61 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylaar]

 The topic of this post is to find an "optimised" party for DA2, the optimisation criteria being the following:
-nightmare difficulty
-almost no use of health potions or injury kits
-no use of other potions or poisons
-four members party
-almost no need to micromanage (efficient use of tactics) therefore almost no friendly fire allowed
-quickest dispatching of enemies as possible
-no kiting

The idea is to find a party that satisfy these criteria. 
I've found one, but I'm going to get to that by using logical arguments.

First: know your enemy

Most of the time you have:
-at least one  talent/spell based boss or elite
-many respawning minion who rather use basic attacks

knowing that you need to allocate eight functions to your party:
absorb / inflict   spell/basic attack  from/to  the boss/minions

absorbing damage is a tank role but for efficiency you need two tanks:
-a constitution based tank that is going to absorb talent/spell attacks from the boss
-a cuning based tank that is going to defend against basic attacks from the minions.

dealing damage is done by three main ways:
-talent based spike damage to the boss
-basic attack to the boss (who shall be busy pounding on the constitution based tank)
-basic attacks against minions

let's flesh this out into character classes:

-a constitution based warrior deals basic attacks to the boss and absorbs his spell/talents (eg Aveline)
-a rogue deals talent based spike damage to the boss or basic attack damage to the boss (eg assassin hawke)
-a cuning based warrior defends against basic attacks from the minions and deals basic attack damage (eg vanguard fenris)

the best complement to this trio is a healer (eg primal Anders)

Tactics are roughly as follows:
-Aveline basic attacks the elite boss / boss / highest health targets
-Fenris basic attacks enemies attacking anders and then critters/ lowest health (works well with vanguard)
-Assassin hawke basic attacks enemies attacking anders and then deals talent based damage to Aveline's target, then basic attacks Aveline's target
-Primal Anders  chain reactions enemies staggered by vanguard fenris and dessicates the target of Aveline for Hawke to annhilate and the rest of the time heals and buffs companions

Why an assassin hawke?
-first with Aveline with battle synergy that helps redistibuting health and threat from the boss killer rogue if not too far we're better off with a melee rogue boss killer.
Since Isabella, the only melee rogue companion has the major drawback of not having assassin type of talents available in her personal tree an assassin melee rogu hawke is far superior.

Beside Fenris, Aveline and Anders are perfect for their respective functions.

The synergy of this party is perfect.
between assassin Hawke and Fenris:
-Hawke (helped by Aveline) dispatches the bigest fish targeted by Aveline
-Fenris (complemented by Anders) dispatch all the small fisk quite quickly

between melee assassin Hawke and Aveline:
-Aveline is the anvil: she takes the damage and the threat from hawke thanks to battle synergy and bodyguard while Hawke is the hammer and deals most of the damage to Aveline's target.

between anders and fenris: electricity combos
between anders and hawke: anhilate combo

Note on Anders: with the right specs he's incredibly powerful.
It's true that blood mage Merril has almost unlimited mana for her spell and is sturdier because of a high constitution.
BUT high willpower Anders with swift justice and sacrifice (helped by rally from Aveline and Fenris) will have unlimited mana as well but will have a much lower cooldown, especially for spell with a long cooldown.
the trick is to take the threat away from him and to have fenris/rogue hawke quickly dispatching his occasional attackers.

If someone has any questions/remarks about this kick ass party that breezes through nightmare I will be happy to answer.

[Mr_Raider]

The more I play the game, the more I think three mages + Varric is the best option. Ice, fire and lightning for the NPCs, add force mage for Hawke mage.

[mr_afk]

I don't understand. Is this meant to be a guide or an open discussion?
Because there are many many of such 'optimised' parties but none that require using a tank- especially if you consider 'the quickest dispatching of enemies as possible' as criteria.

Firstly: what's up with the cunning-based fenris? It really sounds like you didn't optimise him at all. Cunning is pretty much useless for everything but opening locks/traps as defence is pretty useless and there are much better ways to increase critical damage.
-------------------------
Generally speaking, imo an 'optimised' party for act1 would have to include anders and bethany; or anders and mage hawke for the whole game. This is due to double haste and the +100% party-wide damage it conveys. I personally prefer using bethany/anders as it frees a non-mage hawke up to unleash ridiculous dps but I suppose you've gotta make do with what you've got, and if bethany has been squashed by an ogre you'll have to settle for crappy old carver. I still haven't tested the effect that extra available haste will have on speedruns between the classes from act2 onwards but really can't be bothered playing through another mage.

Other than anders that it's relatively open to the player's discretion and what abilities/CCCs they want to pull off.

As mages are one of the most versatile at capitalising on CCCs, having two to three mages (i.e. getting merrill in there) can work quite well, especially in conjunction with a rogue and disorient CCCs. (e.g. brittle-archer's lance for elites, pull of the abyss-disorient-walking bomb/spirit bolt/stone fist). I've used that three mages+Varric setup quite often and it does work quite nicely.

However, for a mage hawke I somewhat prefer sometimes throwing Aveline into the mix- though this was before the haste-bug was fixed so Anders wasn't quite as necessary. It probably would still work post-patch but won't be 'optimised'.
Basically I had Aveline act as a secondary walking bomb/trigger for the walking bomb as well as a setup for staggers. Having all three class types is nice because you can get some pretty nice CCC interplays- e.g. one CCC leading to/stacked on top another, e.g. Cluster+Disorient=Walkingbomb/Scatter/Assault which leads to Cluster+Stagger=Haemorrhage/Chain Lightning which leads to everything been dead.

Now that claymore has been nerfed it may be harder to pull off so using things like shield bash/pommel strike on elites may have to do.


There's too many setups that fit within your criteria so I think I'll stop here and leave you to adress fenris. Why cunning?

[Lucav5]

I was following you until you said this
"-a cuning based warrior defends against basic attacks from the minions and deals basic attack damage (eg vanguard fenris)"
what?

Modifié par Lucav5, 11 juin 2011 - 04:27 .

[AreleX]

No matter what class you yourself play, the best party is always going to be Hawke, Merrill, Anders, Varric.

This is a fact.

[mr_afk]

Actually, with the changes from the patch to lacerate it may be better to work in a warrior for a hawke-rogue, simply for double damage. At least that's what I'm going to do with my shadow duelist.

I'm a little torn though. I'm actually starting to enjoy myself once again by doing a solo dw rogue run. It's made the combat quite challenging, requiring you to manage threat/dish out spike damage/be awesome (instead of been a menial chore)

But I like big numbers so perhaps I'll just do a Hawke+Aveline or Fenris run

[AreleX]

It doesn't work better, because the stagger comes at the expense of having to trade one of the above for Aveline. Aveline is terrible, as much as I love her.

[mr_afk]

Hmm. I'm thinking that Varric isn't that necessary and an elemental Aveline could come close. Only problem is how to use brittles- the only bad thing about disorienting criticals is that you can't use brittles.. not that you really need it anyway; the +50% crit damage makes up for it.

This also has the advantage of having a semi-tank character to draw threat away from the more fragile characters (hawke and the mages).

I suppose I'll have to test it out. Maybe on a varnell speed run. But as I'm no longer playing in a party setup I don't have that much vested interest in optimising parties anymore.

[AreleX]

I don't think you understand the point. Varric can have up to +65% attack speed WITHOUT Haste, but more importantly, he does not have to walk up to an enemy to hit it.

Just about any run you think you can do fast with Aveline, I guarantee I can do much faster with Varric.

[mr_afk]

but.. can Varric scatter/assault disoriented enemies and make them explode?
and can Varric equip elemental weapons and deal double damage?

The main issue I think is that without a force-mage to cluster enemies Aveline's aoe spike damage will be considerably limited. Add to that the inevitable friendly fire to a DW rogue and you have a not so fun party setup.

However, from my experiences with an Aveline party-setup (without anders) in my mage playthrough, a full strength build works quite well. It's basically like an elemental S&S hawke without the reaver abilities- and now that reaver sucks, it's not so different.

Anyway, I'll probably see about doing a varnell speed run - I think Aveline with desdemona's will trump Varric. I sort of can't be bothered playing DA2 that much though so you might not see it that soon.

[Sylaar]

(PS sorry for my english it's not my native language) 
I'll answer from the top to the bottom:

Mr Raider:
IMHO Varric plus three mages (especially force mage) need a lot of micromanaging which contradicts one of the criteria I stated. Beside how do you manage threat? Unsing Varric's scoundrel talents?

mr_afk:
I was just opening a discussion to share a party config that I found optimal and how I selected it by pure logic.
I did a run with this party on nightmare with almost no micromanaging, almost no death and no health potion needed.

Cuning based Fenris means: try to have a high defense against basic attacks and to pick only enemies with basic attacks. At end game I only needed 20 in constitution and the rest in strength.
Fenris with lyrium ghost, heroic aura from anders and battle synergy from Aveline has a high defense;
points in cuning don't need to go much higher than the sweetspot (when you gain 4% in defense just by adding one point in cuning)
I was refering to an end game party; in act one you would replace Anders by Bethany and Fenris by Varric.

You're referring to double haste but with Anders and all his cool down reduction bonuses you don't really need two of them; you're already on haste a pretty good portion of the time.

Lucav5:
Sorry to have lost you with my cunning fenris; there is an answer for that just above.
My point is: a high defense is preferable to a high constitution if you defend against minions with basic attacks; beside you can easily boost Fenris critical chance to 50% which has a good synergy with cuning. (And with sunder claymore Fenris is going to stagger a good chunk of the crowd surrounding him) 

Arelex: I was suggesting a party optimised for the criteria I listed.
mages and archers are for most part squeashies who either need a tank to take threat from them or a bodyguard.
Even constitution based Merril doesn't have the fortitude to withstand being surrounded by mele enemy (which is why I find the wrath of the elven tree mediocre)
With the party I used I could almost abstain from piloting one of the member of the party: they would dispatch the enemy just following their tactics which I don't think is possible with using a lot of crowd control from mages and AOE spell.
The only AOE spell I used is tempest (without friendly fire and very useful to uncloak assassins)
Beside AreleX if you compare Varric with a DW Assassin / Duelist  you probably know who will dish the most damage.
Fenris won't have the same DPS as Varric but he will take care of several enemy at once and will stagger a lot of them (And Anders will help by throwing chain reaction and tempest) . Beside the enemy you want to dispatch the quickest are not the minion because they'll respawn as soon as you'll kill them; you want to kill the boss the quickest ('m happy with Fenris as a not so fast minion killer, and with a very fast boss killer as a assassin hawke / Aveline synergy.)

mr afk:
Lacerate: why not if it's patched now;
In my party the chain reaction was a good way to dispatch the minions staggered by fenris.
Beside I try to avoid sustainables for talents oriented rogue. The only one I used for DW rogue hawke was Parry only when against the boss when all the talents were in cooldown

AreleX: Yes Varric with all the speed bonuses has a very high DPS for basic attacks. But he's going to take a lot of threat and eventually the minions are going to get to him so he needs a bit of constitution.
On the other end a DW assassin hawke working hand in hand with Aveline:
-will have 85% of the damage transfered to Aveline (Battle synergy upgrade + bodyguard = the friendship passive)
-will have 50% of the threat transfer to Aveline so no one against him/her 
So basically hawke will have no point at all in constitution and will still be very durable. Without Aveline he/she would be a glass canon.

Beside thanks to two rallys (Aveline / Fenris) this hawke will almost never run out of mana and will spend his time assassinating, vendetting, twin fanging and bacsktabing the highest ranking opponent which will probably lead to a higher overall DPS than even a speed enhanced Varric on basic attacks who is going to run away from the enemy half of the time because of threat accumulation.


about elemental damage:
apart from a mage (even better with elemental weapons on the top) who can switch staves according to enemies vulnerabilities and has access to all elements I found the second most versatile elemental companion was Fenris (who has access in Act 3 to the best: spirit damage with the cerebrant, electricity with sundering and last but not least cold with bloom. With these three elements covered he doesnt need to use a non elemental weapon and will most of the time have find opponents weak to one of those)

DW rogue hawke has access to two spirit daggers they are either very expensive or have a lower damage than finesse for instance. The low blade deals nature damage and is one of the best dagger of the game but I had to switch it to Carta left hand gainst nature immune enemies.
My Aveline was using Gladivalis (electric) most of the time, otherwise satareth (fire) against either electricity immune or fire weak enemy.

I don't think that having a character specialise in a specific element with plus elemental damage gear works as well as a versatile party that switches weapons according to the vulnerabilities of the current enemy.
(By the way, there was a bit of micromanaging in my party after all: switching to the proper elemental weapon which is sometimes several time during the same combat..)

[mr_afk]

Wow.. major respect for the amount you just wrote. That's even longer than what I do! haha

Anyway, re: my post,
Double haste isn't about extended duration but increased speed. It stacks so you can get a party-wide +100% attack speed boost. Haste is probably the most powerful buff in the game and as such an optimised party will generally try to take as much advantage of it as possible; e.g. getting anders to cast martyr and getting two of them if possible. This applies to all stages of the game, but obviously it won't be quite as applicable before you can get haste and/or while you don't have bethany.

Defence isn't that good. It doesn't protect against abilities and drops a considerable amount against bosses/lieutenants. From my experience, most of the damage that actually is problematic comes from enemy spike-damage talents (e.g. assassin and rage demon backstabs) which defence does not help against. You'd be probably be better off not putting a single point into cunning (despite whatever sweetspot there may be) and dumping it into strength so you kill things faster- as killing something faster is one of the best ways to reduce the damage taken.

Either way, you really don't need that many tanks in your party, even if they are of different 'types'. Threat management is pretty easy to control simply through tactics and using your hawke effectively. Generally speaking you can direct aggro towards party members by increasing their damage output/using goad and decrease it via stealth, armistice, goad etc.

In fact I think might be the missing part in why you can't find more of these 'optimised' parties. Most of the non-pause players follow similar guidelines (e.g. no micromanaging) and find using ranged parties easier. This is partly due to the pain of melee friendly fire (e.g. aveline assaulting or scattering all the companions or fenris doing anything other than auto-attacking) and also due to the ability for CCCs to be performed more easily and via tactics - e.g. target=brittle=archer's lance. This allows your party to operate by itself, the tactics catering for threat management, crowd control and CCCs.


Anyway, on another note, it turns out that staggers+lacerate isn't quite as necessary as I had thought. As in, you don't even need a stagger for vendetta to completely destroy anything.

My shadow-duelist is pretty overpowered atm. It's still pretty fun though, I'm thinking i'll record and post up a compilation of some of my solo runs.

Modifié par mr_afk, 11 juin 2011 - 10:21 .

[Sylaar]

 I get your point about double haste;
However haste only enhances basic attack speed, not spell or talent attacks.
Mage basic attack DPS is not so good so I m not sure it's so efficient to have two mages casting haste; only if the other two party members have a high DPS and rely mostly on basic attacks..

Your point about defence: it's not that good but it's quite cheap to put just enough cuning to get to the sweetspot in defence. My point was a well defended Fenris would not expose himself to talents/spells because Aveline/ Rogue hawke would do that for him.
The occasional backstab by a stealth assassin are a vulnerability I admit but with Anders spelling tempest around Fenris uncloaks the assassin and in my run  low cool down anders healed him almost immediately in the case of a backstab.
Killing faster as a way to reduce damage taken is a bit overated I think because minions will respawn earlier if you despatch the first wave of them quicker. The elite enemies will not respawn though and this rationale is valid for them. 

Your point about the absence of real need for a tank : in the absence of CCC by a mage, which I think requires micromanaging, I don't know that your alternative party can erradicate the melee enemy before thay reach the weakest one in your party.
In DA origins and Awakening I was happy with 3 mages (not even arcane warrior) and 1 warrior on nightmare but IMHO in DA2 the balance has been restored in favour melee fighters for a pure tactics based play.
Similarly in DA origins I was happy to dump all of the points in strength or magic; but DA2 has come up with decreasing marginal return of dumping points into a single attribute that favours a more balanced distribution (for defence, attack and resistances and armor)

About the comparaison of non pause player with no-micromanage: there is a difference which is non pause player give a lot of skill controling their character. Beside most of the time their party is based around their character and all the companions are just for support. that's why they prefer to have only range companions so that they can unleash their nuke hawke spell/ talents while the range squeashies stay in the back at the kiddies table.
The point of my post was also to show that there could be a less hawke-centric and more melee prone party.

About the melee friendly fire: I don't use any AOE talent for my Fenris and Aveline, just cleave and rally so no FF. Boring I agree but Anders and Hawke are here to keep me entertained with their vicious spell/ talents..

I'm quite intrigued by your shadow- duelist as I always thought the only shadow combo would be with assassin for an archer build.. Assassin gives talents to kill one target quickly and is almost a default choice ; from them Shadow is the stealth option while duelist is the in-your-face option but aren't they a bit mutually incompatible?

[Sylaar]

erratum: in my last post meant crowd control for CCC not cross class combo. I think this confusion has generated a misunderstanding with mr afk earlier..

[AreleX]

This isn't even up for discussion, I have played just about every viable party with every build, and I'm telling you that Anders, Merrill, Varric, Hawke is always going to be the best, if you build them and set up their tactics right.

Did you look at the speed run thread that was in the Gameplay section? Did you notice how every single party for every single video was probably the one I just listed above? There's a reason for that.

I've said it once, I'll say it again: Dragon Age 2 is a zero-sum game. You hit hard enough, you hit fast enough, you win.

[Wangry]

AreleX wrote...

This isn't even up for discussion, I have played just about every viable party with every build, and I'm telling you that Anders, Merrill, Varric, Hawke is always going to be the best, if you build them and set up their tactics right.

Did you look at the speed run thread that was in the Gameplay section? Did you notice how every single party for every single video was probably the one I just listed above? There's a reason for that.

I've said it once, I'll say it again: Dragon Age 2 is a zero-sum game. You hit hard enough, you hit fast enough, you win.

The thing i'm curious about, is that in a party of squishies, does the absurd dps really make up for the lack of anybody to really absorb hits?  I'm curious to try this, but the ex-wow player in me is skeptical to try to do anything without a warrior in the party.  Maybe i just need to suck less =/

[AreleX]

Yes. So long as you have good tactics for them, and are doing a good job yourself, you can pretty much steamroll just about any part of the game with Anders/Merrill/Varric watching your back.

[SuicidalBaby]

forget the WoW paradigm. it does not apply here.

damage is king. armor and defense is for the casual player.

[rumination888]

Wangry wrote...

The thing i'm curious about, is that in a party of squishies, does the absurd dps really make up for the lack of anybody to really absorb hits?  I'm curious to try this, but the ex-wow player in me is skeptical to try to do anything without a warrior in the party.  Maybe i just need to suck less =/

Pay attention to whats under the hood, and not the hood itself. Fenris has less armor than Anders/Merril in Rock Armor. His only consolation is that he has more health. The mage companions arne't squishy at all.

One major reason why meleers aren't as good as ranged companions is because the AI is incapable of making closing attacks. Basically, a meleer controlled by the AI can lose as much as half their DPS due to the amount of shuffling they need to do to reach their target.

The only thing they were really good for is applying staggers to Elites/Bosses to burst them down fast.(Aveline was miles ahead of Fenris due to Shield Bash before patch 1.03. Honestly, theres no reason to take Fenris before the patch, and no reason to take him after aside from RP reasons)

With the huge nerf to elite/boss health, every ability that wasn't a CCC essentially kills them twice as fast now. So, you really don't need to utilize CCCs anymore.(which means anyone whining about nerfed multipliers on CCCs doesn't know what theyre talking about).

[AreleX]

If you can honestly tell me you didn't pop a half-chub every time you completely and utterly Assassinated something out of existence, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you.



When you look closely at the sum of the changes, you're left scratching your head and saying 'well, what did all that nerfing really amount to in the end?'.

[rumination888]

Assassin spec bored me to tears. 

I specced as Duelist/Shadow for the majority of my rogue play(Vendetta and Decoy are a helluva lot more fun to watch and use than *yawn* Assassinate).

[mr_afk]

rumination888 wrote...
I specced as Duelist/Shadow for the majority of my rogue play(Vendetta and Decoy are a helluva lot more fun to watch and use than *yawn* Assassinate).

Amen.

Modifié par mr_afk, 12 juin 2011 - 04:25 .

[Sylaar]

AreleX wrote...

Yes. So long as you have good tactics for them, and are doing a good job yourself, you can pretty much steamroll just about any part of the game with Anders/Merrill/Varric watching your back.

That's the part about "doing a good job yourself" that I put into question.
I was curious about what other parties could be played as a mostly healer anders in the back of the room (i.e not doing much) while the rest of the party does the heavy duty.  When actual combat action was needed from Anders, I switched to the most passive companion..


If you know the first versions of Raimbow six where you can, but are not forced to control one of the characters (a swat team liberating hostages from terrorists) you know the joy of controlling a team without participating to the action. Everything is in the prepation then..


Rumination 88 wrote:
One major reason why meleers aren't as good as ranged companions is because the AI is incapable of making closing attacks. Basically, a meleer controlled by the AI can lose as much as half their DPS due to the amount of shuffling they need to do to reach their target. 


This has IMHO  nothing to do with being a melee or range character but with target selection..
The tactics system is very misleading because in some cases you chose a target and in some you perform a conditional action on the current target.
I used mostly the rank (or enemy-> attacking  the squeashy) for target selection and it worked mostly ok. If you target the enemy with highest health for instance I don t know if it switches to another enemy when health has become low enough, but that would explain some time consuming dithering..


Melee rogue can close fast on a target because of their quasi teleporting abilities (vendetta, bachstab, back to back) and warrior should be either attaking a durable enemy or many weaker enemy most of the time


Rumination 88 wrote:
The only thing they were really good for is applying staggers to Elites/Bosses to burst them down fast.(Aveline was miles ahead of Fenris due to Shield Bash before patch 1.03. Honestly, theres no reason to take Fenris before the patch, and no reason to take him after aside from RP reasons) 


The comparision comes to the passive sunder for Fenris (which is not limited to the use of 2H tree talents if I'm not mistaken) to shield bash for Aveline. 


My Fenris had a 50% critical chance and most of the time (with 90% critical damage which adds a 45% average damage compared to Aveline who doesn't do criticals) a 30% speed increase from battle tempo ( plus the 50% haste and 40% from primeval rune but I select only the differences with aveline) and a critical hit is a 50% chance of stagger.
The problem with my fenris was that he was occasionally staggering the allies as well even on basic attacks.. (Fortunately chain reactions has no FF). Aveline is great as a damage / threat sponge, not as a damage dealer.


The best comparaison for a companion is between his unique specialisation and the specialisation of the same class Hawke.


Fenris specialisation could be compared to a 2H warrior reaver / berseker which is an awesome specialisation against swarms of enemies (but I think still inferior to an assassin for a one on one) therefore I don t understand when the same people that diminish Fenris think the Reaver Berseker is a god.


You say stagger is good for Bosses; maybe with blood feud but you would  not want that upgrade for an assassin because it removes the debuff from mark of death. Fitting if you opt for a shadow instead though.


Let's put it this way: my Fenris is pretty quickly surrounded by weak staggerred enemies, Anders chain reaction them and Fenris is standing alone again.
Staggered is exploited by mostly AOE or collective spells with low damage multipliers while brittle is exploited most of the time by individual spells with higher damage multipliers which is fitting because it's much easier to stagger than to brittle an enemy. Brittle is to Stagger what a sniper riffle is to a machine gun.. the problem is the riffle gets jammed against the bosses who are too difficult to make brittle..

[AreleX]

SuicidialBaby wrote...

forget the WoW paradigm. it does not apply here.

damage is king. armor and defense is for the casual player.

this

[mosesofwar]

Sylaar wrote...
Fenris specialisation could be compared to a 2H warrior reaver / berseker which is an awesome specialisation against swarms of enemies (but I think still inferior to an assassin for a one on one) therefore I don t understand when the same people that diminish Fenris think the Reaver Berseker is a god.

Fenris is more of a Reaver/Templar with his Spell Resists. He really doesn't have any Beserker abilities from what I can see.