Spamming barrier and heavily relying on it and generating guard is not any smarter than potion spam.
Spamming barrier and heavily relying on it and generating guard is not any smarter than potion spam.
No it isn't. You can't spam Barrier with it's cooldown being what it is.
You know how you mitigate damage without relying on spamming anything? Be smart, plan ahead, and use a tank.
No, if they want a consistent lore, they have to explain such thing that has a big impact in their game like guard which didn't exist in previous games.
Why on earth would guard be part of the lore? It is just a warriors ability to take hits (on shields, parrying, etc) without actually taking damage (injuries), it isn't some strange new thing that actually exists.
By your logic you can't spam health potions in DA2 "with its cooldown being what it is".No it isn't. You can't spam Barrier with it's cooldown being what it is.
By your logic you can't spam health potions in DA2 "with its cooldown being what it is".
Spamming is only an option if the cooldown is excessively short or non-existent.
You know how you mitigate damage without relying on spamming anything? Be smart, plan ahead, and use a tank.
By your logic you can't spam health potions in DA2 "with its cooldown being what it is".
Don't recall ever saying you could, sir
And the effect of barrier lasts a while. Meaning if the barrier falls and the cooldown is up. It is spammable.. and if your have 4 mages.. then its no different than the multiple level of potions in DAO to spam.
Pretty much. I'm not against a new health system but calling it better or smarter than the previous one is funny.And the effect of barrier lasts a while. Meaning if the barrier falls and the cooldown is up. It is spammable.. and if your have 4 mages.. then its no different than the multiple level of potions in DAO to spam.
Isn't there a healing spell that relies on focus?
And the effect of barrier lasts a while.
If it isn't broken before then. It doesn't just stay up for it's whole duration if enemies are hitting it.
Meaning if the barrier falls and the cooldown is up. It is spammable..
Only the first time
and if your have 4 mages.. then its no different than the multiple level of potions in DAO to spam.
except it is different. In this case, your mages are spending most of their time putting up barriers instead of actually doing damage. It would boring, tedius, and pointless when you could just as easily bring Cassandra along to soak up damage with guard. At this point, you're coming up with the least efficient ways to play just to make spamming barrier viable.
Pretty much. I'm not against a new health system but calling it better or smarter than the previous one is funny.
Only if you don't actually think about it.
Isn't there a healing spell that relies on focus?
Yes. it's in the Knight Enchanter tree
Supposedly they got rid of heal spells to open up party diversity or, at least, that was one of the major reasons. That doesn't look like it will be the case in practice, though. I wonder if they (Bware) have gone through all their videos/streams so far and noticed how much they speak to the necessity of the Barrier spell in ~every single one of them~. So, nothing's really changed, except now you're mitigating dmg instead of healing it. Should have just let us do both and pleased everyone involved but, for whatever reason, they didn't feel that necessary.
Other classes have the ability to create barriers as well (such as Guard for warriors) but the big difference is that those are more for self-sufficiency. From what they've shown so far, Mages are the only one that can protect the entire team, and their Barriers are what was shown keeping everyone alive even with Guard and such, which didn't seem to hold up very long at all; so many times in the Twitch streams, the boss swings his weapon once and all of Cassandra's Guard + half her health disappears instantly. What. Ever.
Yeah. For a game with no healing, everything hits WAY too hard. It's like they completely forgot that they removed healing and therefore needed to significantly reduce mob damage, especially from bosses and such.
Combat still seems to be designed around tank and spank, so in reality nothing has changed. Except they now call overhealing shield or barrier. But I was using barriers to heal instead of healing spells on my disc priest throughout all the 5 man instances in WotLK, So nothing is really new, except for making players waste their time by backtracking and then retracing their steps for no perceivable benefit to the player. Actually it's kinda ridiculous when you really think about it. Why are only some random spots on the map "campsites"? Shouldn't you be the one who designates where the party is going to set up camp?
And effects that are clearly magical in nature don't come from mages using magic but from consumeables that clearly couldn't possibly produce the magical effects that were assigned to them. If the effect is going to be magical (basically all buffs and debuffs and other magical effects) then the source has to be a mage otherwise your gameplay and gameworld don't mesh.
From everything I've seen, there's a huge disconnect between the game mechanics and the game world.
If you don't want to spam barrier all the time, then do the same as if you didn't want to spam healing potions all the time, as in DAO/DA2: play better and more strategically.
In DA:O this translated to bringing 3 mages and permanently paralysis locking everything. I'm not sure if that counts more as playing strategically or breaking the game to get around the overtuned mobs.
I'll let you know if I spam it when the game comes out. I think this was discussed in some length in the healing spell thread.
How it was like the movie Signs where in reality nothing actually changed between the time before his wife died and the time after the aliens left Earth except that his wife was dead?
I find this quite amusing. 'We could play the other games without a support mage, but we can't play this one!' Before the game is even out.
They were avoiding a support mage by using the bottled version of a support mage, ie potions.
Le sigh.
From what I've seen, no. Using Barrier is handy and helpful, but moving around the battlefield, sensible positioning, Guard, Stealth, etc. are now all just as viable builds for avoiding damage. Especially Stealth which I basically never gave any rogues before because it meant less DPS - and if they were low on health then that was what healspam was for.
Moreover, Barrier positioning will likely make it quite hard to spam. While it's easy to drop a Barrier over the whole party at the start of combat due to close grouping at first, as the close combat and ranged characters split up and you manoeuvre your party into different positions, it might become quite difficult to find the optimal 'barrier spot' to cover the majority of the party, forcing you to think before you barrier.
On TOP of that, a number of characters may have various barrier buffing offensive passives on their mages that you may want to take advantage of.
While I think Barrier will be important, I don't worry about spamming it. I'll probably have one person in my party with it, cause it looks handy and I love cheese, but I can envisage perfectly viable builds without it.
Yeah. For a game with no healing, everything hits WAY too hard. It's like they completely forgot that they removed healing and therefore needed to significantly reduce mob damage, especially from bosses and such.
Combat still seems to be designed around tank and spank, so in reality nothing has changed. Except they now call overhealing shield or barrier. But I was using barriers to heal instead of healing spells on my disc priest throughout all the 5 man instances in WotLK, So nothing is really new, except for making players waste their time by backtracking and then retracing their steps for no perceivable benefit to the player. Actually it's kinda ridiculous when you really think about it. Why are only some random spots on the map "campsites"? Shouldn't you be the one who designates where the party is going to set up camp?
And effects that are clearly magical in nature don't come from mages using magic but from consumeables that clearly couldn't possibly produce the magical effects that were assigned to them. If the effect is going to be magical (basically all buffs and debuffs and other magical effects) then the source has to be a mage otherwise your gameplay and gameworld don't mesh.
From everything I've seen, there's a huge disconnect between the game mechanics and the game world.
Origins had some potions that gave X resistance towards Y damage so there is a precedent in the gamplay of the series.
It's not as if they're pulling "items that do magic" out of thin air.
Supposedly they got rid of heal spells to open up party diversity or, at least, that was one of the major reasons. That doesn't look like it will be the case in practice, though. I wonder if they (Bware) have gone through all their videos/streams so far and noticed how much they speak to the necessity of the Barrier spell in ~every single one of them~. So, nothing's really changed, except now you're mitigating dmg instead of healing it. Should have just let us do both and pleased everyone involved but, for whatever reason, they didn't feel that necessary.
Other classes have the ability to create barriers as well (such as Guard for warriors) but the big difference is that those are more for self-sufficiency. From what they've shown so far, Mages are the only one that can protect the entire team, and their Barriers are what was shown keeping everyone alive even with Guard and such, which didn't seem to hold up very long at all; so many times in the Twitch streams, the boss swings his weapon once and all of Cassandra's Guard + half her health disappears instantly. What. Ever.
I'd be interested to see the dev quote where they stated [the bold bit] was a major reason for the change.
All I've seen devs stating is that healing was removed to make combat balancing more reliable, to remove elements of adversary tactics that they didn't like inflicting on the players - excessive use of stuns, cc's and alpha strikes - and to make combat more meaningful by forcing you to consider what your state will be after the fight rather than knowing you only had to get through it and your health would regen to full, rendering the fight you just undertook to be pretty meaningless.
Far as I know - and I've been involved in this discussion a lot - party diversity is a parallel discussion players have had as a result of the change - I've seen nothing official stating this was ever an objective.
As for Guard I disagree, I've seen Guard lasting quite a long time in general fights, and I believe it persists if it isn't used unlike Barrier that erodes over time regardless. Bosses hit harder - thats why they are bosses - but if you are aren't specced into barrier you are specced elsewhere meaning you can bring alternative CC to the table or hit the dude harder. If you are not using a mage at all, bounce taunts off him to tag team between your warriors or use your rogues evade and stealth abilities to avoid being hit at together.
If you choose to ignore Barrier you will have options. Learning what they are and how to modify your playstyle to adjust to them is part of the game.
Yeah. For a game with no healing, everything hits WAY too hard. It's like they completely forgot that they removed healing and therefore needed to significantly reduce mob damage, especially from bosses and such.
Combat still seems to be designed around tank and spank, so in reality nothing has changed. Except they now call overhealing shield or barrier. But I was using barriers to heal instead of healing spells on my disc priest throughout all the 5 man instances in WotLK, So nothing is really new, except for making players waste their time by backtracking and then retracing their steps for no perceivable benefit to the player. Actually it's kinda ridiculous when you really think about it. Why are only some random spots on the map "campsites"? Shouldn't you be the one who designates where the party is going to set up camp?
And effects that are clearly magical in nature don't come from mages using magic but from consumeables that clearly couldn't possibly produce the magical effects that were assigned to them. If the effect is going to be magical (basically all buffs and debuffs and other magical effects) then the source has to be a mage otherwise your gameplay and gameworld don't mesh.
From everything I've seen, there's a huge disconnect between the game mechanics and the game world.
You know, for so much ranting, you said nothing of value. It was basically paragraphs of "ugh, you mean we have to come up with brand new cheap tactics that make the game way too easy, instead of using all the old cheap tactics that make the game way to easy?"
Yeah, it's interesting how bioware gonna explain "guard" and "health grenades".
We won't get one, its a gameplay abstraction like everything else in the combat system, but I'm not really sure why we need one?
A warrior taunts an enemy and having successfully drawn their attention is better prepared to 'guard' against those attacks that they know are imminent. The attacker has to hit them longer before breaking through their 'guard'
Most folks here seem accept that healing potions are totally lore consistent. Some clever clogs has now found away to turn the liquid into an air dispersed gas, just like the poison grenades we've always had in the game.
Not really sure why these are such incongruous concepts, just because they are new.
I'd be interested to see the dev quote where they stated [the bold bit] was a major reason for the change.
All I've seen devs stating is that healing was removed to make combat balancing more reliable, to remove elements of adversary tactics that they didn't like inflicting on the players - excessive use of stuns, cc's and alpha strikes - and to make combat more meaningful by forcing you to consider what your state will be after the fight rather than knowing you only had to get through it and your health would regen to full, rendering the fight you just undertook to be pretty meaningless.
Far as I know - and I've been involved in this discussion a lot - party diversity is a parallel discussion players have had as a result of the change - I've seen nothing official stating this was ever an objective.
As for Guard I disagree, I've seen Guard lasting quite a long time in general fights, and I believe it persists if it isn't used unlike Barrier that erodes over time regardless. Bosses hit harder - thats why they are bosses - but if you are aren't specced into barrier you are specced elsewhere meaning you can bring alternative CC to the table or hit the dude harder. If you are not using a mage at all, bounce taunts off him to tag team between your warriors or use your rogues evade and stealth abilities to avoid being hit at together.
If you choose to ignore Barrier you will have options. Learning what they are and how to modify your playstyle to adjust to them is part of the game.
one problem with that reasoning.. it's based on the idea that temp hp doesn't exist when in fact it does. they remove the basic spam heal spell to get rid of "infinite hp" then added a bunch of way to add hp over your normal health bar so you have infinite hp anyway... can you say epic fail.
usually on Dragon age I'll take 1 mage as healer\team buff caster and set his tactic to do the "boring" casting\healing stuff.
one problem with that reasoning.. it's based on the idea that temp hp doesn't exist when in fact it does. they remove the basic spam heal spell to get rid of "infinite hp" then added a bunch of way to add hp over your normal health bar so you have infinite hp anyway... can you say epic fail.
No it isn't at all, but I invite you to find the gameplay video where the party engaged in more than 1 fight didn't take any damage at all. 
Its based on the idea that when you leave camp you have 4 party members whose HP pool is somewhere between the health pool for 4 mages and the health pool for 4 warriors plus 8 to 12 potions. That is a finite amount of health.
Barrier, Guard, Stealth CC are Evasion are tools available to you to manage how quickly that finite health pool gets eroded. Depending on how well you play and what fights you choose to engage in, that could be 10 minutes, that could be an hour, but it will get eroded. This is in direct contrast to the old system where as long as one party member survived the fight with 1% health, the entire parties health pool went back to up to full after every single fight.
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