38 réponses à ce sujet

[Zeevico]

I've played up to near the end of Act 3 with an Archer Rogue on NM. My comments on gameplay are as follows:

- talents: the talents are situational in use, but some are much better than others.

The archer tree is pretty much useless. Hail of Arrows is designed to take out groups of enemies, but enemies in DA2 swarm you, wave after wave; attacking them with hail of arrows does little to slow their advance or deal substantial damage. Pinning shot doesn't do enough damage to justify investment. Ditto burst shot. Archar's Lance is another ability that doesn't deserve the investment. It deals the same damage as pinning shot, albeit in a line; and it crits on one guy. Well, when do enemies arrange themselves in a neat line for you? Rarely.

Archers are good, but that's because of (i) good DPS; and (ii) making use of other talents in other trees to make them good. In effect it's just better to use the basic attack than rely on the archery tree, which is simply a waste of stamina/talent points. It wasn't designed for nightmare play.

-Wave combat: It bears repeating, but without an isometric map, and with waves spawning out of nowhere, this game tries hard to take the fun out of combat by making it hard to tell where enemies are coming from (and without giving any reason why they just spring out from thin air). Again, the devs recommended nm for a challenge, but they didn't mention how frustrating it would be.

--Attributes. Strength is an underestimated attribute for rogues in this game--indeed for every non warrior. I found I had to up strength to about 20 for every character and use fortitude boosting items for isabela, as a frontliner and for archers. Aveline/warriors are meant to draw threat, but with no fortitude score worth speaking of your character is toast. Cunning and Dex each have their own advantages which I won't analyse in depth. Willpower is relatively unimportant for non-mages (and irrelevant to blood mages). Magic is only worth getting for mages. Constitution worth getting for sword and board warriors; less so for 2h warriors; not really worth it for anyone else.
Cunning is irrelevant to non-rogues.
What's annoying is that we don't have the figures in advance on the "sweet spot" for a given stat.

--Gameplay still needs work. Also it meshes awkwardly with the storyline (e.g. mages).

Modifié par Zeevico, 17 avril 2011 - 05:50 .

[aethernox]

Strength is only relevant to warriors.
Dex is relevant to rogues and some mages.
Magic is only relevant to mages.
Cunning is relevant to rogues and some mages.
Willpower is relevant to some warriors and all mages (blood mages still need a minimum amount of willpower to equip level-appropriate gear).
Constitution is relevant to all characters.

The archer tree is useless, though. I don't have a problem with the wave combat, and I'm quite pleased with the gameplay (a few skill trees need work, and the itemization needs to be altered, but otherwise the game is fairly good).

[mr_afk]

Zeevico wrote...

The archer tree is pretty much useless. Hail of Arrows is designed to take out groups of enemies, but enemies in DA2 swarm you, wave after wave; attacking them with hail of arrows does little to slow their advance or deal substantial damage. Pinning shot doesn't do enough damage to justify investment. Ditto burst shot. Archar's Lance is another ability that doesn't deserve the investment. It deals the same damage as pinning shot, albeit in a line; and it crits on one guy. Well, when do enemies arrange themselves in a neat line for you? Rarely.

Archers are good, but that's because of (i) good DPS; and (ii) making use of other talents in other trees to make them good. In effect it's just better to use the basic attack than rely on the archery tree, which is simply a waste of stamina/talent points. It wasn't designed for nightmare play.

It depends what you're looking for. Archer's Lance is amazing at CCCs (the highest damage dealing one I know of). It also is very effective at killing your own party haha. I would agree that for an archer Hawke the archery tree is pretty terrible - but spare points for Varric or Sebastian could probably go towards getting archers lance.
Pinning shot is bugged, burst shot kills your friends (though I suppose with against brittle fire vulnerable enemies it might be good). The only use for hail is maybe slowing the enemies getting aoe bombed by a mage - which is partially redundant if hawke is a mage and has access to much more effective force-mage talents

Zeevico wrote...
-Wave combat: It bears repeating, but without an isometric map, and with waves spawning out of nowhere, this game tries hard to take the fun out of combat by making it hard to tell where enemies are coming from (and without giving any reason why they just spring out from thin air). Again, the devs recommended nm for a challenge, but they didn't mention how frustrating it would be.

Once you play through the game several times you'll know exactly where and when they spawn. Which ends up for amusing (slightly cheap) tactics such as slowing/targetting the area even before they appear. Though yes, the way enemies somehow drop out of solid roofs etc. is somewhat annoying

Zeevico wrote...
--Attributes. Strength is an underestimated attribute for rogues in this game--indeed for every non warrior. I found I had to up strength to about 20 for every character and use fortitude boosting items for isabela, as a frontliner and for archers. Aveline/warriors are meant to draw threat, but with no fortitude score worth speaking of your character is toast. Cunning and Dex each have their own advantages which I won't analyse in depth. Willpower is relatively unimportant for non-mages (and irrelevant to blood mages). Magic is only worth getting for mages. Constitution worth getting for sword and board warriors; less so for 2h warriors; not really worth it for anyone else.
Cunning is irrelevant to non-rogues.
What's annoying is that we don't have the figures in advance on the "sweet spot" for a given stat. 

I agree that knockbacks are truly frustrating - but that still doesn't make strength worth getting! If you're going for a glass cannon sorta rogue (relying on defence which admittedly does **** all and threat reduction talents) you shouldn't need to get any strength as spending points in strength reduces your damage potential.
And I definately disagree about cunning been irrelevant to non-rogues. Check out my crit-mage for example. 

Zeevico wrote...
--Gameplay still needs work. Also it meshes awkwardly with the storyline (e.g. mages).

yeah.. whatever. it grows on you. if it helps you can consider all the exaggerated violence part of Varric's exaggeration. 
And i'm not sure what you meant by that last point about mages.

edit: and this is what I hate about going to get a coffee before replying - you end up repeating everything somebody else already said

Modifié par mr_afk, 17 avril 2011 - 06:44 .

[aethernox]

mr_afk wrote...
edit: and this is what I hate about going to get a coffee before replying - you end up repeating everything somebody else already said

If I had been given the choice between posting first and posting second with coffee, I would have definitely have prefered to be the dude with coffee.

[brazen_nl]

I love Hail of Arrows, but, you have to pin them down using a ring first. The thing I needed to get my head around to is that DA2 is so much more team play oriented and you have to maximize that.

Same for Bursting Arrow and Archers Lance. As a finisher for the brittle CCC they are devastating.

[Nasabe]

mr_afk wrote...

yeah.. whatever. it grows on you. if it helps you can consider all the exaggerated violence part of Varric's exaggeration. 
And i'm not sure what you meant by that last point about mages.

edit: and this is what I hate about going to get a coffee before replying - you end up repeating everything somebody else already said

The point about the mages is.. at the very beginning of the game there is a codex entry (Gamlen's place if I'm not mistaken) which points out two things you cannot do via magic. 1: return the spirit back to the body once it has left. 2: teleport. The very purpose of that codex entry is to point out you cannot teleport.

I believe it is the same entry from DAO, but once you find out that almost every mage you encounter in the game teleports all over the place.. Well it kinda breaks apart the lore.

I am by no means a lore-crazy person but it just seems like such a fundamental mistake. My advice would be to remove that codex entry and hope people who played DAO never payed attention? don't know..

Modifié par Nasabe, 17 avril 2011 - 05:33 .

[Grumpy Old Wizard]

Yeah, teleport on a cooldown would have been fun and not imbalanced considering the squishyness of mages and the long cooldowns on spells. I would rather have that than mindblast.

[brazen_nl]

 Obviously, you don't need magic to do that, since rogues do it all the time! 

[Fadook]

You're exaggerating about the importance of strength for non-warriors. Yes, getting knocked back a lot is irritating. But it just means that you need to micro more, target archers, manipulate threat etc.

[pcrisipm]

poorly designed gameplay.
period.

up to hard difficulty the combat is actually fun -- even on hard the bosses and rogues/assassins end up turning the combat into a exercise in repetition and boredom, not to mention frustration: their health and armor stats are way to high wrt the player's, not to metion their ability to take health potions in addition to their own powers.
on nightmare there also the issue of friendly fire -- and just about everything is liable to hurt your own party, absurd as it may be. so on one hand the game has less expansive battlefields and on the other we are effectively stripped of our abilities of crowd-control.
nightmare combat quickly becomes an exercise in futility and frustration. it simply ceases to be fun. (remember the arishok?)

[Roxlimn]

pcrisipm:

It's possible to do more damage than you apparently are doing. See: various class build threads.  I'd recommend never to play on Nightmare until you're wiping the Hard encounters so hard that you're actually standing around doing nothing between enemy spawns.

Modifié par Roxlimn, 17 avril 2011 - 08:08 .

[Att3r0]

Look up some guides etc NM is not suited for casual play ( and is not realy that hard)
You dont need STR nor CON as rogue. While con will help, if you will keep focus targeting and having your tactics well set it wont be problem to ignote it. And later with aveline bodyguard + friendship bonus coupled with high defene allows you to pretty much run wild - well that is for DW rogue
Being archer is huge advantage by itself - the talent are too good but improved archers lance is good expecialy if you can cuause aoe aoe brittle. And enemy will hardly line up for you unles you make em do that ;]

[mjharper]

pcrisipm wrote...

poorly designed gameplay.
period.

up to hard difficulty the combat is actually fun -- even on hard the bosses and rogues/assassins end up turning the combat into a exercise in repetition and boredom, not to mention frustration: their health and armor stats are way to high wrt the player's, not to metion their ability to take health potions in addition to their own powers.
on nightmare there also the issue of friendly fire -- and just about everything is liable to hurt your own party, absurd as it may be. so on one hand the game has less expansive battlefields and on the other we are effectively stripped of our abilities of crowd-control.
nightmare combat quickly becomes an exercise in futility and frustration. it simply ceases to be fun. (remember the arishok?)

Having played through three times on Hard, I'm now on my first NM playthrough with an archer (like the OP, no points in Archery), and having a blast. You need to take account of the mechanics: it isn't just harder, it's different. FF management is crucial, so generally Primal > Elemental. Crowd control is still possible, but talents like Fatiguing Fog become more useful than, say, Sleep. And cross-class combos (read: a well functioning party) make everything much smoother.

The only time I've actually beentruly  frustrated was in the prologue, against the Ogre. The Arishok solo was a piece of cake (bow + Decoy = dead Arishok) and the only things difficult about the High Dragon were the adds, and the HD firebombing Anders repeatedly.

I'm not trying to boast my wicked skills. Believe me, I don't have any. But taking time to prepare and learn the ropes will help no end.

[RedsaberEQ]

Bah with combos and such. Get 3 ranged damage and 1 tank (max magic/damage resist). Put everyone on hold, control the tank and bring him to the middle of the fight. With the dog and taunt, you can have your mages/archers shooting fireballs, lightning storms, arrows and walking bombs while your tank is taking all the blows.

This is only fun if your the type of player who is a tank through and through.

[aethernox]

The Nightmare difficulty is not poorly designed simply because it's too challenging for some players. Many users, myself included, are more than capable of both excelling at and enjoying Nightmare, but no-one said that it was for everyone.

[Apathy1989]

aethernox wrote...

The Nightmare difficulty is not poorly
designed simply because it's too challenging for some players. Many
users, myself included, are more than capable of both excelling at and
enjoying Nightmare, but no-one said that it was for everyone.

Indeed. Usually my only risk in nightmare is killing my own people with AoE.



On topic of archery tree being useless, I agree. Archers lance is great against brittle, but its not worth buying 2 useless skills to get it. Archers are better using the specialist tree and specialisations.

Edit: About strength - don't waste points in strength to avoid knockdowns. Either get a warrior using rally and turn the blade, or invest in a anti-knockdown ring. Playing as a melee rogue is incredibly annoying before you get one of these rings though, as you are constantly knocked back from everyone and everything.

Modifié par Apathy1989, 18 avril 2011 - 12:05 .

[Lumikki]

aethernox wrote...

The Nightmare difficulty is not poorly designed simply because it's too challenging for some players. Many users, myself included, are more than capable of both excelling at and enjoying Nightmare, but no-one said that it was for everyone.

Actually Nightmare difficulty has design problems in my opinion. Example enemy knock backs, elemental immunities and friendly fire exception in AoE's. Meaning they are over done in nightmare difficulty or mistakes.

Way too many enemy has 100% guaranteed knock backs and way to avoid is to make you self allmost immune to it. That's poor design. It would be so that there is like enemies has max of 50% knock back possibility and player can only reduse the effect, not eliminate it.

Also elemental immunities has MAJOR effect to mage spells, while it has very little affect to rogues and warriors talents. This is not balanced design. It makes so that many mages "tallents" become useless bases every enemies. There isn't much any enemy where some spells aren't useless. This is bad design.

Also not all enemies should even have weakness or immunities. It's over done feature in nightmare difficulty. It would be so that maybe 20% of enemies has immunity to some element and rest of just have diffrent resistances to different elements. No-one of enemies should ever has two immunities. They aren't Gods.

Also there is mistake in Friendly fire too. Eletrical AoE's should also do Friendly Fire. There is no excuse to some AoE doesn't have FF while others have. If some spell or talent is AoE it can't choose who's in the effect. Example players benefit AoE should also benefit enemies in that AoE. Control AoE's like Glyph of Paralysis should affect also companions.  AoE is AoE, it doesn't choose targets.

My opinion about attributes: (I don't consider critical build mage as good option. Also I'm not so sure about possibility of critical warrior build. This would affect dexterity for classes.)

Strenght: Only for warriors
Dexterity: Only for rogues
Magic: Only for mages:
Cunning: All melee classes (and rogue for traps and chests)
Will power: None, no-one needs it
Constitude: All melee classes and blood mages.

Only other reason to take attributes is to fill gear and weapon restrictions.

PS: My point with critical mage build is that you get peak damage value up, but total damage value in long run is lower than normal mage. Why I have all melee class in cunning, because it's very easy to get base 20% defence with few cunning skill point. It raise real fast first few points.

Modifié par Lumikki, 18 avril 2011 - 06:27 .

[Roxlimn]

I broadly agree that the FF feature in DA2 is not well done. The surest sign of this is that most people design their parties so that they can completely avoid FF issues at the character build level, rather than managing the feature to have enhanced tactical play.

[mr_afk]

Lumikki wrote...

I don't consider critical build mage as good option.

Ps: My point with critical mage build is that you get peak damage value up, but total damage value in long run is lower than normal mage.

What's the fun in having consistently boring damage scores when you could get massive spike damage instead?
Haha the crit-mage build is about utility as well. In general, most critter-enemies are pretty easy to destroy (you don't need a massive base damage). However, in every mob there's one or two annoying enemies (either a boss, assassin or mage) which will continue to harass you until you kill it - hence the general tactic of focus firing at them from the very beginning. Especially in the case of assassins whos backstabs can destroy glass cannon builds (like the ones I use), removing them early makes the whole battle so much easier. Thus spike damage, where your chosen target gets hexed and blown into oblivion, will have an important role in most encounters, serving as a preventative measure against all the damage that the enemy would have inflicted on you had it been given the time.

Additionally, the average damage scores aren't so different in the long run. If you have a crit chance of ~30% (e.g. my mage at level 12), this means that around one in three of your hits will crit. The base damage does not actually improve that much if you pump magic and the mage equipment usually only adds on small +% increases to certain elements (and +mana which everyone knows is useless). Whereas the rogue armour which a crit-mage uses increases the crit damage ~20% (once again at level 12) on top of the increased crit-damage from pumping cunning.

Thus overall, the average will not be too different - and the crit-mage has the versatility to do massive single target dps (e.g. paired with an upgraded hex of torment). With the latest patch fixing rally, it is possible to get an additional 25% crit damage (and 10% damage) making the utilisation of criticals even more powerful. For example, my level 12 crit-mage (which I keep referring to) had 92% crit damage which could go up to 117%. Go check my crappy quality video i've got on it against the deep roads dragon if you want to see what it can do.

It's not the build for everyone (in my case it's a major glass cannon), but if you check Arelex's mage videos you'll see that a rogue-armoured mage (hers isn't really as focused on crits as mine) is a very viable option.
Hope I managed to defend my build eloquently enough 

Modifié par mr_afk, 18 avril 2011 - 06:48 .

[Siham]

Lumikki wrote...

Also there is mistake in Friendly fire too. Eletrical AoE's should also do Friendly Fire. There is no excuse to some AoE doesn't have FF while others have. If some spell or talent is AoE it can't choose who's in the effect. Example players benefit AoE should also benefit enemies in that AoE. Control AoE's like Glyph of Paralysis should affect also companions.  AoE is AoE, it doesn't choose targets.

I didn't know for electrical AoE's !  Is there a list somewhere of what spells and abilities do friendly fire? I couldn't find any synthesizing information on these forums or on the wiki.

[mr_afk]

Here's a discussion on FF that happened a few days ago, not sure if there's anything more comprehensive out there.  In the wikia I think the Notes section on each of the spells etc. should say if there's FF or not.
The only other option is to test it out I guess.

But yes, lightning not having friendly fire sorta makes sense. It's just so awesome it transcends all the crappy ff issues that undirectable spells like fireball have. 

[Jack-Nader]

Case for critical build mages:=

Case 1---------------------

(90 attribute points)

100 magic = 45 DPS
10 cunning = +50% damage on a critical hit
10 dex - 0% critical chance

Staff base damage 40

Damage done over 100 hits = (40 + 45) * 100 = 8500 Damage

case 2----------------------

(90 attribute points)

55 magic = 22.5 DPS
10 cunning = + 50% damage on a critical hit
55 Dexerity = + 45% critcal chance

Damage done over 100 hits = 55*(40 + 22.25) + (45 * 1.5 *(40 + 22.5)) = 3437.5 + 4218.75 = 7656.25

case 3----------------------

(90 Attribute points)

50 magic = 20 DPS
40 cunning = + 90% critical damage
20 Dexterity = + 10% critical chance

Damage done over 100 hits = 90*(40 + 20) + (10 * 1.8 *(40 + 20) = 5400 + 1080 = 6480

At Bonny Lems store in act II you can buy the ring of puzzle boxes.
It has + 2 dexterity + 2 cunning and +9% critical chance

This translates to + 11% critical chance and + 2% critical damage for a mage.

using case 1 stats

Damage done over 100 hits = 89 *(40 + 45) + (11 * 1.52*(40 + 45) = 7565 + 1421.2 = 8986.2 damage

8986.2 / 8500 = 1.0572

Which means that the ring of puzzle boxes purchased for 88 gold compares to an item that boosts damage by only 5.72%. Worth it?? Not likely!

case 4-------------------------

same as case 2 but with rally enabled - 10% damage excluded as it would also apply to case 1.

(90 attribute points)

55 magic = 22.5 DPS
10 cunning = + 50% damage on a critical hit
55 Dexerity = + 45% critcal chance

Damage done over 100 hits = 55*(40 + 22.25) + (45 * 1.75 *(40 + 22.5)) = 3437.5 + 4921.875 = 8359.375

Conclusion:=  The best thing you can do for a mage is to put as many puts as possible into magic.  Choose an element to excell in - (Fire being the logical choice) and stack % gear. 

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 18 avril 2011 - 12:34 .

[Att3r0]

Nice math but should the staff influence be bigger?
i mean staff base damage = 40 equals to a ~55dps staff.
Magic attribute bonus is expressed in dps
why then use staff base damage rather then dps for calculation ?
case 1: 55+45= 100 dps
case 2 : (55+22.5)*0.55+55+22.5)*0.45*1.5 = 94.9375 dps
case 3 : (55+20)*0.9+(55+20)*0.1*1.9 = 81.75 dps

obioussly the math is not too accurate with bonus to crit from heroic aua as example but i agree with conclusion

[mr_afk]

You're missing out the part where a full magic mage has to invest (waste) points on willpower in order to equip their robes etc. A blood mage which doesn't need to have any willpower will have extra points in that case (or at least be more sturdy if the full magic mage doesn't get similar levels of constitution). Also, equipment plays a large part in this calculation, as rogue gear has +crit damage properties which is effectively giving you the equivalent of free cunning/dexterity. I've been meaning to do some calculations anyway so here it goes:

[edit: check second page of this thread or my guide linked in my signature for updated calculations. probably should stop confusing people with these ones (slightly incorrect)]

Modifié par mr_afk, 18 avril 2011 - 05:39 .

[Att3r0]

mr_afk you quite clearly frogot about +% damage. At lv 12 wearing a set of +% damage you recive over 20% of damage increase this way.
EDIT: aye comparing vs spirtal eye... it SUCKS BALLS

Modifié par Att3r0, 18 avril 2011 - 04:13 .