Dragon Age

[Segoris]

I've decided to put the game on hold until they release the fix for the 100% CPU usage + slow load times problems. What used to be a bearable 1-2 min delay has now become a mind numbing 4-5 min load for every transition, even minor interior ones. Plus as an added blow, as I've progressed, I am getting more and more stuttering in game.

For reference, I am playing on an AMD dual core processor with 4 GB RAM. I am fairly certain that the game should not be using 100% of both my cores just in the menu screen.

Try the .net version lac posted above in this post:

For those experiencing multi minute load times on fast pc's, .net framework 4 beta 2 seems to help. If that doesn't work, restarting the game often does the trick

That's what I used after he posted this solution, and it worked great.

[Elerion]

Ehh. My save files are ~7 mb big per file at the moment and i'm OCD about it so probably saved like 300+ times so far (i do clean up and overwrite old ones frequently, though)  7 mb hardly feels like "too fucking large" given how many corpses with worthless loot i left across the countryside to rot forever.

Make 5-10 savegames with generic names. Save to the oldest one of those every once in a while, use quicksave for your "once per room" saves. That way you always have a trail of savegames 1-3 hours back if you need to redo something, but you don't get a 1gb save file.

[Threash]

I was so proud after finally beating that damn revenant and his horde of undead in the redcliff courtyard after about 2 hours of trying it, then i saw the damn lever that was no where near where the fight took place.  Damnit.

[Fabricated]

I think I'm going to redo my human fighter since the game seems to provide more than capable tanks. I started a street elf rogue and was semi impressed to notice I wasn't totally gimpy and useless at early levels. The drastically different stories starting off were really cool... Until they ended.

[Reg]

Rogues are currently slightly bugged in that dex doesn't do as much for your weapon skills as it's supposed to. Rogues are still fun though and as soon as you get the Lethality skill that lets you use cunning in place of strength in damage calculations the dex bug stops mattering.

[Ingmar]

I was so proud after finally beating that damn revenant and his horde of undead in the redcliff courtyard after about 2 hours of trying it, then i saw the damn lever that was no where near where the fight took place.  Damnit.

The lever that before you go into the keep, they tell you quite specifically in the dialogue, "Hey, the knights will be trying to get in, when you hit the courtyard see if you can let them in to help!"

That lever? 

I'm somewhat disturbed by Bioware's recent habit of reincarnating Carth.

Wat? Other than being a white dude, Alistair is really nothing like Carth.

[Sky]

frost weapons (didn't know Morrigan had that)

I just got Wynne, and I'm already missing iced weapons and cone of cold.

Redcliffe courtyard was actually pretty easy. I tanked the revenant with my 2h warrior main, set Leliana back against the wall near the door in support, sent Alistair over to aggro all the archers on him with Shield Defense and Cover, then took control of Morrigan to debuff, cc and damage the revenant. Forgot to open the gate after I drew aggro on my initial run to open it, ran back to the side door I entered from.

The room with the suits of armor was much tougher, because I was low on mana potions. Meleeing those guys down took forever. I bet it pissed Morrigan off that I had her healing the npc knights :)

[Reg]

Wynne and Morrigan are a great team.  I had Wynne set up to automatically cast that fist of stone spell on anything that Morrigan froze with Cone of Cold so that they'd shatter nicely. And her Earthquake spell is great at making people not able to leave the area of Morrigan's Blizzard.

[Evil Elvis]

Repulsion/Paralysis bomb is where its at.  It appears to be unresistable.  I just wonder if its the exact same as Mass Paralysis.

[Threash]

Repulsion/Paralysis bomb is where its at.  It appears to be unresistable.  I just wonder if its the exact same as Mass Paralysis.

The duration varies a lot though, i accidentaly had one go of on my party while fighting a boss and he got lose after a few seconds and proceded to slaughter my still paralyzed party.

[Strazos]

I'm somewhat disturbed by Bioware's recent habit of reincarnating Carth.

Wat? Other than being a white dude, Alistair is really nothing like Carth.

Alistair just comes off as boo-hoo whiney sometimes, though not nearly as bad.

I'm still going to use him.

[stray]

Carth was cool. If they're whiney, they're just kind of fish out of water/sort of down to earth guys I guess? Part of their charm though. Makes them funny sidekicks.

Although, I do remember turning 180 in KotoR and toasting Carth at the end. A sad moment.  

[tmp]

Redcliffe courtyard was actually pretty easy. I tanked the revenant with my 2h warrior main, set Leliana back against the wall near the door in support, sent Alistair over to aggro all the archers on him with Shield Defense and Cover, then took control of Morrigan to debuff, cc and damage the revenant.

I just hid behind the staircase so the Revenant couldn't use his pull move, then hit him with cone of cold when he approached on foot and shattered him with a crit. Then it was a Mind Blast on remaints and something like 20 secs to mop them up.

Courtyard revenant is a (relative) gimp, it's yellow con not like these orange optional guys

on the subject of fun fights; boy, am i glad Jarvia doesn't trust these elf helpers enough to keep couple of them in her room, and that dwarves can't do magic...

[Fabricated]

I'm stuck trying to find this douchebag's lockbox in the wilds. Says west, I go west, there's a mark on my map, looks like the right ruin, but nothing's there.

[Riggswolfe]

Rogues are currently slightly bugged in that dex doesn't do as much for your weapon skills as it's supposed to. Rogues are still fun though and as soon as you get the Lethality skill that lets you use cunning in place of strength in damage calculations the dex bug stops mattering.

There's a mod on the official site that fixes that. My rogue currently makes me first playthrough as a fighter look like a gimp. She kills things FAST. The secret with rogues is to get that mod, use daggers, and flank. That's it. Don't bother with swords or axes.

[tmp]

I'm stuck trying to find this douchebag's lockbox in the wilds. Says west, I go west, there's a mark on my map, looks like the right ruin, but nothing's there.

That took me a few minutes to figure out too because the spot to right-click doesn't highlight with the Tab.

[Sheepherder]

Ehh. My save files are ~7 mb big per file at the moment and i'm OCD about it so probably saved like 300+ times so far (i do clean up and overwrite old ones frequently, though)  7 mb hardly feels like "too fucking large" given how many corpses with worthless loot i left across the countryside to rot forever.

Loot carried by a creature is a reference stored in an array.  So we're talking bytes here.  The major factor would be the coordinates for every body segment with physics properties, which would be something like ~24 bytes of data, lets call it 32 though.  So that's 32 body segments in a kilobyte, 32 768 (32) - 43 690 (24) body pieces in a megabyte.  You could expect the models in most games to have ~15 body segments that actually get appended to the save file, which gives us a figure of 2185 - 2913 unique corpses per megabyte of data if the game consisted of nothing but stacked corpses.  That would be an awesome game.  I'd call it Corpse Fortress.

So yeah, save files are huge, what the hell is up with that?  Does Bioware not believe in garbage collection?

Also, repeated saving with little in-game change shouldn't noticeably increase the size of a file unless it's appending large amounts of data to the file with each save, that would be a bad thing and would indicate something retarded is happening.  Like when Oblivion used to save every dynamic pathnode ever generated by a mob.

[Fabricated]

Rogues are currently slightly bugged in that dex doesn't do as much for your weapon skills as it's supposed to. Rogues are still fun though and as soon as you get the Lethality skill that lets you use cunning in place of strength in damage calculations the dex bug stops mattering.

There's a mod on the official site that fixes that. My rogue currently makes me first playthrough as a fighter look like a gimp. She kills things FAST. The secret with rogues is to get that mod, use daggers, and flank. That's it. Don't bother with swords or axes.

that's another thing I wasn't too clear on; is it better to use only daggers or is it just as effective to use a sword mainhand and dagger offhand?

Also where is this mod specifically? The ea community website thing is fucking balls, as it is trying unsuccessfully to integrate bioware's forums/registration account into their dlc microtransaction hell.

[Bunk]

Look back in this thread about half a dozen pages. I recommend the official one that tweaks archery as well.

[Brogarn]

Also where is this mod specifically? The ea community website thing is fucking balls, as it is trying unsuccessfully to integrate bioware's forums/registration account into their dlc microtransaction hell.

I went out and found it since I rolled up a rogue for my next playthrough:

http://dragonage.gulbsoft.org/doku.php/hotfix/dexterity_hotfix_101

It's written by Georg Zoeller from Bioware.

[Stormwaltz]

It's written by Georg Zoeller from Bioware.

Who is a god among men, if you didn't know.

The statistics tracking on the DA social networking site is a spinoff of the spookily comprehensive datamining tool he created to debug DA. When he decided to call it Skynet, the name was accepted without comment.

[Threash]

I freaking love how dragons fight using their whole body.  Biting my tank while casually swatting away my rogue with one leg then turning around and tail sweeping everyone, le awesome.

[Furiously]

I really enjoyed the final fight other than the target moving to areas you can't walk to. If you had asked three weeks ago if I was getting the game I would have said, "looks meh."

I confess I got a little weepy at the ending I picked.

[stray]

Rogues are currently slightly bugged in that dex doesn't do as much for your weapon skills as it's supposed to. Rogues are still fun though and as soon as you get the Lethality skill that lets you use cunning in place of strength in damage calculations the dex bug stops mattering.

There's a mod on the official site that fixes that. My rogue currently makes me first playthrough as a fighter look like a gimp. She kills things FAST. The secret with rogues is to get that mod, use daggers, and flank. That's it. Don't bother with swords or axes.

that's another thing I wasn't too clear on; is it better to use only daggers or is it just as effective to use a sword mainhand and dagger offhand?

Also where is this mod specifically? The ea community website thing is fucking balls, as it is trying unsuccessfully to integrate bioware's forums/registration account into their dlc microtransaction hell.

Depending on your build, your mainhand/offhand damages change. Also, I believe axes are generally higher dmg than swords.

There was a player who did a pretty detailed rogue rundown on the Bioware forums between dex/str/cun, but I can't find the thread now. The poster's name is "discobird" if you're curious. The differences however are pretty miniscule, and there's no wrong way of doing anything short of spiking pointless stats like magic. Personally, I've gone the combat rogue/duelist route, spike DEX, and use cunning/lethality.

[Rasix]

I ended up using dual axes. Although with a dagger build (and that patch) you can almost effectively ignore str past about 20 (for some of the better leather armor).  Otherwise, some of the axes and swords require upwards of 30 str.  There are a lot of nice, obtainable axes in the game, some really suited for backstabbing and rogues.   I found there to be somewhat of a dearth of great daggers.  

My duelist/assassin rogue at the end was a beast.  He tanked almost better than Alistair.  With good daggers and that fix he probably would have been absurd at almost any angle.

As for not installing that mod, I didn't feel like getting archer raped even worse. There's some areas, especially later on, where you're in unavoidable situations where there are just swarms of archers all ready to hit you with that stun shot; all at the same time.  It gets a bit ridiculous.

[Sky]

There are a lot of nice, obtainable axes in the game, some really suited for backstabbing and rogues.

I was just out in the woodpile last night, stabbing some logs into kindling.

[Rasix]

An axe in the back is an axe in the back.  Would be nice if backstabs had a different animation with an axe equipped.

It is a bit odd that there are so many axes with +XX% backstab damage.   

[Jherad]

So was *really* struggling with my 2H warrior - to the point of ragequitting a few times after hours of retries on some battles. Picked up Wynne the night before last, and now, running with her, Morrigan and the rogue chick, the game has, overnight, become incredibly easy.

Casters. 

[Thrawn]

So was *really* struggling with my 2H warrior - to the point of ragequitting a few times after hours of retries on some battles. Picked up Wynne the night before last, and now, running with her, Morrigan and the rogue chick, the game has, overnight, become incredibly easy.

Casters. 

My situation as a 2H warrior was pretty much exactly the same.  Once I picked up Wynne the game mostly became a breeze, before that I even had to give in to dropping the difficulty to easy for a couple fights I kept losing.  Now I run the same part you are pretty much all the time.

[schild]

It's written by Georg Zoeller from Bioware.

Who is a god among men, if you didn't know.

The statistics tracking on the DA social networking site is a spinoff of the spookily comprehensive datamining tool he created to debug DA. When he decided to call it Skynet, the name was accepted without comment.

Now he just needs web programmers, GUI designers, and platform devs to actually present the data in any sort of meaningful environment.

That social site is a terrible, terrible, terrible mess.

[Draegan]

Wynne and Morrigan are a great team.  I had Wynne set up to automatically cast that fist of stone spell on anything that Morrigan froze with Cone of Cold so that they'd shatter nicely. And her Earthquake spell is great at making people not able to leave the area of Morrigan's Blizzard.

What do you set for this?  I couldn't find a "if frozen then..." option.

[sidereal]

Casters. 

My Mage PC now has Winter's Grasp, Crushing Prison, and Force Field.  Morrigan has Horror, Sleep, Paralyze, Winter's Grasp, and Cone of Cold.  Plus there's Zev's Dirty Fighting, Sten's Pommel Strike, and Mind Blast for both mages.  So at this point at the beginning of the fight I just pick which, if any, enemies I want to allow to move, and the two DPS guys go and mop them up one at a time.  Occasionally, if there's a bunch of enemies and a lot of successful saves one of them will be able to get an attack off, but it's kind of a surprise.  Plus I'm adding Mass Paralysis, Blood Wound, and Blood Control shortly, which should pretty much take care of it.

I'm considering doing a no-mages run next, as a sort of Nightmare mode.  Something like a Sword&Board PC, Oghren, Leliana, and Shale or Zevran.

[Ingmar]

You might need Shale in heal beacon mode for that to work, would be interesting to try.

[Reg]

What do you set for this?  I couldn't find a "if frozen then..." option.

I looked for the "paralyzed" status. It worked out OK because the only time creatures were paralyzed it was because Morrigan had cone of colded them.  It probably wouldn't work so well if you were using non-freezing paralyze spells too.

[stray]

I'm considering doing a no-mages run next, as a sort of Nightmare mode.

Either that, or run mages in an actual harder mode.

... On a sidenote, I read something awhile back that the developers considered "hard" their default ruleset.