I'm only in the Hinterlands so far but which mage makes for the best companion? I play mage and usually like to have one for healing\barrier stuff and then two warriors for shield and in-person death dealing. Solas is the only one I have but he keeps dying which is annoying.

 

Vivienne is a KE, so there is that. She'll keep herself alive and kill things.

 

Keep Solas. 'Preference' Barrier in his skills then when he gets Rift Mage, preference anything that puts weaken on enemies.

 

I personally like leading with a barrier over your team, having Solas place a Pull of the Abyss, and then place a fire mine in the middle. Fade step to the combat then start using your spirit blade. Chaotic Focus + Fade Shield = win.

 

I used Solas pretty much exclusively my first run.

Think for the second run I'll use Dorian just for the lols. Rolled an Archer Elf.

Promptly respecced to Dual Daggers and have been facerolling everything.

DDs are so broken.

 

Yeah, archery utterly blows in DA:I. They really should have buffed it more.

 

I dunno, I actually like archery Sera with full tempest and a few points in stealth. Sure the damage isn't optimal, but unless I'm fighting a dragon, she never really takes damage or requires a barrier, which is excellent when I'm focused on keeping protection up on Cass or Bull. And with full crit gear and flanking crit bonus from dagger tree, almost every shot can crit.

Cole on the other hand takes a fuckton of damage in Nightmare if I'm not controlling him directly. And I have to give him on-hit guard gear because his AI is moronic.

 

Lol, Archery definitely doesn't blow. The assassin damage is ridiculous, and you never have to worry about getting CC'd by bruisers.

I walked the game with an Archer/Assassin on my first playthrough. Before I had even properly worked out the systems.

 

Hm, I finally got it, and discovered that installing mods n shit isn't as much of a pain in the ass as I figured it would be. I mean it's not as simple as download X -> move to override folder, but the file merging process with the official patches isn't bad.

However, it sucks that we probably won't get the huge volume of mods that the other games have gotten. Seems to be a hassle even with the toolkit. The existing mods are basically just texture tweaks.

But, I'm having a problem where I can't play it in total fullscreen mode. I know it's not mod related, because when I first started the game to get all the .dlls and stuff written, it was the same. Anyone else have this problem and did you find a fix?

Edit i'm retarded.

 

If anyone is interested, I found a nice way to skip those 13-14 hour operation times.

Just go into your pc/console settings and manually set the day forward, and the operation will auto complete. Then set it back to regular date. Rinse and repeat.

If this was mentioned before, I apologize. Just thought it might be helpful for those gunning for 100% completion.

 

Just finished soloing the lvl 20 high dragon in the Hissing Wastes, on nightmare difficulty, without even using a single health potion. Was originally just trying for shits and giggles with the expectation of failure, but then it worked. Knight enchanter so op lol. Sadly didn't occur to me to get video. Probably not the first person to manage this, but still pretty damn satisfied.

 

Finally beat it (~66 hours), and I loved it. It deserves all of the GOTY accolades it got and then some. Dat ending.

 

David Gaider's leaving Dragon Age.

Seems like an improvement to me. Gaider's always come across as a slimeball, and Patrick Weekes seems to not have his head as stuck up his ass.

I still haven't found it in me to beat this game.

 

Been playing as a human mage, my party pretty much consists of Varric, Cassandra and Dorian most of the time.

Still not anywhere near the finish, at the moment I'm completing the Warden quest. The only thing I've gathered from it so far was that if this was a novel, my guy and Dorian would be bros, he's my favorite so far. Sera's awesome as well, but Dorian is just great.

Romancing Cassandra, for a brief period I was thinking of the diplomat, but I turned it down at the last second.

 

Good choice. You don't get to bang the diplomat. Plus Cass is hilariously awesome romance.

 

Aye. Cass is awesome.

 

God it's a pain in the ass to find mod work-arounds after official patches.

 

Finished in 147 hours. Did most of the side quests except for Emprise, i couldn't be fucked to run around that place, the paths where horrible. Did all the companion quests, every war table quest except for maybe 1 or two. I ran all the charger quests out before I left them to die, hoping the Qunari alliance will do something in the next game.

Overall I enjoyed it, but felt it was too easy. I went KE also, before knowing how insane OP it was. I had mana regen faster then I could spent it, barrier reggening, guard generation on hit, double damage spells powered by my barrier, etc. I'd drop a fire mine once a fight and drop nearly everything, assuming my fade cloak aoe didn't kill them. When I wanted a challenge I'd switch over to using someone like Varric, and his useless bullshit crossbow. I finally towards the end got his crossbow up to like 180 dps, which was a massive joke considering Cassandra had a 300dps hatchet she'd gotten off the Hinterlands dragon at like level 13.

Viv... dear god I hated using her at all, so annoying. Sera was amusing, but over the top, the rest of the crew was pretty much alright by me. I hated the romance options for straight male. Cass was too manly looking, and her secret gushy romance option was character breaking, it had nothing in common with her normal personality at all. Josephine was just ugly as fuck. Period. Sexy accent, ugly as hell. Lesbian inqusitors have it better, even if Sera's uglier than Josie, at least their sex scene is amusing, same with gay male characters and Iron Bull, his scene is probably one of the funniest scenes I've seen in gaming.

Ran Cass as my anchor to the party, then just swapped whoever in occasionally. Tended to stick more with Cass/Bull/Varric, but as soon as I got Cole, I'd run Cole whenever I thought I'd need DPS. I had some dual daggers on him with AoE, at 411 dps early on, and he just demolished whatever I left alive.

Had the party banter bug apparently, so they never really spoke to each other until late game when I figured out how to fix it. I plan on doing another playthrough again whenever the big DLC releases, and I'll make sure I fix the bug if it's still there this time, I know I missed out on a ton.

 

What difficulty did you have it on?

 

Even on nightmare, the game is easy as shit after you get to Skyhold.

Especially as a KE.