6 réponses à ce sujet

[swk3000]

I'm trying to put together a decent team, but I'd like some advice. Here are my thoughts and issues with each:

Tank - I'm going to use Blackwall, since he can become a Champion. I don't forsee too many problems at that point. My main concern is the early game: with limited skill points and no Specialization, I'm not sure how to build him to make him an effective Tank. What should I beeline for in the early game, and what can be left for later? What abilities should be Preferred?

Rogue - I'm thinking of having my Rogue as an archer. When I can become a Knight Enchanter, I don't see this being a problem, but I'm concerned that running a party with three ranged characters might make things harder than needed. Is this the case, or can I run an Archer with no problems?

Mage - I'm thinking Vivian so the party can have more powerful barriers that decay more slowly no matter who casts them. For Vivian, however, I plan to disable Spirit Blade; I want hwr as a ranged mage, while I work melee. I plan to have her dabble in all 3 elemental trees after that, so she'll be able to hit any elemental weakness. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I will go myself.

That's what I've got. Any input would be appreciated.

[Lerrasien]

Champion is okay for tanking, but in my opinion the focus skill on the Templar (Cassandra) is much more helpful with it generating guard and stamina/mana as well as damage reduction to the entire team which usually helps more because honestly without effective tactic options like we had in origins and 2, the tank's ability to hold aggro is almost 0. You can rush the 2 aggro skills at the top of the Vanguard line (Challenge[single] and War Cry[pbaoe]) which will also be the main Guard buildup for your tank so long as they are sword/shield, which I recommend because honestly, the 2h is pretty much worse in every way unless you're not planning on building up guard at all, which a rogue is better at dps, so 2h warriors are essentially useless this time around sadly. You will also MOST DEFINITELY want to start off early with Grappling Chain for your tank in the Battlemaster spec line, as it will be your main crowd control skill for when there is a stray enemy wandering toward your mage(s). Another couple of great skills in that line are the Deep Reserves passive for keeping the stamina up and the Combat Roll for more mobility around the battlefield.

 

Rogue archers are amazing, they are much more viable as an AI option simply because I don't feel like the dual wield rogues utilize their mobility enough. Even when I gave Cole Hook and Tackle with its upgrade to basically give him free mobility to jump from enemy to enemy with 0 stamina usage or cooldown on it, he still ends up just running up to them most of the time. With that said, I honestly feel like the Assassin is the best specialization period for rogues, and works phenomenally with the archer spec. If you wanted to do that and you weren't being the rogue, you would obviously need to buy a respec necklace for Cole and have him go archer, since he is the Assassin specialized NPC given to you.

 

As for more ranged, it's not necessarily harder, but it can make things somewhat difficult because unlike 1 and 2, you cannot click to move, so you have to manually(while in combat/not paused) move the ranged character out of harms way, and obviously if you have more than 1 ranged in serious danger of melee, you cannot move them both or all three at once. With that said, some mitigation can be had for this issue with Stealth, Evade, & Leaping Shot for the archer as well as Fade Step on your mage.

 

When it comes to mages, if you want the best defensiveness, since there are no heals, obviously you will want to go with Vivienne. I tried to actually go dual mage for double barrier, but I found it to be problematic and a hassle, because unless I disabled one mage's barrier and simply used it when I needed it, I would have to worry about remembering to do so, because if I didn't disable it, they would simply use them both at the beginning of the fight, which essentially renders it completely useless to have two...

 

Considering the way they made this game, you essentially NEED to have at least 1 of each class to be able to do everything. You will need a warrior to break down walls and such, rogues to open locked doors and such, and mages to use their powers to rebuild or reform things to get to certain locations. With that said, you can pretty much go off of whatever you want more in your group as to what you will choose it to be. If you want more magical damage and the possibility of a manually maintained barrier, since it is by far the strongest defensive thing in the game, then go with 2 mages. If you feel like you need a lot more damage, I would say to go a dual wield rogue if you feel confident in your tank holding aggro, or your barriers holding up. You can also put masterwork +2 or +3 guard per hit on your rogue to give it more defense, which actually works quite amazingly as either dw or bow. Lastly, if your tank just isn't getting the job done with holding aggro, you can form another tank out of either of your remaining warriors.

 

Personally I am running myself as an archer with Solas as the mage (Rift Mage), Cassandra as my tank (Templar), and Cole (Assassin) as my dual wield rogue with +5 guard per hit to mitigate his lack of defenses, even though he does have about 40% melee and 30% ranged defense. I'm also running the 10% chance for Hidden Blade +4 strikes on myself which is AMAZING, and the 10% chance for 3s of invulnerability (blackwalls spec skill) on Cassandra, while I run +60% barrier rings (30% each) on Solas and just speccing him in the Spirit and Rift Mage lines along with a little ice so he can freeze then shatter for a little extra dps. I've also got the paralyze on him with the Static Cage for a little bit more crowd control. All in all, with Cole and I both having Mark of Death and Hidden Blades, not even dragons last very long, since I can use Mark of Death, throw all the highest dps I can use, along with all the focus skills of dps, which is basically the default one on me as well as Solas' aoe meteor shower, and then use Mark of Death's secondary use for bonus damage along with everything else that was dealt while it was up, and it usually hits for a good extra 15-20k if everything goes right, which I can obviously then follow up with a second Mark of Death for even more extra damage.

 

I was however running Cassandra/Solas/Vivienne for a while there and we did take basically 0 damage at any given point, but we didn't of course kill things as quickly, and I'm all about effectively murdering enemies as quickly as possible. You know, the whole, "the faster I kill you, the less damage you can do to me" ideal.

 

If you want your mage to be cc/defense related, I would say to get a myriad of elements to get yourself Lightning Bolt for the paralyze, Flash Fire for the fear, and Winters Grasp for the freeze (or even the Ice Mine for defense and cc mixed) and possibly Static Cage if you're wanting to keep them in one place. Another great CC skill is Solas' Rift Mage skill Pull of the Abyss, which also weakens the enemies within while pulling them in with a gravitational pull. All in all, Solas is by far the best cc machine with the Pull of the Abyss, Stonefist, and Veilstrike in his specialization, but if you're looking for better barriers, obviously you'll want Vivienne, if you're just going with 1 mage.

 

Anyways, I hope this helped out and just remember, regardless of how effective something is, if you're not having fun with it, then there's no point in using it. Play what you enjoy, regardless of how effective it is. At the end of the day, it is a video game, and it is meant to be enjoyed. Good luck!

[swk3000]

Things worth noting:

1. I don't use Tac Cam. I probably should, but I just don't have the patience for it.

2. I only ever control my Inquisitor. Everyone else is left to their own devices. I realize this makes my team less effective, but as I said: I don't have the patience for it.

3. My Inquisitor is a Mage.

4. The point behind the dual Barrier is to have Vivian take primary Barrier duty. However, if things start going sideways, I also have the spell myself, and can drop it as needed to keep the party up. Or to drop Barrier on the Tank because Vivian decided she and the rogue needed it more than him.

[Alan Rickman]

While Champion is a very good spec to build a tank out of, you'll manage just fine with heavy investment into the Vanguard tree, with Champion skills coming later as a luxury option. FWIW, I'm running with Cassandra as my tank and she's doing great with pretty much no micro.

 

For the rogue, I'm partial to Varric for the utility and fun of tossing traps around but since you'll only be controlling the Inquisitor, I'd say Sera is the better bet. The Tempest flasks are great, and besides them I'd go Poisoned Weapons up until the passive which causes poison clouds whenever a poisoned enemy dies, grab Long Shot to begin with and eventually get pretty much all of the archery tree. Get Stealth too so she can get out of trouble if someone gets close. Not sure how well Cole does as a ranged character purely under AI control, so I can't really comment on him.

 

Vivienne has performed admirably for me as mainly a frost mage, setting up enemies for shatter combos very regularly without any prompting with only Ice Mine. So far, she's basically only using Immolate, Ice Mine and Barrier for me when under AI control, but I do switch quite a bit between who I'm controlling so I also have Fade Step for kiting, Spirit Blade and Blizzard just for fun whenever I'm controlling her. If you want her to be purely DPS + Barrier under AI control, I guess I'd go through Immolate down to Fire Mine, get upgraded Winter's Grasp and the mana regen passive from the Frost tree and pretty much all of the Storm tree + obviously Barrier from the Spirit tree.

[Lerrasien]

I never once used Tac Cam in any of the 3 lower difficulties. I'm now running through Nightmare as a mage and am beginning to understand that the AI just doesn't cut it anymore. If you are running in anything other than Nightmare, the AI usually just well enough to get the job done, just don't expect them to do everything in their ability to max their capabilities since there is no real tactics page anymore, and all you can do is "prefer" certain skills and hope to god that they actually use things at the right time lol. Other than that it sounds like your setup works well when you yourself are a the second mage, that way you don't have to micro manage the second AI mage casting barrier, and since barrier is better than anything else, it's just plain awesome. The only thing I suggest is when you get your rogue to get a 10% hidden blades upgrade on 1 or more of their items as well as getting a + guard on hit either for your tank if they just aren't keeping guard up enough or on yourself to help mitigate any damage you may be taking while the barriers are on cooldown from either casters or archers.

[Bruxae]

My personal team and what I would recommend is one dps of each class and one tank. This way you aren't lacking in any area and they won't compete much for gear. As for each individual these are my recommendations based on my experience completing the game on hard, so they are my opinion and nothing more:

 

Tank - pick up the S/B passive that makes you immune to flanking first, that's a no-brainer. After that make sure you have both taunts (War Cry and Challenge), past that I would pick up the rest of the passives and Unbowed in the vanguard tree. Grappling Chain in the Battlemaster tree is also definetly a must have. One of your warriors should also definetly grab War Horn, whether you pick it with your tank or your dps warrior depends on who you think will have the most spare points, I used it on Blackwall but not on Cassandra since Blackwall had more spare points, I didnt like his specialization for when the AI controls him and I cba excessive pausing and that wonky tactical camera. dump the rest of the points into your specialization class. Also, do note that you dont necessarily need to pick up everything in the order I wrote them, as long as you pick up flanking immunity and both taunts as early as possible.

 

Rogue (Archer) - Pretty straight forward, get Poisoned Weapons and the passives that affect it (1 upgrade and 2 passives I believe), then max out the Archery tree. That's it for the important parts, neither Sera or Varric had very attractive specializations, I suppose you could respec Cole into an archer but I wouldn't have any insight on that. Any remaining points once these things are maxed I ditched into Subterfuge, mainly upgrading Stealth and picking up all the passives and Evade, note that Shadow Strike only works in melee so its pointless on an Archer.

 

Warrior DPS - Get everything down the right side of the 2 handed tree, the reason I skipped the left side is that the AI is not very good at channeling spells and I didn't want to risk them just standing around not attacking while waiting for someone to hit them, and it wasnt worth the point investment to get all the way down to pommel strike. Next get Unbowed in the Vanguard tree, this will make your dps warrior keep armor up which makes a huge impact on his survivability, might have to manually use it sometimes since the AI dont really want to spam it even if set to preferred, I manually activated it each cooldown at Dragon fights. Get War Horn if you didnt on your tank and feel free to disable the grappling chain, I didnt want my dps to grapple things away from my tank, but sometimes it can be usefull to save squishier dps, up to you what you prefer. If you use Cassandra get all the templar abilities before war horn, if you use Iron Bull or Blackwall as 2H dps take War Horn first as well as the passives down the right side of the tree. If you use Iron Bull get everything down to Devour next but avoid the last Reaver ability, I wouldn't trust the AI on Hard or Nightmare with something that drains HP.

 

Mage - Variety is key since there are so many resistant/vulnerable enemies to specific elements, I would pick up Winter's Blast/Immolate/Chain Lightning/Barrier first, make sure to upgrade them, you can hold off on upgrading Winter's blast early on, its not that great. Remember that Chain Lightning will bounce a set amount of times, so the best time to use it is when theres only 2 enemies since it will then bounce back and forth between them and do massive dmg, its pretty useless on 1 enemy though since it will not bounce at all. Past these spells the order you pick things doesn't matter much, id aim for the most attractive passives and maxing out whatever specialization you pick. Personally I went with Necromancer since I didn't want to go melee range (Knight Enchanter) and Rift Mage didn't have spirit damage I think. There are tons of spirit vulnerable enemies through out the game so Necromancer felt like the best choice. Once you have the passives you want and your specialization maxed, I went down the Spirit tree and picked up Ressurect as well as the barrier passives, since it's pretty much your only real support ability in the game.

 

So yup, that's about it.

[Novadove]

1 tank 3 mage = slow and steady but wins the day

 

1 tank 2 archer 1 mage = artillery unit

 

tat's probably about it. there isn't much other than these. kinda limited in terms of flexibility.