83 réponses à ce sujet

[Ironman Gaming]

Yeah, Cncrjs should post what difficulty he/she plans to play at.  It could be casual and with a flat 20 attack, 7 damage bonus, you don't have to do anything different to win other than plow through it.  Since they've played 4 times+ maybe with a group, it's probably Hard or Nightmare.  It doesn't invalidate your advice Hadin, but may make not necessary or helpful in terms of surviving if the game has to be played differently.  It looks likes the OP also changed that they will learn ALL Entropy spells now so you won't have enough talents to learn everything on your list anymore...

 

 

According to wikia, hard is the difficulty the game is tuned to be played at for a veteran player (where friendly fire does normal damage), "meaning that at this setting neither the player's party nor the enemies have special bonuses or limitations."  Some differences between how much special abilities is use with another site...Maybe it was changed in later versions.

http://dragonage.wik...tings_(Origins)

 

The difficulty will change what spells/skills/tactics to use since if the enemy never uses Crushing Prison or Overwhelm, you can play the game completely differently.  The big change thing that Nightmare brings is the enemies hit much harder so for nearly all characters, taking on 2-3 at once means you can end up dead rather quickly.  Course, you have many people say Nightmare is too easy as well (due to pulling/kiting/potion use/bug abuses...).

 

http://web.archive.o....php/difficulty

 

Other interesting things I see between Hard/Nightmare:

Setting                            Casual    Normal    Hard    Nightmare    Comment
Rank Damage Scaling    2             7             9         16                 Amount of damage at which rank damage (down)scaling kicks in. Lower means easier.
AI Ability Frequency        1             1             1.25    1.5                Modifier for the AI to prefer the use of high powered abilities.

Reactive Potion Limit      20           12           8          0                  Limit of potions after which the loot system will no longer prefer potions.

 

Less of an issue for mages since they start with herbalism, but you start having to manage every single ingredient/trap/heal pot at the higher difficulty levels since you don't find many (very noticeable if you play the dwarf noble origin on nightmare and don't learn steal).

 

Oh well, the game will be pretty straight forward even at nightmare if you allow yourself to take many other spells outside of Entropy (according to the original poster) so I don't think you need to worry too much really.  Just get a few damage spells (3 or 4) and some crowd control and you're pretty unstoppable.

[DarthGizka]

@ Hadin

 

Killing loads of enemies with nothing more than Arcane Bolt and staff blasts must have taken some doing, kudos. Some parts of the Fade were probably painful with only six orbs to fall back on, especially the ambush with the four wolves and the final fight with four wisps aiding the rage demon...

 

The difference between difficulty levels is nowhere near as big as in other games, except in a very small handful of situations where scripts pile on additional difficulty (e.g. the Harvester fight). For the most part it would be impossible to tell the difficulty level by playing the game. The only readily observable effect is on stun/paralysis duration: on Normal difficulty the player character gets out earlier than normal enemies, on Hard at the same time, and on Nightmare later (110% duration, same as critters). Walking into a trap would elicit a major difference, but that's not something people normally do if they can help it...

 

In the Wilds and at the Tower of Ishal, some white enemies are critter-ranked and some are normal, with serious differences in stats but no visual distinction. Same difference as the wisps in the Fade, where the bonus wisps (82 XP apiece) require quite a bit more work than the 'obligatory' critters (27 XP) that need only a bolt and a staff blast.

 

Most of the wolves in the Wilds are critters but the white wolves in the alpha group aren't. Some of the cloaked genlocks are critters but not all. At the Tower of Ishal there are critter-level hurlocks side by side with normal ones. The only way of telling what's what is taking a nibble, and that can make things a bit tricky without some AoE damage ability for probing whole groups during one's opening move.

[DarthGizka]

How about for survivability? If I'm going against a large group of enemies without any defensive sustainable, what can I use?

 

99% of the time a caster mage can keep the opposition from getting close enough to do damage - including bosses like the RtO ogre - by a combination of crowd control and superior firepower. Fireball, the glyphs and Cone of Cold can be incredibly useful in that regard, and Mind Blast too. Sleep takes the sting out of ambush encounters. If all else fails, Inferno or Death Cloud and then Force Field on self. This means that you can get away with being as squishy as you like, defence and armour rating don't come into play at all.

There are a couple of situations where the game dumps the Warden squat in the middle of a group of hard-hitting melees who may well stun you or knock you down before you get off even a fast spell like Mind Blast. The Slums House in Orzammar comes to mind, where you get the fingerbone token for the Carta hideout. The thugs there can annihilate a squishy in one or two combat rounds. If you get off a spell then you're home free but if you don't then you're toast.

To add insult to injury, even if you manage to turn the tactical situation into something more tenable - e.g. thugs in one room, you in the other, and a repulsion glyph in the doorway - there's a second cutscene that will again deposit your character within arm's reach of the remaining thugs, once the leader has taken some damage. With prefect precognition you can arrange for everyone except the leader to be dead when that happens, or at least paralysed. Otherwise it can be incredibly annoying.

Armour rating, defence and dodge can take some of the pain out of that encounter. Rock Armour combined with Wade's superior plate or Evon's does the trick nicely, even without the +15 armour from Shimmering Shield. There are two or three situations in the game that are similar, but with the difference that even a squishy can handle them with the simple expedient of pre-casting a glyph or two.

With only one single encounter in the whole game - and a minor one at that - calling for melee-hardening of the Warden, total squishiness is a perfectly viable option. My first solo mage didn't even notice how difficult the fingerbone token encounter could be since she was lucky enough not to get knocked on her ass. My current mage went through there several times because of some research I'm doing, and about half the time she succeeded on the first try.

[Tremere]

Am I the only one who finds it sad yet funny that everyone jumped straight for the DPS primal spells when they saw solo yet didn't read the rest of the topic title let alone post?

 

The guy wanted a viable Solo Blood Mage Entropy Specialist build. As I am not a character creator wizard I won't try to brew one but that build should have more then enough CC to be alright.

*smh & laughing* You are so "right on point" about this! Suffice it to say that you aren't the only one who noticed this.

[Ironman Gaming]

Probably because it's not really viable without any damage spells since your staff and Arcane Bolt can only do so much.  This is sorta like if you say you want to be a mage and never use spells, solo/nightmare, etc...sorta not really that fun playing that way and most would say it's impossible to finish the game that way.

 

I'd say if you want to be an "Entropy" mage and get the "Hexer" achievement (all spells), that'll give you a few more spell slots to play with (probably 15 actually).  Just depends when you want to get them or force yourself to only use entropy spells early on (you may find new strategies though)...

 

 

EDIT BELOW:

Here's a couple videos using ONLY Entropy spells...The problem, as stated before is multiple enemies, you don't have enough crowd control to not get swarmed.  If you're ok with pulling and kiting, then it'll work of course, but it's not something I consider fun.  This is because sleep doesn't always work on everyone and even if it did, without Fireball (which has 15 seconds cooldown, knockdown effect and does good damage), you can't finish mobs fast enough...This fight actually took more reloads than the ogre fight...which took a couple reloads to have sleep hit initially.

 

Against the ogre, it's very similar to my old videos...so that's not as big of a problem.  Difference is if you get grabbed, you will die and it's another reload (or restarting for noreload players)...

 

4 Darkspawn fight is not optimal and sloppy due to just wanting to get something shown.

Modifié par Ironman Gaming, 06 juillet 2014 - 07:10 .

[Ironman Gaming]

@Ironman Gaming   Thank you for your videos and help. I wanted to try my favorite school of magic only to solo on nightmare but I doubt its possible due to some enemies being immune to spirit damage and entropy doesn't kill enemies quick enough. Without any sustainable to somewhat protect myself I'll die a lot result in multiple reloads, kiting, and frustration. Also I wanted it to be solely entropy spell use without the bombs. Is it even possible to solo nightmare with just one school of magic that isn't primal?

 

Well, you'd be forced to pick more than just Entropy and BM spells anyways since that only totals 20 and you can have up to 36 spells I believe in DA:O with DLC.  It just depends on how much you want to depend on the other spells to play vs. going with the tried and proven Primal spells.  I think if you went with some spirit spells, it'd be doable since the bomb spells are physical damage and the main problem with the entropy line is gone since you can use forcefield to protect yourself from swarms while the 2 bomb spells work when you have 3 or 4 baddies.  Forcefield is also powerful since it gives you another 20 seconds to wait for your cooldown times (to avoid kiting) and it's very reliable and is very fast to cast.

 

With forcefield alone, you can now aggro everyone and sit in your death cloud spell with the 2 walking bomb spells going and this is actually an easy way to play I think.  Against non spell immune bosses, I think the spell combos Nightmare and Entropic Death will make it very easy against them as well...Pile on the hexes and you can hit for probably 1000+ which sounds like fun!

 

The best thing with this build is that you can play around and learn/use spells that most people don't have time for since near everyone learns fireball and cone of cold which uses up a lot of early spell slots.

 

Tough fights will be against templars since your forcefield will be dispelled...

 

I may give this more of a go since I've never used Entropic Death before myself...

In the early game, sleep and horror will kill at least 1 mob.

[Mike3207]

Reaper's Vestment/Vestment of the Seer
Spellward/High Regard of House Dace
Lifegiver
Ring of Ages/Dwarven Ring
Helm of Honnleath

You get stat bonuses for picking specializations. You'll miss out on the bonuses if you don't pick a specialization.

[Ironman Gaming]

Someone else with more recent experience in the later game can chime in, but I don't know if anyone is completely immune to spells off the top of my head...Also, if you use walking bomb (and there is debate whether that should be a nature or spirit damage spell)...it would work against golems if you disable the Core Rules Fixpack for that spell (I did since it's a spirit spell in DA2 and is smack in the spirit tree)...A lot of things are immune or to nature.

 

http://dragonage.wik...m/wiki/Immunity

http://dragonage.wik...ances_(Origins)

 

I'm actually giving this a go myself and am testing/deciding what spells to get first...As powerful as walking bomb is, it's sometimes a danger to use since if you're being arrowed to death, once the forcefield runs out, you could be in a world of hurt.  As I am trying noReload again (no wonder I haven't finished the game yet), it's important to have a consistent way to win fights against multiple mobs.  Positioning would be key and when/if you want to forcefield.

 

Virulent Walking Bomb or Sleep/Horror Combo or Death Cloud/Death Hex combo first?  As usual, the game will get a ton easier after you get to lvl 15 or so, but before then, you have random Darkspawn ambushes on the world map, instant ambushes like outside the tower, etc...

 

The paralyze line is lower on the list for me since it doesn't do damage...

[Mike3207]

I think most foes will have more elemental resistance than spell resistance, and that foes will be more likely to resist spells on the harder difficulty levels. I usually don't have as much issues with enemies resisting spells on Normal, unless I run into one of those mages that has Spell Shield.

Unfortunately for you, the best way to handle foes with high magic resistance-utilizing the specializations you have rejected. The shapeshifter special abilities ignore spell resistance, and the Arcane warrior is able to equip weapons that will directly attack magic resistant foes. The road gets a lot tougher if you don't have access to the abilities of either of those specializations.

One solution might be for a mage without access to either of those specs-make more use of poisons/traps.I usually don't use either of those, but I could see where they would be useful to a mage who didn't have access to the melee specializations.

[Blazomancer]

Don't seem to recall anybody having spell immunity, only the occasional mage using Spell Shield. Paralysis Explosion can be an effective counter for Spell Shield.

[DarthGizka]

Passive Combat Magic can be extremely useful for a soloing mage - I wouldn't sacrifice that option for the measly specialisation bonusses of BM and SH. Blood Wound rocks, and later in the game it should be pretty affordable. This makes BM a fair bet. But SH is totally useless for soloing, except maybe on a no-pots run.

 

My mages would probably faint at the prospect of having to make do without Mind Blast, Force Field and at least one bomb spell. My Ajira is miffed that she still has only one bomb spell at level 16 while Fiona got her second in Lothering already, but such is the price of getting Sleep early... Mind Blast and Force Field may be expendable for the first dozen levels or so if Cone of Cold is available, but then things get increasingly difficult. Mind Blast and Crushing Prison are pretty much necessary for dealing with the increased spell resistance in Orzammar and the high incidence of dangerous elites (especially emissaries). Bombs and Force Field are the aces up your sleeve in all boss fights.

 

Going without Spirit spells might be easier than going without the glyphs, but it's bound to be tough.

[DarthGizka]

Don't seem to recall anybody having spell immunity, only the occasional mage using Spell Shield. Paralysis Explosion can be an effective counter for Spell Shield.

 

The highest spell resistance I remember is 40%, for the Arcane Horror in the Circle Tower, followed by Desire Demons with 30%. Gaxkang is somewhere in between (only 20% base vs. 30% base for real Arcane Horrors). The bossy Arcane Horror in the werewolf lair may well beat them all by a small margin but that doesn't matter because it always dies meekly without making a fuss.

 

Dwarves and ogres have 10% base spell resistance, which puts their ranked variants at 20% and higher. The upshot is that spell resistance will not make casting totally infeasible but it is bound to put a monkey wrench into any strategy that depends on spell chains (e.g. Sleep plus hex plus Horror). And it gives the dice a good chance to really SNAFU things. Even a lowly grunt can resist two, three or four spells in a row if the dice are in a spiteful mood, and for a squishy that can easily spell doom.

The Rain of Destruction spells work reliably even in the face of spell resistance, because each damage tick (or series of three to four ticks, in the case of Inferno) must be resisted separately. Inferno and Tempest are especially effective against Spell Shield; Tempest because it drains additional mana when it hits, Inferno because it does twice as much damage as the others and hence drains the shield twice as fast. Not to forget that 30% fire damage amplification can be achieved even on the tightest of budgets, as soon as free travelling is possible.

Entropic Death is special in that spell resistance affects it only in a linear way, not squared or worse as for other combos. If the Death Hex hits (linear dependence on spell resistance) then success is pretty much guaranteed, since one of the Death Cloud ticks is bound to breach spell resistance sooner or later.

[Elhanan]

Uncertain if this works well or not, but try placing AoE spells near such opponents, and not directly on them. Seemingly the AoE will bypass SR of some spells. Or perhaps I was lucky....

[DarthGizka]

Inferno and Tempest are especially effective against Spell Shield; Tempest because it drains additional mana when it hits, Inferno because it does twice as much damage as the others and hence drains the shield twice as fast. Not to forget that 30% fire damage amplification can be achieved even on the tightest of budgets, as soon as free travelling is possible.

I blooped here. It is Mana Shield (Flying Swarm form) where the drain depends on the amount of absorbed damage; for Spell Shield the drain only depends on the casting cost of the absorbed spell. Mea culpa.

That makes Blizzard a slightly better drainer than Death Cloud (drain 10+70 vs. 10+50). Tempest drains the same as Death Cloud if absorbed but if it hits then it drains as much mana as it does damage. That makes it marginally better than Death Cloud but it would require spellpower and damage amplification of Awakening proportions to beat Blizzard. Inferno has the same drain per 'attack' as Blizzard but it does only half as many attacks (of three to four damage ticks each), so it is the least effective of the four as regards cost-based mana drain.

Storm of the Century is probably better than all four of them combined...

[Ironman Gaming]

I'm thinking about only using the entropy without the spirit school period on nightmare. Spec into SH/BM for bonus but no points into any of them and see how far I can go without getting killed.

Think its possible?

 

I suppose if you are willing to avoid some fights possibly later or kite and run around till a damage spell recharges, most anything is possible to beat at the lower levels.  Even with only learning Arcane Bolt.  We already know Gazarath can be kited easily as well as the Ogre.  All the other minor darkspawns can be pulled.  Again, if you are willing to run around endlessly, you can definitely pick them off one on one or one on two.  But if we think of some of the really early tough battles such as the Highwaymen right at Lothering (IMO, definitely one of the very tough early battles solo).  4 decently tough mobs with multiple ways to stun you.  Your sleep spell just isn't reliable as shown in my video and it'd "probably" be a show stopper...

 

You might want to just give it a whirl though since the Origin story in the tower might be hard already with only Entropy spells...

 

The main problem I see again is lack of fast damage spells.  You only have:

1) Arcane Bolt

2) Drain Life

 

Later:

3) Sleep + Horror combo (good for 1 mob)

4) Curse of Mortality (very slow damage)

5) Waking Nightmare (sorta unreliable)

6) Death Cloud (you don't have a way to keep them in the cloud as you can test with the Ogre)...The problem with sleep is once you damage them, they wake up.

 

When you have 2 or 3 mobs at once with 100+ hp each, you need to figure out a way to deal 300 hps of damage and Arcane Bolt and Drain Life only goes so far.  The 1 boss is actually not as bad since sleep + horror and waking nightmare can buy you a lot of time.

 

Right now, I'm trying a build with all Entropy and some Spirit spells...Avoiding Primal and Creation...

The Glyphs are powerful since Paralysis Explosion is very reliable and all the spells in the line are very good.  You can also put 2 paralyze glyphs before they expire and repulsion alone is good for keeping mobs away from you.  You can also use that to trap them in a room and warding allows you to get your defense very high quickly (+30)...add in Arcane Shield, etc...

 

As I mentioned before, even if you only wanted Entropy Spells, that's only 16 so you'd have a lot of left over spells available...I may try to max out both the Entropy/Spirit line since that's 32 spells and can get both achievement (even though the Anti-Magic line is mostly crap).  I do love Spell Shield...Thinking more, at least I can probably dispell Curse of Mortality on myself...

[dainbramage]

I'd say there's a reason that a lot of people suggest not going full entropy - namely it's overspecialized yet still fairly weak at that specialization.

 

By and large, the single target spells suck. No-one is interested in reducing a single enemy's attack and defence by 5 (seriously, disorient?) while the harder disables still don't last long enough to be of much use against (elite) bosses. Meanwhile stuff like missing or being unable to heal are pretty worthless against monsters, despite being debilitating when used on the player. But then the aoes aren't that much better. Paralysis explosion is superior to mass paralysis in every way. Miasma is situational at best, but even then my melee arcane warriors don't use it, so... Death cloud is half as strong as inferno while having no secondary effects, making it significantly weaker than its primal counterparts (and they're not even that great).

 

That leaves waking nightmare as the "good" line, which while good I still wouldn't consider core on any mage. But with your only damage coming from one low damage aoe dot and a pair of single-target nukes which are both spell combos, you won't be killing anything before your disables wear off.

 

Most of this could probably be solved by virulent walking bomb. But on a solo skipping fireball (and flame blast on its way) is just silly, IMO, as is skipping the glyphs (which, for 3 spell points, provide better lockdown than the entire entropy tree). And the other primal cone spells also have a lot going for them.

[DarthGizka]

About time you showed up, we'd almost given you up for dead...

 

I guess the whole thing boils down to this: soloing mages don't really have the luxury to pick spells based on the mood projected by lore fluff pieces or on how well they complement their attire, unless they're very patient, fond of pulling/kiting and have good suppliers for consumables.

I wonder what happened to Mr "I doan need no steenkin damage spells"... He was last heard of heading into the Wilds, and it would be interesting to know how long it took. Lothering has a few interesting situations that could prove challenging for a purist Entropy build.

[Ironman Gaming]

I'd say there's a reason that a lot of people suggest not going full entropy - namely it's overspecialized yet still fairly weak at that specialization.

 

By and large, the single target spells suck. No-one is interested in reducing a single enemy's attack and defence by 5 (seriously, disorient?) while the harder disables still don't last long enough to be of much use against (elite) bosses. Meanwhile stuff like missing or being unable to heal are pretty worthless against monsters, despite being debilitating when used on the player. But then the aoes aren't that much better. Paralysis explosion is superior to mass paralysis in every way. Miasma is situational at best, but even then my melee arcane warriors don't use it, so... Death cloud is half as strong as inferno while having no secondary effects, making it significantly weaker than its primal counterparts (and they're not even that great).

 

That leaves waking nightmare as the "good" line, which while good I still wouldn't consider core on any mage. But with your only damage coming from one low damage aoe dot and a pair of single-target nukes which are both spell combos, you won't be killing anything before your disables wear off.

 

Most of this could probably be solved by virulent walking bomb. But on a solo skipping fireball (and flame blast on its way) is just silly, IMO, as is skipping the glyphs (which, for 3 spell points, provide better lockdown than the entire entropy tree). And the other primal cone spells also have a lot going for them.

 

Yup yup and yup...

 

I think anytime you do a roleplay or specialized build that isn't ideally optimized, you're going to have some issues in general (which is fine since it allows you to try other spells or learn new tactics).  As many people state, a pure Entropy build "probably" won't be able to complete the game or it'll simply be not fun and take too long (too much running around, reloads, massive kiting, potion spamming, etc).

 

Fireball, with it's reliable knockdown effect, fast cooldown-15secs (I typically get 2 off in a fight before everyone is dead) and high damage against Darkspawn (-15% resistance) and Undead (-25% resistance) makes it my typical 1st launch spell.  After fireball hits, you typically can paralysis explode or inferno most any group of mobs...since you have a lot of time...

 

That said, this leads to everyone and oneself playing the game the same way which is why we're here...You take out two or three of the most powerful spells in the game (Glyph line, fireball, cone of cold) and your playthrough and tactics is guarenteed to be different which is what we're (some of us) are trying to achieve.  Since you've yourself finished the game 4 times?  (That's 4 more than me!), it's understandable that we'd want to try something different.

 

There are some videos of someone avoiding all Primal spells which would be a fun playthrough probably as this thread is similar...As Death Cloud is the only non-primal area affect, it's going to be my own go-to-spell...just debating between when to get Sleep+Horror line vs. playing with Death Hex/Death Cloud (which I've never tried and does more damage)

[DarthGizka]

@  Ironman Gaming

 

Good point. Fireballing and cone-bombing are probably the most prevalent early fighting styles; certainly the easiest and - in the case of Fireballing - probably also the fastest. But even so people can go down different routes starting with the Wilds; I was particularly impressed by how you tamed the Ishal ogre. And who's to say that there aren't other interesting gambits besides the two classics.

 

That's why we need to go out and slay things, and post noteworthy exploits in the video thread as inspiration for others.

 

One drawback of the whole Sleep business is the insanely long cooldown (three times as long as the repulsion glyph).