436 réponses à ce sujet

[TheOgre]

I'm on Nightmare, I love a good challenge in Dragon Age, and prefer strategy and tactical gameplay over simple button-mashing. But at the moment all I'm really doing in Inquisition is button-mashing barrier, it's plain out boring when playing the healer.

 

You might say I also just button-mashed healing spells in Origins and DA2, which is true and this was also a problem in their design, but at least then I had many spells to choose from (heal, regenerate, group heal, group regenerate, healing aura, revive + buffs etc.)

 

What we need is some rebalanced healing spells back in Dragon Age, pref. of limited use (just not as limited as focus!)

 

Bring some importance back to mages other than CC.. Buffs and healing were one way, but damage used to be another function. Rogues/Warriors can easily do more than a mage could damage wise which to me does not make sense from a lore perspective. But this threads about healing and regeneration, and I would like that if we are going with a threat% design (MMO build)

[Sidney]

You might say I also just button-mashed healing spells in Origins and DA2, which is true and this was also a problem in their design, but at least then I had many spells to choose from (heal, regenerate, group heal, group regenerate, healing aura, revive + buffs etc.)

 

..but does having barrier, shimmering shield, magic shell really change the nature of the combat problem? It would mask, as you said, the sizzle but not so much the steak.

 

I think the loss of the buffs and hexes is a design decision that is harder to explain. While, again, to an extent a lot of those spells are "Bless" and "Curse" under the hood I think there is more that could be done. I'd like to see the "support" tree where you had the aforementioned bless and curse and then maybe elemental resistance spells. If they don't want post-combat healing maybe a healing spell that has a timed duration and it only heals damage you take - not recovering already lost health.

[Sidney]

As for the challenge, the challenge comes from intelligent AI, not from lack of healing which is just an excuse for poor coding. If the AI is up to scratch to provide more intelligent tactics and the NPCs are tougher to kill and hit harder than on normal, Nightmare is a challenge irrespective of healing or lack thereof. There is no acceptable reason you can give to discount the need for better pot cache placement. None at all.

 

A smart AI would savage the hades out of your support characters, strip them off and then grind the warriors into paste - basically what you do to the bad guys. The thing is you have a raft of skills to change the AI behavior (taunt, hard to notice and so forth). Then you get things like Bear fight Wolves that eliminates the positional advantage of the AI.  It is hard to argue the AI is "dumb" when so much of what you do as the player is designed to make it behave in certain ways (and then that mangling of the AI gets called tactical) or eliminate the edge it gets for behaving in a smart way. It is one reason why this game is fundamentally not a tactical experience and nor will it ever really be such a thing.

[Sidney]

Lame argument. You can use that about every game. "If you don't solo the game on Nightmare it is because you suck at the game".

 

 

It was a lousy argument. I agree. BG1 was by far the most challenging game in the Bioware library.

 

BG1 had more challenging fights overall because you were a lower level character. Especially in the AD&D realm and ruleset lower level characters were at a lot more risk than in other game systems - for mages they can be one hit killed by some weapons until what (even at their max HP) 3rd level? Even a fighter can succumb in relatively short order to a hail of arrows from kobolds.  Enemy mages, in paricular, had disabling spells that lasted way, way, way too long (as did your just to be fair).Your party have limited or even no skills to use other than their base attack. Plus, given the scarcity of healing surviving one fight still leaves you very much at risk in the next fight.

 

All of that makes it difficult but it is the latter fact that drives most of the fights - again trash mobby sorts of fights. You walk into the Firewine Bridge and suffer a bad encounter early on, now you are at a massive disadvantage for the rest of the fights (assuming the lousy path finding doesn't get someone killed on it's own). That first fight isn't the killer, maybe not even the second, it is trying to stick it out because well Jaheria has 6 HP left and...oops, one arrows and she is done. Plus, she is really done. She doesn't get up after the fight, you can't revive her with a spell or action. That is as close as Bioware has ever come to a permadeath solution and it really affects the game and your decision making. They kept a teeny-tiny sliver of that for DAO with injuries but I'd like to see a downed companion be a much bigger burden than the whole DA series has made it.

[Hexoduen]

..but does having barrier, shimmering shield, magic shell really change the nature of the combat problem? It would mask, as you said, the sizzle but not so much the steak.

 

I think the loss of the buffs and hexes is a design decision that is harder to explain. While, again, to an extent a lot of those spells are "Bless" and "Curse" under the hood I think there is more that could be done. I'd like to see the "support" tree where you had the aforementioned bless and curse and then maybe elemental resistance spells. If they don't want post-combat healing maybe a healing spell that has a timed duration and it only heals damage you take - not recovering already lost health.

 

My opinion is this:

 

* The removal of health regeneration I like, it's a good challenge (as in Baldur's Gate)

 

* The limiting of healing potions I understand for balancing combat, but I hate the way Bioware did it.  IMO we should be able to stock up on as many healing potions as can fit in our inventory, but we should not get them for free. We should have to buy them (from a limited stock), find them (and they should not respawn), or create them with materials (that would respawn on rare occasions).

 

* The new protection spells are cool, but with the removal of so many other spells (be it Creation, Entropy, Blood Magic, Arcane or Spirit) I find there is too little variety in playstyle as a mage. The removal of healing spells have specifically killed my class

 

Obviously I'm bored in combat, otherwise I'd be busy playing the game I pre-ordered instead of writing here. The rest of Inquisition is amazing, I love it     But character build and combat makes me *yawn*

[Jeffry]

* The removal of health regeneration I like, it's a good challenge (as in Baldur's Gate)

 

Well, at least in BG (I only played BG2 though) you could sleep in the middle of a dungeon to replenish your health (and spells), you didn't have to go back to an inn to heal And later in the game you even found some items that restored your health over time.

[Hexoduen]

Well, at least in BG (I only played BG2 though) you could sleep in the middle of a dungeon to replenish your health (and spells), you didn't have to go back to an inn to heal And later in the game you even found some items that restored your health over time.

 

Unless you got eaten by a giant spider   Soloing BG2 as a cleric/mage is one of the best gaming experiences I've had, and sleeping in a dungeon with no spells left was certainly toying with death, I loved it.

[Rawgrim]

It was a lousy argument. I agree. BG1 was by far the most challenging game in the Bioware library.

 

BG1 had more challenging fights overall because you were a lower level character. Especially in the AD&D realm and ruleset lower level characters were at a lot more risk than in other game systems - for mages they can be one hit killed by some weapons until what (even at their max HP) 3rd level? Even a fighter can succumb in relatively short order to a hail of arrows from kobolds.  Enemy mages, in paricular, had disabling spells that lasted way, way, way too long (as did your just to be fair).Your party have limited or even no skills to use other than their base attack. Plus, given the scarcity of healing surviving one fight still leaves you very much at risk in the next fight.

 

All of that makes it difficult but it is the latter fact that drives most of the fights - again trash mobby sorts of fights. You walk into the Firewine Bridge and suffer a bad encounter early on, now you are at a massive disadvantage for the rest of the fights (assuming the lousy path finding doesn't get someone killed on it's own). That first fight isn't the killer, maybe not even the second, it is trying to stick it out because well Jaheria has 6 HP left and...oops, one arrows and she is done. Plus, she is really done. She doesn't get up after the fight, you can't revive her with a spell or action. That is as close as Bioware has ever come to a permadeath solution and it really affects the game and your decision making. They kept a teeny-tiny sliver of that for DAO with injuries but I'd like to see a downed companion be a much bigger burden than the whole DA series has made it.

 

The way you position your party, and what items you give to each of them is rather vital in BG1. Nothing like that at all in DA:I. If you actually sell your weapons. All of them. Guess what happens. the game gives you new weapons right out of the blue. Just to make sure you don't screw up in any way.

[Jeffry]

Unless you got eaten by a giant spider   Soloing BG2 as a cleric/mage is one of the best gaming experiences I've had, and sleeping in a dungeon with no spells left was certainly toying with death, I loved it.

 

Yeah, it was a risk, but one I was willing to take every time Also the items I mentioned were extremely tough to get, like the uber ring, no fight in any DA game can compare in difficulty to frikin Kangaxx... my god that damn prison spell

[JimBlandings]

Removing health regen/unlimited potions was absolutely pointless as it certainly didn't make the game any more challenging than the first two games.  I only died a handful of times in DA:I and I probably died 20x+ in DA:O and DA2.

[luism]

Removing health regen/unlimited potions was absolutely pointless as it certainly didn't make the game any more challenging than the first two games.  I only died a handful of times in DA:I and I probably died 20x+ in DA:O and DA2.

This

[saladinbob]

A smart AI would savage the hades out of your support characters, strip them off and then grind the warriors into paste - basically what you do to the bad guys. The thing is you have a raft of skills to change the AI behavior (taunt, hard to notice and so forth). Then you get things like Bear fight Wolves that eliminates the positional advantage of the AI.  It is hard to argue the AI is "dumb" when so much of what you do as the player is designed to make it behave in certain ways (and then that mangling of the AI gets called tactical) or eliminate the edge it gets for behaving in a smart way. It is one reason why this game is fundamentally not a tactical experience and nor will it ever really be such a thing.

 

I never said the AI was dumb. I said the challenge comes from well coded AI rather than the absence of health regeneration and lack of healing pots. If health regeneration and healing magic where removed from the game in order to provide a challenge then that is lazy development.