Having finally managed to finish my second playthrough of DAI including all the story DLCs, I found myself pondering on the various changes in the game mechanics and how they influenced my experience in the game. One of these elements was the decision to switch to non-regenerative health and, as a partial function of that, largely removing the healing spells and limiting the amount of healing potions the group can carry.
As context for these decisions, from the top of my head, there were multiple reasons given for these changes. Primary reason was an effort to change how the player approached combat, trying to enforce a more tactical approach to the situations, while also discouraging trying to fight everything moving around for XP and being forced to weight the benefits of a confrontation and exploration. Additionally, in a long post, one of the devs explained how this was really good for combat design and balancing as in the previous system, due to the possibly large number of health potions, they could never know what was the upper limit of the group health when entering the combat system. Removing that uncertainty allowed them to create more balanced combat encounters that didn't result in just giving the boss fights endless amounts of health slowly widdled away.
So I am curious to hear opinions from posters here what they thought of this change? Did you feel that it improved your game experience and if so, why? And if you felt it took away from your enjoyment, what were the causes for that? And finally, did you feel the change achieved the goals publicly set out for it?
And by the way, if I have accidently given any false information here, please correct me.
I always thought Bioware's reasoning there was pretty bad. They have a terrible habit of scrapping something instead of actually being innovative and making it work better. They did it again here. Could you have lots of health potions in DA:O? Sure, but you had to buy or make the good ones. In DA:I, you can just stop by a camp or find a conveniently-located cache in a main mission, and it'll give you as many as 12 for free. How is that not just as bad? I never even came close to running out of potions in story-missions on Nightmare, there are just so many caches.
What makes it worse is DA2 solved most of DA:O's spam problems by simply making potions and healing spells have long cooldown times. That made them more balanced, and DA:I should have simply gone in the same direction instead of getting rid of everything. Potions in DA:I don't even have cooldowns, so that's another reason I think their reasoning is flawed. It's not worth removing an entire magic tree just so they didn't have to actually use their heads and solve the problem, and it didn't work anyway.
But Barrier is the worst problem. If you have one mage in your party, which you usually will, the entire group will get a barrier at the beginning of a fight, which will almost guarantee a win for a lot of fights just by itself. It's just as spam-y as potions, and much easier to manage, since you can cast in infinite times. It's also even less tactical than potion-spam (not that that was tactical) since you won't even take any damage in the first place, so you don't have to think about when to heal who. You just use it whenever it's available. If you have two mages in your party, well... it almost plays itself.
So please go back to DA2's healing system in DA4. In some ways, I think they should scrap Barrier, too. Give mages better damage and crowd-control spells though. I mean, what happened to good old Fireball? Or the cone spells? Etc, etc, etc.
Somehow I just noticed this was mostly about lack of health regeneration, my bad. Well, the same thing applies. It doesn't matter while exploring because you can fast-travel to a camp. All it accomplishes is making the game more tedious. It doesn't work in story-missions because you find caches everywhere. And I don't buy that it made combat more interesting or easier to balance for one second. Quite the opposite. It's easier to balance each encounter if you know your group will always enter it at full-strength. And it's also extremely tedious to fall off something and take a bit of damage, then use a whole potion just to heal it so you don't go into the next battle with a disadvantage. I should be able to have my health regenerate (slowly would be fine), or heal it with magic.
Retour en haut
, barrier. Barrier is actually a good mechanic from ME but it didn't have as much impact as it does in ME. What I mean is in ME barrier will prevent an ability such as freezing an enemy from occurring without reducing the enemies barrier to a certain threshold. In DAI barrier is more an annoyance and damage sponge. 
