This will be long, so just realize that. I'm here because once again, the game crashed. Right after I did something I'd been trying to do for a while. And now I'll have to do it again. This annoys me.
I hated DA2 and was one of the big criticizers of it on this forum. I really, really like most of this game so far. I mean to say that I don't consider myself someone who just dislikes new/different things. Yes, it's not DA:O and that upsets me greatly, but considered on its own merits this could be a great game. Right now, it's not at all a great game. It's an okay game because, despite glaring combat and other issues, it is saved by the enormity and scale of what it provides. I still wouldn't recommend it to people, for example, but I would consider recommending it if certain fixes were made.
There are a few essential problems. They include combat balancing, optimization, and bugs. This will deal with combat. If anyone cares about this thread even slightly and somehow people want me to talk about the PC specific issues or bugs, I'll do that later.
1a) Combat imbalance basically boils down to this: it's a game which heavily rewards a party of 3 ranged characters and 1 tank. DPS melee characters need guard, and those who don't have access to it will die very quickly. Also, Rogues in melee are absolutely broken, probably because they can't get guard, and because they rely on flanking to do enough damage to make them worth having. Flanking is far too difficult in a game which has enemies moving around the map wildly, and in which threat literally cannot be generated on certain enemies (taunt immunity is a scourge which must be removed immediately because it makes the bad tanking situation that much harder. like on rage demons, for example). This means that an enemy will jump to nearby characters who do too much damage. Rage demons kill rogues and mages constantly.
The way that melee needs guard to work, mages need barriers. Why do I bring this up? This whole "needing" thing defeats the entire purpose of removing the need for healing spells. Why was this design decision made? Have the characters be able to heal themselves somehow if you want to remove healing. Guard works for warriors, and barrier could be in the game too, but each character class should be able to heal itself. And rogue should have an equivalent of guard/barrier. I suggest something called "evade" which grows as you don't get hit and is consumed when you are hit. Without something like this, the melee rogues are unplayable. I've tried to for the past 25 hours now, and it just doesn't work at higher levels.
And back on taunt immunity, or threat in general, warriors need some better way to generate threat (and guard for that matter, but that's a different issue). Why do my threats, even those that go through, seem to have no lasting impact? Particularly in the quest to light the veilfires for the swamp place with all the undead. There are 2 bosses on each spawn, I assume level-scaled, and both of them just jump around and attack whoever. This is regardless of how much I consistently spam the threat-generating skills like war cry and so on. To alleviate this problem, the range of War Cry and other threat generators needs to increase by three times what it currently is. That is not an exaggeration. The enemies move around too much and start out too far apart in many cases for tanking to be effective, despite the absolute need for tanking in this game.
Enemies that you tank don't stay still, so combat placement is kind of useless. I don't need enemies to wait to be hit and stand in one place, but the amount they currently move is far too much. It makes melee rogue impossible to flank with. There's a million skill-specific problems too, mostly with melee rogues, but that's covered in a different post I made more comprehensively.
1b) The tactical camera cannot be the only way to check enemy levels, and that's far from the only problem related to the tac cam. This is really a bad design decision when levels are so vital to the combat. Likewise, skills queue'd in the tactical camera should rarely miss. You shouldn't whiff on a melee rogue skill one foot away from the guy you're supposed to hit with it. Skills begin just early enough to barely miss 100% of the time for certain skills. It's unacceptable that this happens.
The orders you give in this mode are worth nothing. The characters simply don't keep to them. They attack my Inquisitor's target instead of the one I, the player, choose for them. They listen to the avatar I control more than to me directly. I've tried to fix this but I can't figure out how to without disabling the AI almost entirely. I want some AI input but the kind that DA:O had, where I have some semblance of control. Why the DA:O system of checklist AI was scrapped boggles my mind still. The dullards who couldn't do anything with it still got a good AI based on the archetypes provided by the game itself in that drop down menu.
1c) The AI outside of Tactical Mode is atrocious. It doesn't seem to understand the basic idea that ranged characters are called ranged characters because they need to stay out of melee range. I've had to disable multiple skills because of that. I've also disabled that warrior skill where the guy charges and just keeps on running for what seems like forever. This skill is inane. What is the point of having the guy run so far? Why are you running Cassandra? Stop, Blackwall, the battle is over here. Now all these guys decided to attack my other characters, thus ruining the impact of the tank entirely. Melee rogues will never go for flanks, War Cry will be used way too soon (before the enemies are around you), and a whole bunch of other issues exist that simply are head-scratching. Similarly, auto-level makes some odd choices. I auto-level'd because I assumed I didn't understand the game well enough at one point, when in reality the problem was the game itself.
1d) Regardless of 8 or 12, there are still not enough potions in the absence of healing spells. I don't want to keep going back to camp after particularly tough fights. There are also times when fights have required me to use all potions. I cannot tell if this was by design, or if that means I'm too weak and should leave. I wish I knew, it would help me to think about re-specs if I need them. I play on hard difficulty, so that's something to consider also. There is simply no gauging my strength in combat. But back on potions, no arbitrary number like 8 or 12 or 20 would be right. Make barriers last longer, make guard easier to get, and create an equivalent for rogues. Otherwise, this game is just jumping back and forth from camp to hard fight and back to camp.
1e) Enemy types can occasionally feel exploitative. They feel hard because they do things they shouldn't be able to do. Mage fights feel hard because they just zip all over the map, some with seemingly infinite barrier. It makes it impossible for melee dps to keep up, once again reinforcing the ranged dps bias this design has led to. The larger bosses which have 2h weapons and do AoE damage will once again ruin melee dps because even in flanking position you can be killed. Combat animations on some enemies, such as bears, are not clear that they do damage to party members directly behind them. This is really ridiculous. These large enemies are vastly overpowered and yet again reinforce ranged dps dominance.
1f) The talk of strategy and choke points is a lie for way more than half the game's content. These areas are, for the most part, wide open. Kiting is near impossible because controls aren't precise enough; kiting would be great if such a method were feasible.
1g) We should be shown more in-depth explanations of guard/barrier, as well as skills involving blocking a strike (such as parry for melee rogue or the block and strike skill for 2h warriors) because these are not common skills for Dragon Age. A "practice arena" for timing based skills somewhere in Haven and Skyhold would be appreciated.
1h) Having recently done the "leveling event," I can safely say that 8 is not enough skill slots, and I summarily reject the notion that it makes the game more tactical. The game is not that tactical, even in tactical mode, because it refuses your orders. Limiting skills limits your choice, and choices are what allow tactics. 8 skills is a retroactive attempt at balancing something that is inherently imbalanced, as established above. A game that did this, and what this design choice was likely based on (most of the game seems to have been based on) was Guild Wars 1. GW was a game where you'd have 8 skills, but the difference was that you controlled one person and each skill was better balanced for that system. There were distinct strengths and weaknesses, versus just losing something you're forced to put a point in if you want the passive after it. That kind of is a bummer to see. Even 10 skills would be good. The other issue is the number of skills per full spec. It means the lower the number of skills for a lower tier spec, the better it is in that it will have more passives and more high tier skill slots available. And more focus skill slots available. Specs become more valuable the more passives they have, and that's a weird balance issue once again.
That's about it for now. PC specific issues include things like the tooltips being lackluster and not giving info, the UI not providing enough info, there not being enough numbers in the game for me to understand the effects certain things have, the crashes that I've had with the game, the performance instability and weird graphics issues, the bugged skills not working a lot of the time, the repeated dialog on PC, etc.
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