10 réponses à ce sujet

[Peter Thomas]

errant_knight wrote...

Well, I play DA:O with two sword and shield (with no aggro management), a healer mage with a few offensive/defensive spells--but mostly dedicated healing, and mix up who I put in the last slot. I have no problems at all and only have people die in a few boss battles. Almost never everyone forcing a reload. I don't think DA2 will be harder than DA:O, so no, I don't think you'll be forced into a party configuration by playing nightmare

There were a number of new mechanics introduced in Nightmare this time to make it more of a challenge. I... er... am not sure what I can discuss about that, though.

In my Nightmare playthrough, I had a weapon and shield warrior (tank), a dual weapon/archer Hawke (DPS), an offensive/healing mage (AoE DPS/healing), and either an archer (DPS) or another offensive mage (AoE DPS). This conforms to the holy trinity you mentioned, but there is a reason why each of those things is important in the context of DA2 on Nightmare.


Tank

In DA2, you generally have a party size of 4. That's not that many people. Usually you will be outnumbered, sometimes by a lot. The threat system is essentially the same as DAO. If you do lots of damage to an enemy, you will become their target. A new concept in DA2 is force. If an enemy does a lot of damage in a hit, you will be knocked around (or whatever) by the force of the blow. On Nightmare, where damage done by enemies is increased, force is also increased as a consequence. Allowing a weak character to get swarmed will cause them to be ineffective or dead. Threat/aggro management is important to prevent that. Also, since force is based on damage done, a highly armored character (or one with lots of Strength, like I mentioned in a previous thread) will be most likely to resist that force. This is the reason that a tank is an important part of gameplay. Damage is redirected from where it will do the most harm (squishy, knocked around character) to where it will do the least (tank character).

Other methods of reducing the damage are by not being where the damage impacts (running in circles; constant micro; doesn't work against most ranged attacks), or by CC effects preventing the enemy from attacking (constant ability use; decreased effectiveness of most effects on higher difficulties; some enemies immune).

If you want to play without a tank on Nightmare, you will have to solve the crowd control problem. There are abilties for each class that can do things like that, but constantly using them will mean that there are a lot of other things you aren't doing at the same time. Like damaging the enemies. You're probably only slowing them down.


Healer

Healing is important, but it's more for emergencies than a constant spam. This was a conscious design choice in DA2. If I find myself relying on that one heal to save me, then I'm probably going to wipe anyway. In my case, the utility of the mages wasn't primarily in healing, but in AoE DPS and varying damage types (to take advantage of enemy resistances/vulnerabilities).

Healing type spells are essentially substitutes for healing potions that don't cost you finite resources. The number of healing potions in the game is lower than DAO, and they are a less frequently used resource. This makes healers good, but the time and mana spent using them isn't being used to damage the enemy. You may only be drawing a battle out, not winning it. This is why I only had a single healer, and didn't have much in the way of healing abilities. Time spent healing was not time spent winning the fight.


DPS

Having DPS characters, however, is vitally important. Nightmare is... unfair, though I can't describe all the ways that it is. Being able to thin out enemy numbers quickly, do enough damage to cause force effects on them, and lowering the health of higher ranked creatures quickly is kind of essential. On Nightmare specifically, there were certain (surprisingly plentiful, non-boss) single enemies that, if my party was reduced to my tank and a single DPS character, I was not able to do damage quickly enough to kill them. Sometimes it meant a slow death, sometimes a fast one. On some, even my entire party (as I had built it) was only barely enough.

DPS, by itself, isn't enough. There are enemies that can take too much damage, or attack in too large numbers that can't be whittled down in short time. Characters built more towards DPS are also the ones most likely to be affected by the force of enemy attacks. They're strong, but weak in other areas that the other roles make up for.



If you can provide effective solutions to the problems that each of those roles addresses, then you wouldn't be required to use that role as such.

[Peter Thomas]

JediHealerCosmin wrote...

Thank you for the information Mr. Thomas.
A small (possibly sadistic) question: is it possible playing on Nightmare without pausing too much? :innocent:

It may be possible, but would be very hard.

During combat, unexpected situations may pop up. Failing to deal with those quickly can be very damaging to your party. Lethality is higher on Nightmare, so the negative effects of mistakes or delays is increased. I couldn't see myself playing without pausing, but that's also my preferred way to play.

Higher difficulties require larger degrees of party control. Pausing and be able to issue orders to the entire party is one of the main ways of giving you that control.

[Peter Thomas]

AgenTBC wrote...

I hope Peter is right and Nightmare is going to be really damn hard in DA2. It will make my day! I can and will forgive a multitude of sins for a challenge. But I'm not confident that he will be shown to be correct: Nightmare mode in DA:O was mostly easy enough that I'm not sure Bioware's meter is calibrated properly. And I'm not sure that Awakening can be said to have difficulty levels at all since a baby hamster with a blindfold on could beat it by randomly hitting the mouse with her nose.

But I hope I'm wrong! I'll be one happy camper!

One of the reasons that difficulty was easier on Awakening was that, while player abilities ramped up in power, the creature scaling system couldn't really follow the same trend.

This may displease some people, but creatures no longer scale in the same way as the player. This allows us to make their balance better at all player levels, and on all difficulty levels.

[Peter Thomas]

Refara wrote...

"Nightmare is unfair" exactly what I wanted to hear!
I want a challenge.
I got another question, in boss battles, or the hardest fights in the game, I hope they aren't over in like 2 minutes. Are the hardest battles in the game fairly long? I remember my first time doing Gaxkang without any of the overpowered abilities in DA took some time, but it felt really good after all the time it took for the one attempt and it felt really rewarding. Will boss encounters genuienly be "difficult" and take a few attempts to get down, or will if you are experienced and know tacticts be able to adapt on the spot and be able to "one-shot" every encounter

YMMV for boss battles. Some I had to repeat numerous times, others I did the first time with varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes it's luck and sometimes it's good planning. We've tried to differentiate them from each other and add factors to complicate them. Almost all can be dealt with without any foreknowledge, assuming you pay attention to what happens in the encounter and are flexible enough/have a flexible enough party to deal with it.

[Peter Thomas]

balchagi wrote...

I can understand your worries. It always irked me that nightmare mode
automatically means enemies having ungodly amounts of health and
suddenly doing increased damage while your supposed hero of legend can't take a few hits. I would like to see advanced tactics and more varied skill usage, but when the player is able to penetrate those, it shouldn't take a million hits to down a  basic enemy. I can accept it for magical and fantastic creatures like golems and dragons, but not for every enemy in the game.

That said, I did find nightmare difficutly on DAO not very nightmarish, so I do look forward to a harder nightmare mode. I would like to see party wipes where I can't help but admire the AI tactics that were set up rather than rolling my eyes because my warrior and rogue can't take down a single enemy together.

One of the reasons for increasing enemy health and damage is to encourage efficiency from the player. They don't have to be huge increases compared to the normal game (which can lead to boring grinding on single enemies), but should be significant enough that a party that isn't as close to optimal will suffer.

One of the ways of looking at it is that it would take the party X seconds of focus firing to take down a given enemy. Higher difficulty increases that time, causing complications due to threat management, additional damage taken in that period, additional ability usage, enemies repositioning themselves, etc. The time increase doesn't have to be huge, but has to be enough that the other factors will end up having an impact on how the fight progresses.

Enemy damage dealt can be viewed in a similar way. My tank can stand up for X seconds under the enemy assault. Higher difficulty means that time is shortened. I would have to be better protected, have an off-tank, be able to decrease enemy DPS for a while, incapacitate them, or find some other method to be able to extend my own survivability time.

For advanced tactics and additional abilities, someone else had mentioned this earlier: If we did have that, why wouldn't we include it at all difficulty levels? We want to give all players the best, most varied experience possible, and design decisions have to be justified based on that. Tweaks and special additions were put in on Nightmare that makes enemies harder or, in some cases, act a bit differently, but changes that require significant amounts of resources (which abilities and additional scripting do) would need to be justified and, given all other constraints, probably can't be. A few of us have tried to put in things that will complicate Nightmare, but it was limited to extra time we had over the course of development.

[Peter Thomas]

andar91 wrote...

Wow, look at all of the info. So...are healers useless now, or does that just apply to Nightmare mode? Because I always took Wynne and (being a mage player) always took Heal and Group Heal as a precaution.

Healers are useful, just don't base your strategy on being able to outheal incoming damage.

[Peter Thomas]

Ensgnblack wrote...

Mr. Thomas,
All due respect, Tanking in DAO was broken. Warrior runs in, taunts, and can at that point cease being controlled...for the remainder of the fight. Taunt was so overpowered a single initial application made me good for the entire encounter.

Non-passive taunt/detaunt type abilities have been changed from numerical effects to complete ones. So if you use a taunt type effect on someone, it would automatically set his hate towards you to maximum. In some instances it might also clear his threat table towards other people as well. DAO threat abilities weren't always noticeable in their effect. In DA2, activated ones usually have an all-or-nothing effect, while passive ones add gradual, cumulative bonuses noticed over time.

Other things have also been done to prevent battles from being so passive. You shouldn't be able to run in, taunt, then put down the controller and go have a sandwich while it sorts itself out. Er... lowest difficulties excepted in certain circumstances.

In my own Nightmare playthrough, I had to constantly switch between party members, including the tank.

[Peter Thomas]

distinguetraces wrote...

Peter Thomas wrote...
In my Nightmare playthrough, I had ... a dual weapon/archer Hawke

So splitting your attention between talent lines in this way is viable this time? Or did you just want to test both weapon styles out?

The rogue hybrid actually sounds like a more fun build for my LadyHawke than the pure archer I had planned.

Archery and Dual Weapons are good for slightly different things, and also can vary at the rate in which they do damage. They're good for different situations. Archery is bigger hits, Dual Weapons is higher sustained DPS, but more risk.

I've mentioned before that DPS is important. If you're trying to get a lot of burst damage in, having the extra dual weapon abilities is invaluable.

[Peter Thomas]

AgenTBC wrote...

Sounds good, Peter.

Speaking for myself, I'd love to design a combat system that does discard the entire MMORPG "aggro" mechanic in favor a pure positional system where you protect the squishies by physically preventing the enemy from approaching them. Far more strategic; choice of battleground would be hugely more important than now and ambushes would be deadly (as should be).

But major game developers aren't exactly beating down my door offering me jobs or asking for help. I'm not sure why.

You can do that, and I did quite frequently in my game. Sitting my tank in a doorway, physically blocking enemies from getting to my back line. It doesn't always work though. Sometimes enemy ranged attacks would kill them, sometimes my tank would get knocked back by attacks, spilling them through the doorway, sometimes the tank would just get overpowered. I'd say that, on Nightmare, even with a tank, positioning, choke points, tactical retreats and that sort of thing are pretty essential.

Some mention was made of a Warrior blocking enemies by hitting them. This is in the game. Force of attacks affects enemies as well. If a Warrior attack or ability does enough damage or force, the enemy will be interrupted and play a damage reaction or knockback type animation. Warriors do their interruptions through force of attacks, rather than abilities designed purely to interrupt. A Rogue may do something tricky which stuns a guy, but a Warrior smashes him in the face to get a similar effect.

[Peter Thomas]

Ensgnblack wrote...

Since you are following this thread, might I ask if taunt is an ability you find yourself using a lot or are you able to use attacks and other abilities during the fight to keep control with your tank?

Hm... I can't talk about specific abilities, but I used taunt effects when the battle started to slip away from my tank. It depends on the situation or individual battle, and also on what build you create. Mine was focused mainly on taking damage, not dealing it, and not using other effects/abilities/equipment which increase threat.