Boss Battles
Bioware’s designers have fallen into the “Boss Monster” trap.
You’ve learned to maneuver effectively. Your rogue is a master of stealth. You use your battle mage to shut down the enemy.
Then your sneaky rogue – plus your entire party – gets sucked into a cut scene, whereupon you enter combat with a difficult enemy boss, hordes of minions, all in a small area that makes maneuver difficult. Don’t you love game designers that force you to throw out all you’ve learned?
Usually, it’s not that bad. Smaller areas will often be populated with additional resources, allowing you to regen spellcaster mana or hide from view. What usually happens is that your party is tightly bunched at the beginning, so the first thing to do is spread them out. Sometimes you’ll have allies. Take advantage of them to soak up the brunt of the enemy attacks while you’re maneuvering for better position.
One key tactic that almost always works well is to take out the lesser minions first. It’s always tempting to try to take out the major boss first, thinking that once the boss is down, the rest of the battle is easy. Often, though, you get whittle down by those smaller enemies, letting the boss take your party down one character at a time by dishing out large amounts of damage.
This is where shutting down the boss comes in handy. Cone of cold, paralysis, dirty fighting and other similar abilities let you shut down the boss for a few seconds, and concentrate on the minions. They often go down pretty fast, and once they’re down, the big guy can receive your undivided attention.
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5 comments
Chris Nahr says:
December 8, 2009 at 1:41 am (UTC -7 )
Good tips. On the subject of buffs, don’t be afraid to use weapon coating potions before a tough fight because you’ll find a ton of them. (I usually forgot to use them and eventually sold them off…)
On the subject of choke points, there’s one catch: the game lacks any sort of “zone of control” mechanism to prevent enemies from moving past your characters. So the smallest genlock will easily push both of your warriors out of the way if he’s targeting your mage in the rear! Using a warrior’s Taunt skill should make him the target and prevent that.
QKF says:
December 8, 2009 at 3:20 pm (UTC -7 )
Nice coverage of tactics. I agree with the above, I never really ended up using the weapon coatings, and ended up selling them. Probably would have been useful on a couple fights. On other tip, I found it amazingly useful to bind the pause and quick save to my two extra mouse buttons. Being able to pause, queue up all my actions in a fight and unpause with just a couple clicks on the mouse really streamlined combat. Then being able to quicksave easily allowed me to never really lose progress when a fight went badly or I ran across one of the infrequent crashes.
Alejandro Hernandez says:
December 8, 2009 at 4:27 pm (UTC -7 )
hey, good tips, Im about to plat DEO, I just bought it and wen have the time with holidays I will engage to to it, thanks
BTW dont get lost so much time, I always check for new articles.
YS says:
December 8, 2009 at 6:27 pm (UTC -7 )
After playing enough MMOs the pause thing gets really old. I like my fights fast and furious!
Still, I’m engrossed as much as Loyd is for the same reasons: The characters, the voice-acting, the world.
Jeremy Clarke says:
November 7, 2010 at 10:06 am (UTC -7 )
Great writeup man! I’m totally addicted to the plot like you describe, but am not really interested in micro-managing my team for hours on end, especially when I die a couple times in the same situation. Maybe I should switch it to ‘easy’ difficulty, but I find that annoying from a plot perspective, it just gets ridiculous to watch battles where no strategy is necessary.
Anyway, I’ll try out your tips