Real Dragon Age fans looks a little... precious. I feel like if I go a few pages in there's going to be alot of erotic fan fiction and art. I dunno.

That Fextralife one looks alright. Both those "BSN" ones look terrible.

What a sad, sad day.

I haven't posted much since the change to the new forums but I've been an avid poster and lurker for 7 years. I play lots of games but Bioware's are the only ones I really care about enough to engage in discussion on a regular basis. 

I'd rather eat rancid tuna salad out of my own ******* than get on reddit or twitter.

I think I'll join the Wikias I guess...

Well as a mage I can't imagine you're wearing a whole lot of armor?

My only experience is in trying to equip Iron Bull and finding that a good amount of it won't says "Human Trained Only" or "Human and Elf Only", etc.

I haven't done an in-depth analysis or anything, I don't have hard numbers it just seems like there's not a lot of gear for Qunari characters and I know in past DA games my melee rogues have sometimes relied heavily on gear. My main rogue Warden didn't really become unstoppable until I got ahold of the Felon's Coat.

Anyway, I'll focus on damage and evasion and see how I do. Thanks for the advice.

That interesting. But I was thinking more about the armor restrictions for Qunari, not rogues.

I mainly wondered since it seems like they can't wear most armors. Rogues tend to be squishy enough already and I realize the idea is to avoid being hit but dual-wielding will definitely draw aggro if your DPS is high so my concern would be they'd be about as tough as a wet paper bag.

I'm nearing the end of my first playthrough as human 2H warrior and I'm considering a melee rogue for my next run and was wondering if Qunari play well in that role? I know that their gear choices are somewhat limited and they tend to be portrayed mostly as warriors. I'm not a 100% min-maxer but I don't want to sink 20 hours into a kit that just isn't going to hold water.

Is this a viable combo?

If she were an elf, I suspect she'd be one of the most popular LI's ever. Seriously.

Maybe get Kelly Cuoco to be the model and voice too, like that actress did for Miranda in Mass Effect?

Mainstream nerd boner swarm, for great justice and the win.

You're welcome, Bioware. 10% of the profits would do nicely.

I do think this game has the weirdest and least appealing romance options yet. I do say this as a straight male, but I've played female characters and gay characters in Bioware games before. The only character I really find attractive enough, physically and personality-wise, is Sera. I'm romancing Cassandra (or trying to) as my current Inquisitor is straight.

Everybody else? Bleeeeh. Iron Bull, um, gross. Also, Freddie Prinze Jr. Dorian's a bit too smarmy for a relationship, although I like the character. Josephine seems like a total non-entity to me. Solas... mmmmaybe, but if I roll a female elf I'll probably go after Sera. Am I forgetting someone? Oh, Cullen. Well again, if I do get around to making a female I would definitely favor Sera, most likely.

Anyway. I think the next game should have a skinny blonde with enormous breasts who's very virginal but becomes wanton in the presence of the main character. Just to play against playing against stereotypes, you know?

S&S is a lot more fun in DA2 than Origins but I feel like it plateaus at the higher levels. When I got my S&S warrior to Act 3, I felt he was outclassed at every turn. While certainly the toughest in my party, the amount of damage he could soak up couldn't make up for the pathetic damage he did. All he could do was take aggro, he had no other impact on the battle. Even with Might, Cleave, Assail, et. al, it was like having a nerf sword. Not too bad if you rely on someone else in your party for big damage but some of the big fights where you have a fair chance to end up on your own (like the High Dragon at the Bone Pit in Act 3) you will feel how much you suck compared to other builds. If it came down to just him and a big bad, his high HP and Armor would fail before his piddly little damage could take anyone down.

2H, though, has it's own problems, but you'll definitely be effective throughout the whole game. They're still a bit too squishy for my taste in DA2, and they're better at taking on waves of trash mobs than facing off against an elite one-on-one. But the playstyle is much more fun and effective at all levels.

Fenris was a bit too on the nose for me. He's such a proto/arche- typical "beautifully handsome, brooding hero with unique powers and a tragic past" that I find it difficult take him seriously most of the time. Throw in some anime hair and that voice actor... I mostly just rolled my eyes.

It's also my personal opinion that he let his past define him so much that he missed opportunities to let go of it and have a happier future. My canon Hawke was a mage who relied on him for muscle and developed something of a camaraderie with the guy, hoping to show him that there's more to life and to mages. However, even though I was closer to Friend than Rival, I never got far enough on either side of the line to have a strong relationship with him. It was always two steps forward, one step back with him. I did all of his quests and always tried to be a decent guy to him, but he disagreed with almost all of my actions. So he left my party to join the Templars and I ended up having to kill him in the final battle.

And that worked for me.

Well, I sort of doubt any of Bioware's writers would just come out and say "well, this integral feature of most of our products is actually a giant pain in the ass and I'd step on a puppy if it meant not having to deal with it anymore", not while they continue to implement it. Just like none of the gameplay designers would come on the boards and say "yeah, jumping is for damn idiots, also, sorry for all the mountains". There's a certain amount of "party line" they have to adhere to.

So regardless of how they feel, we won't hear about it.

Yeah, it's been real ya'll and I appreciate most everyone keeping it light and civil, but I'm out. I give up. Where there's time travel, there's paradox. That's all I see here. How you get to shapeshifting demons, and somehow think that's a simpler explanation... granted, time travel is inherently complicated, but that's like finding a guy stabbed to death with a bloody knife right next to him and thinking "Hmm, the wound might been caused by a very large and angry bird with an incredibly sharp beak who wanted revenge on this man for some misdeed in his past and so lured him here and did this to him... that's clearly the simplest explanation, since we know that birds exist and sometimes get angry" well, I've said all I can say.

Please see my Pokémon tournament example.

Good day, sirs and madams of the internet. Good day.

If we're using Occam's Razor I think the simplest explanation is that Fiona has a twin sister who forgot to tell her she invited the Inquisitor back to Redcliffe. And then was never seen or mentioned again.

/thread

Could have been a doppleganger, could have been Flemeth, could have been the Lake Calenhad Bunny Monster... hell, it could have been Commander Shepard. Coulda coulda coulda

@Sifr,

All these theories require "tweaking" to make it work. The bubble theory makes perfect sense to me, although I grant it's confusing. And I see more evidence for that than your explanation... Alexius wasn't exactly subtle either, why wouldn't he have a muahahaha moment about how he lured you there in the first place? The whole idea that it was a fake Fiona is grasping at straws... we know there was time travel involved, I think it makes much more sense to delve into how alternate timelines could result in these paradoxes than it does to jump to the completely unrelated subject of shapeshifting demon impersonators and secret ploys to trick the Inquisitor that are never mentioned by anyone ever.

You don't have to accept it. No need for anyone to get cross-eyed, I'm just happy to defend my thinking (up to a point). I've stated several times, as have others and I've agreed with them: "who the hell knows". If you want to keep throwing rocks at my logic, I'll keep defending it but I'm not on any crusade here. Go with whatever explanation works best for you.

I'm definitely beginning to think most of the people in this thread have devoted more thinking to this issue than the writer ever did, that's for sure

@draken-heart:

How did she get out of Redcliffe after Alexius took it over? You're saying she somehow got to Orlais to invite the Inquisitor and then came all the way back and he never noticed she was gone?

As far as the agent, I don't remember the conversation with him that vividly, but I still don't see how that's an inconsistency. He was sent it in, he saw what he saw, he came back out and reported it. Where's the paradox?

@Sifr,

Sure, but I could just as easily say it was actually Flemeth who shapeshifted into Fiona in order to give the Inquisitor a reason to visit Redcliffe and thus get on the path to saving the world. That makes MORE sense, actually, because while literally almost anything is simpler than time travel (and thus fits Occam's Razor), there's no clear reason for Alexius to want the Inquisitor to come to him. And we do see signs of the time bubble existing (temporal disturbances on the edge of the village, people within experiencing [or CLAIMING to experience, if you prefer] a different timeline of events, no one outside the village being aware of the Tevinter presence within Redcliffe)... the Time Bubble Theory is nothing if not extrapolated from the evidence at hand. The "Maybe It Was A Demon Thingie Theory" is pulled from thin air.

@Mikael:

How does that disprove anything?

No one said the bubble was impenetrable, only that people on either side of it experience a different timeline. The scout would pass from the timeline where Fiona went to Val Royaeux (outside the bubble) to one where she didn't (inside the bubble) and then back out again, but it wouldn't mean anything to the scout because he wasn't in Orlais and thus nothing is contradicted for him.

@Helmetto: Well, it does address the causality of Fiona having done one thing and then suddenly having not done it. All other paradoxes are addressed too, in a broad sense, in that yes, the time lines DO merge at the point at which the bubble is burst, and people who were inside the bubble remember one version of events and the people outside remember a different version of events. So that's the "resolution" of those paradoxes. In the merged timeline, things both did and didn't happen, from different perspectives. It's like The Warp In The West, from The Elder Scrolls. To say it "doesn't work that way" can't really be definitive since I just described a way in which it can.

Of course, we can counter each other back and forth until the end of time (<-- see what I did there?) and get absolutely nowhere, because, as I think we all agree:

time travel is dumb

I still think, for me any anyone else who wants it, the Time Bubble Theory is a suitable explanation, given what we do know. It's just as fair to speculate maybe Fiona was playing dumb, both times, for some reason we'll never know, but that's less satisfying to me.

Yeah, so I just watched the scene on Youtube and unless I blacked out drunk (always a possibility), I never triggered that conversation. I wonder what that means for me going forward...

Well, we agree there (it's a stupid, convenient plot device). Although, how convenient it was really... oy vey. Really it was just unnecessary in every way. God only knows what motivated them to write it. They could have done... I dunno... literally anything else instead.

So maybe it's a theory, if you like, but I still say it holds more water than "demons did it, for reasons".

Arg, now I'm getting frustrated. Like Rust Cohle would say, time is a flat circle, and so is this thread now

The quality of writing is subjective, obviously, but it's not "oh bla bla bla, it doesn't have make sense, magic demon crumpets bacon Templar derka derka Jihad". It makes perfect sense, if you think about. I've already laid out the logic as plain as I can make it.

Now, saying it was heretofore unmentioned demonic impersonators acting without discernible motivations... THAT is pure theory.

@MikeJW: High five! We made it. And, yeah. I hate time travel too. It just shouldn't be used unless it's the entire point of the story. Primer is the only time-travel story that stands up to thorough scrutiny and even then it's best done with multiple viewings over a single weekend, supplemented with reading explanations on the internet. It's a really great film though, if you're ever curious about seeing what time travel would be like, realistically.

@draken-heart: Well, to each their own, like I said. And I don't think we're "making up theories", per se. I mean, it's not like we're at Indoctrination Theory levels of pulling-it-out-of-our-ass here. I don't consider this a "theory" as I do a more detailed explanation of the time travel rules they used that were only sparsely explained in the game itself.

My quote function is wonky, so,

@MikeJW: I can't say for sure how exactly that works. My speculation is that when you met her, the bubble had not yet been created. So there were not two Fionas, one in the bubble and one out, at any point. Once the bubble was created, the Fiona you met in Val Royaeux would cease to exist. I would imagine a sort of popping or sucking sound and then she vanished . Best not to think too hard on it, except that her disappearing does not retroactively erase her actions or memories of her for those who exist outside the bubble.

@draken-heart: To each their own. I don't think it's bad writing or any more ludicrous than most plots involving time travel (and better than several that come to mind) but I do think it was unnecessarily confusing and out of place in the setting, so, there's that. Not a shining moment of Bioware's trademark A+ storytelling. But I would disagree it's a case of "it doesn't make sense because it's dumb writing". It's confusing, but it does make sense. It just requires a lot of extrapolation that, in the best case scenario, would be self-evident in the story.

There isn't a Fiona outside the bubble anymore, once the bubble is created. But there still used to be. What you're getting hung up on I think is the idea that because the timeline changed, the Inquisitor's memories would be altered as well, but they are not. He or she still experienced what "originally" happened, and then travels to the bubble and bursts it, mending the timeline. So, as Three F pointed out earlier... it both did and didn't happen.

So in the simplest breakdown

It happened.

Then the bubble was created and it didn't happen (but only for those inside the bubble, it still did for everyone else).

The bubble was destroyed and both realities (the one where it happened and the one where it didn't) became one, with people from the bubble remembering their version and people from outside it remembering theirs.