I played the mage origin a couple of times because I was unhappy with my spell selection, and I found that you do find different loot.

 

Revenants. Jesus christ! In the forest, on easy mode, managed to beat one set after about 20 reloads, heavy reliance on frost weapons and acid bombs. Second one I just can't kill.

edit: And this game is a memory whore, lol. I'm up to 6 gigs DDR, it'll eat up 3 gigs of that right off the bat with no problem. Nice to be able to click the desktop icon and be in the world playing within 30 seconds of a fresh start of the day, or 15 seconds just now from an exit and reload =)

 

well I beat it a few days ago so here goes


SPOILER WARNINGS

Can't get the tags to work -_-

Spoiler

My origin was human noble.

I married Anora but decided to go traveling with Zevran to find Morrigan (honestly she has a god baby I want to know wtf she plans on doing with it.

I gave the throne to Horrow- can't spell his name and the Drawrven empire stagnated cause he was too damn conservative

The Circle grew and because I helped the Dwarf girl get there they learned more about magic and some other warm fuzzy crap

The Urn of Sacred Ashes became a tourist attraction until...something went wrong and the Templars had to step in.

I helped the Elves survive the curse without killing all the werewolves

Alistair just...lived I guess. There wasn't anything specific about him (granted I killed Logain and wasn't a complete douchbag about killing Ali)

Leliana just wandered off.

 

If I don't restart my computer after playing dragon age it will chug chug chug. Lots of memory leaks. Of course, I only have 2 gigs of memory...

And the loot is pretty randomized. The game scales to your level, so if you do Orzimmar first, you'll get crappy loot, but if you do it last, it's much better (but enemies get stronger too). The 'named' loot seems to remain the same throughout though. I'm running through my second playthrough real quick as a mage. Going evil.

It's really frustrating since Morrigan is the only character that likes doing evil stuff and I'm going to need lots of crap to persuade my allies all the time... or I'll have to play with dog / morrigan the whole game. I'm going to have to get Shale this time and see whether it's evil or not.

As for reverants... they made them OP, even in normal mode. They basically take no damage. At best, Morrigan can cone of cold them over and over again for a little damage.

 

The Archdemon just kicked my buttocks so hard I'll have to wear them as a hat from now on...

I'm playing in Normal difficulty on the Xbox. Any tips on defeating it?

Spoiler

I'm playing as a Dawlish Rogue, and with Morrigan, Wynne and Loghain on my team. I usually survive until the Archdemon only has a quarter of his health left, but most of the time I end up losing because of an insta-kill.

Who should I summon to the battle?

 

The Pull bit is annoying as shit, as well as some sort of insta kill move they have. I've been hit with some sort of fire spell for massive damage that sets everyone on fire as well. Easy mode, level 9, and they're nearly unbeatable without pausing and queing up/chugging greater health potions

Cone of cold I just got, in the werewolf lair atm, pissing me off that even turned to easy, which friendly fire is supposed to be turned off, she still freezes my guys =/

And I just loled cause I went the back way first, and I just realized the Nature staff the tree gave me? The bolts it shoots are useless against the skeletons. *DOH*

Spoiler

There's a red named Dragon down there that gave me some issues, but it still feel easier then the Orange Revenants, same with the Arcane Horror, no trouble.

 

Revenants are meant to be massive OP, man.

Spoiler

They're guarding this epic set of massive armor called Juggernaut, which is basically what my warrior's been wearing since I got it. I didn't manage to get it until I was level 16, used Wynne, Morrigan, and Leilana to get it. Put Wynne on constant heal, Morrigan on Cold damage, and Leilana on range while I tanked like fuck. Best advice I can offer.

 

If you're finding them hard on easy mode something's wrong. Did you get the patch? It makes easier mode...what it was supposed to be at least. It pre-beta but works pretty well on what I've tried so far.

Yes I'm playing the game on easy mode. I suck at it. (Granted the archdemon while bad wasn't OMG horrible on easy mode either. Though I was using both Morrigan and Wynne as healers)

Spoiler

Doing the archedemon with just a melee party is idiocy I'd highly recommend against it. If you have to refuse Morrigan's offer (or if she's not in the party period) I'd recommend making your main character either an archer or mage. The dragon spent nearly 30 minutes on some slab of rock only my mage and archers could hit it on and still was raping the party.

 

Thanks for the advise, though I feel a bit foolish when looking at how simple the solution was. When I got rid of my warriors and just hooked myself up with rogues as companions, I won at the first try.

I'll be taking a break while I get obsessed with CoDMW2, but will return to DA:O eventually XD.

 

Awesome sex scenes...

 

For those of you who have yet to get Shale/are interested in it, he's pretty much morally neutral. I've pleased him with some actions, but have yet to upset him. I'm a pretty damn good char though.

As an aside, anyone done any Romancing? I'm pretty intimate with Morrigan, myself

Better romance mechanics than Mass Effect, imo

 

Level 8 Mage playing on hard on the X360... didn't find the revenants that hard, although I heard they made the X360 version easier than PC because the interface isn't as good. Somehow, though, I just died without a savepoint for the last ~30 minutes to a god damned pack of wolves whilst travelling. Utterly flummoxed how I died to that when I'd managed to win the proper main plot battles without reloading :/

 

Archdemon on normal mode was piss easy when I fought it, beat him on my first try with no deaths and plenty of supplies to spare, here was my set up

Spoiler

Summon Archers - elves will be basically immune to damage and will be able to hit the Archdemon when he flies over to the corners of the ring where melee units can't go.

Use Wynne and have her use her passive spirit healer AOE heal (the one that heals every few seconds) to heal the archers if they're taking damage for some reason))

If you have a rogue, put it on bow. You should only have one melee unit fighting the archdemon. If you have 2 mages in your party you can focus heals on him. Make sure to chug fire resistance potions when the fight begins, and poisons help, of course.

If you don't have archers, use your mages. They can spam their spells can really take out the archdemon's health... though he is fairly resistant to magic.

Prior to the final boss you should have aquired enough gold to purchase the fuck out of potions anyway. You can easily use potions of resistance to null his AOEs, mana potions for healers, etc. boss should be very easy since you can use up everything you have.

 

Been running through the game with Shale, Wynne, and Leliana, and a PC warrior. Shale is a really good party member for just about any party; he's a nicely solid frontliner and morally neutral enough that he'll fit in with good or evil groups.

Pairing my PC up with Leliana; so far the romance is reasonably well-written and engaging, but I'll hold off on a final judgement until I've finished the whole thing. If nothing else, the dialogue has some nice funny moments and Leliana demonstrates why French accents are sexy. Having a silent protagonist hurts the quality of the dialogues in comparison to Mass Effect, but I can understand why it had to be done since you'd really need different male and female voice sets for all of the origins to get things right.

 

At level 14/15 the dwarf area is hard as hard as fucking nails at some bits - not to do with the quality of enemies, but the sheer quantity - you go from one minifight to anoher minifight with no real party-rezzing cooldown. One of them just ended with all my high level members dead, and Shale just chugging down potions while he faced off against 4 people, and won.

That said, its very fun.

 

Yeah I got the patch, didn't notice too much of a difficulty change.

I gimped my mage a bit by going for Tempest first, which evidentally, is supposed to be the shit later on, but with a 25ish magic stat at lvl 9 or so, it does fuck all for damage, and I run out of mana uber fast.

Had Sten Leliana me as a mage and Morrigan, didn't have enough tanking power at all. I slapped Leliana into dual wielding, made her better, wound up just swapping her back out for Alistair, who does more damage then the Dog, but doesnt survive as long for some reason.

I'll try going back to them later on, I'm probably just trying to kill them too early, since the stats on the armor will take even my tanks in the group another 4 or 5 levels to get the stats to wear it.

About to go finish the Werewolf lair, had to turn it off, and was out of power all today.

Lvl?

 

Concerning magic: I had Morrigan learn Sleep & Waking Nightmare. Every big mob group that stands close together is now a joke. (Sleep is crowd control and makes mobs more susceptible to WN which turns them on each other.)
It doesn't even have friendly fire like the elemental spells which knock your own guys down or freeze them, etc.

I did Redcliffe -> Urn -> Tower -> Orzammar and the fight against

Spoiler

Branka

was the hardest one yet - I needed multiple reloads and used up most of my potions. Just did not take much damage from my weapons and knocked my guys down for something like 8 seconds or so.

Spoiler

I didn't take on the dragon when I went to get the Urn - seemed like suicide at the time without a healer. I may try now again.
I did after all manage to kill Flemeth.

 

Also concerning magic.

Force field is an amazing spell, truly a must have. Morrigan starts with the one before it so there's even more reason.

It's really useful to just set aside a powerful enemy or boss until after you've dealt with it's minions.. or to buy time to heal and set traps, or to put it on someone who's about to die that you can't heal in time(in which case the enemy will likely wail on the barrier futilely while you heal them up and make with the killing. It's a fast spell as well, though you have to select target, it doesn't auto-cast on your current one so pausing is probably a good idea.

But I'm a compulsive pauser anyway, though I imagine it might be a nice challenge to see how far you could get without using pause to plan, aim spells and so on.

 

Wow. Game looks all kinds of awesome.

Sigh. Gotta wait till I get my new RAM sticks before I can even think of getting it though. Ahh well.