27 réponses à ce sujet

[TheNecroFiend]

Shapeshifter was the character I was looking forward to the most. I loved the Shifter from NWN. I'm a bit dissapointed with the Shapeshifter. I find myself using my spells and out killing the rest of my party. Whenever I shift my damage takes a nosedive, not to mention the loss of my crowd control. Does it get better with the tier 4 advanced forms? I'm only lvl 10 now so I only have up to tier 3. To make matters worse for me I had no idea Animate Dead was a sustained spell which is giving me more incentive to just so I don't feel like I wasted a spell pick. What is everyones opinion on the Shapeshifter class?

[Erik Mcvay]

i agree and i only have the bear so far morrigan is my heal/buff/dd no shapeshifting

[Asgorath_]

The first time I used my shapeshifting abilities and my sustained spells disappeared I immediately took shapeshift off my hotbar. I was disappointed to say the least.

[Malecite00]

Oh yes yes it does. The demon bear form has overwhelm and does massive crazy ultimate damage, im not a fan of the spider form as much, but the swarm form gets pretty awesome as well. Its all about hitting that 4th point.

[Malecite00]

dddddoubllle post!

Modifié par Malecite00, 07 novembre 2009 - 12:36 .

[Varenus Luckmann]

I've just gotten Morrigan, and I personally find Shapeshifter awesome. I think that Shapeshifter will scale badly the more and the stronger your regular spells get, to again peak when you finally get the last, 4th, point. The spider poison so far is strong, the webbing keeps them still enough, and you can definately take more of a beating.

[darthMark5]

Using shapeshifting as a tactic is a huge advantage. I have Morrigan shift into a bear (then later bees) when she's attacked and falls below 80% life... then when her mana is below 20% i have her go into an offensive form. Keeps her kicking butt and alive in big fights much easier.

[ItmustBeDONE]

Nay.

[Titanmike357]

I didn't like it much, but thats me

[Winterbay]

My elven mage is a shapeshifter, but so far I've not used it a single time. Too many other fun spells to use instead. I mainly took the shapeshifter in order to get the passive bonus.

[Darkblade77]

I am wondering: Does the shapeshifter stack (or work well) with the Arcane Warrior spec? I was thinking that maybe the offensive powers of the AW could boost or supplement the fighting prowes of the shapeshifting forms.

[TheNecroFiend]

Sustained spells turn off when you shapeshift. And you can't cast when shapeshifted. So Arcane Warrior doesn't add anything except for the inherant bonus of +1 dex and +5 attack. At least  I'm assuming that gets added to the forms. Scrapped Shapeshifter at 14 so havent tested it.

Modifié par TheNecroFiend, 13 décembre 2009 - 01:04 .

[badkenbad]

Even Master Shapeshifters in forms do very little damage. I ran some tests with Morrigan at level 19, since I hadn't spec'd her since the beginning of the game. If I put everything in spellpower, I got moderate bonuses to dexterity (spider form) or strength (bear form). It still wasn't nearly enough to scale to the level, though. Alistair, sword & shield spec'd with decent gear did more than twice as much damage as Morrigan in *spider* form. If I put the stat points into strength or dexterity, the spellpower bonus went way down, and the attacks got even weaker.

Unfortunately, shapeshifting is mostly just an ability of last resort, when you're out of mana and potions but still want to contribute to damage. The Swarm form is very useful for offtanking because you just don't get hit. The other forms really don't do enough damage to be worthwhile, though their abilities can be situationally useful.

Shapeshifting spells are basically "just another spell" in a shapeshifter's repertoire. If you play a Shapeshifter, don't expect to be spending a lot of time as a bear or spider.

Modifié par badkenbad, 13 décembre 2009 - 01:24 .

[Daz58]

One handy thing I found was that in traveling the swarm moves extremely fast on the map. When I have a long way to move I change and use it to zip about. Also great to pull mobs into ambushes.

[Nokturnal Lex]

badkenbad wrote...

Even Master Shapeshifters in forms do very little damage. I ran some tests with Morrigan at level 19, since I hadn't spec'd her since the beginning of the game. If I put everything in spellpower, I got moderate bonuses to dexterity (spider form) or strength (bear form). It still wasn't nearly enough to scale to the level, though. Alistair, sword & shield spec'd with decent gear did more than twice as much damage as Morrigan in *spider* form. If I put the stat points into strength or dexterity, the spellpower bonus went way down, and the attacks got even weaker.

Unfortunately, shapeshifting is mostly just an ability of last resort, when you're out of mana and potions but still want to contribute to damage. The Swarm form is very useful for offtanking because you just don't get hit. The other forms really don't do enough damage to be worthwhile, though their abilities can be situationally useful.

Shapeshifting spells are basically "just another spell" in a shapeshifter's repertoire. If you play a Shapeshifter, don't expect to be spending a lot of time as a bear or spider.

Gotta agree, most underpowered specialization for mage. If you're out of lyrium pots you didn't plan ahead, if you're low on health you didn't AoE and CC enough. PC players are lucky they can download mods to make shapeshifting a lot better. As far as swarm being good, i thought it was decent till I got hit by a fire spell... immidiately died and said.. ok time to reroll.

I was hoping for a Druid-esque char when I made my shapeshifter but all 3 forms seem too underpowered compared to all the other spells you could be casting instead of being in a form. (Also I find ranger pets are basically a shapeshifted mage, but they don't make your mage unable to cast and basically become a 5th party member that does pretty well for itself)

Modifié par Nokturnal Lex, 13 décembre 2009 - 02:13 .

[Rainen89]

Shapeshifting if you spec right will do appropriate damage the problem is lack of abilities, lack of CC and lack of being able to use items/spells when in form, and using spells out of form unless you go half and half.

Despite the tooltip, damage is based on strength, not magic, so if you make a shapeshifter you will need to stack strength if you want to hit hard, if you do this you will hit quite hard, you just won't be able to use too many spells / or they won't be very strong compared to a normal mage.



Not to mention forms have a 3 minute cooldown and you are shapeshifted out everytime a cutscene or dialogue occurs...so it's more of a disability even if you do spec right. That being said the forms do look cool, but no unless you're devoted to it all you will get out of shapeshifting at the end of the day is the nice little speed increase from Swarm.

[borelocin]

Even with the mod for instant shapeshifting I found the specialisation useless. You are not as effective as a rogue, a warrior or even the Dog.

[R1cardo]

I will make my next mage a shapeshifter, for the fun... Someone can confirm if damage, attack and deffense comes from magic or str/dex?

[Rainen89]

Already confirmed it, and have beaten the game with it. It's fully strength not dex. (Unless some mod or patch fixed this.) Also swarm does not seem to gain any stat contribution to damage whatsoever.

[badkenbad]

Okay, clearly I'm going to have to bust out some screenshots to explain this, since my text explanation didn't seem to work.



In shapeshifter forms, your attack power is based on strength. Spellpower gives you a bonus to strength for Bear form, and to dexterity for Spider form. The actual amount of damage you do is nowhere near a same-level melee character. In spider form, you do about half as much damage as a tank (non-DPS) spec warrior.



Screenshots coming as soon as I can take them...

[Sir Ulrich Von Lichenstien]

badkenbad wrote...

Okay, clearly I'm going to have to bust out some screenshots to explain this, since my text explanation didn't seem to work.

In shapeshifter forms, your attack power is based on strength. Spellpower gives you a bonus to strength for Bear form, and to dexterity for Spider form. The actual amount of damage you do is nowhere near a same-level melee character. In spider form, you do about half as much damage as a tank (non-DPS) spec warrior.

Screenshots coming as soon as I can take them...

Is that whilst wielding a stave or a normal weapon though?

As I heard it is better if doing the latter as obviously staves aren't really 'melee combat' orientated and if you are buffing dex/str then you will be able to wield the normal weapons even if you aren't properly 'using' them.

[badkenbad]

Sir Ulrich Von Lichenstien wrote...
Is that whilst wielding a stave or a normal weapon though?
As I heard it is better if doing the latter as obviously staves aren't really 'melee combat' orientated and if you are buffing dex/str then you will be able to wield the normal weapons even if you aren't properly 'using' them.

When in a shapeshifting form, it doesn't matter what weapon you are using. The damage you do depends entirely on your strength, with bonuses based on your spellpower.
In fact, if you spec Arcane Warrior/Shapeshifter, you will do more damage with Combat Magic active and a decent two-handed weapon than you would in spider or bear form. In bear form you have more armor, though, so better damage mitigation.
I promised some screenshots, so here we are. The tests I did are from a save with Morrigan at level 19, where I had not leveled her up since level 12, so she had 21 stat points and 7 skill points to spend. Here's the starting point:


As you can see from her spell bar, I had been using her earlier in the game as more of a debuffer/controller than damager. For a pure shapeshifter build, you probably wouldn't willpower and magic that high, but for the purposes of this test it really doesn't matter.

Maximizing her strength results in this:

In bear form:

Note that bear form gives significant dexterity (16->25), constitution (16->31), armor (4->17), defense (64->73), and damage bonuses. The damage numbers aren't really comparable in this case, since she has a staff on. The damage in bear form is based on strength. Also note that she does not get a bonus to strength, possibly because it is already high, possibly because her spellpower (39) isn't high enough to give a bonus.

In spider form:

It's about the same as bear form, except much higher nature resistance, lower fire resistance, slightly more dexterity in spider form, but a lower constitution bonus. Damage and defense are about the same (defense is slightly higher because of dexterity), and while spider form still has an armor bonus, it's not nearly as big as the bear form bonus.

So, let's see what happens if we put all those points into Magic instead of Strength, and take Arcane Warrior as a second specialization for the stat bonuses.


As an Arcane Warrior, she can wear better armor, even better than the medium armor pictured. It's just what I had handy. She can also use a two handed sword with some bonuses on it. Interestingly, the weapon and armor bonuses carry over to the shapeshift forms. I don't know if runes do as well.
The important thing to notice here is that the damage number from the sword she carries is better than the damage number in bear form with her strength stat pumped up. She doesn't even have Combat Magic turned on, which would give even more of a damage bonus.

In Bear form with this spec (high magic and arcane warrior secondary):

Higher armor and defense, but lower damage. Her increased melee critical and armor penetration numbers from her armor (not pictured) carry over to Bear form. The interesting thing is that spell power of 51 gives 11 point strength and dexterity bonuses in bear form. The constitution bonus is only slightly higher than the high magic stat build.

In Spider form:

A small strength bonus, but a higher dexterity bonus, presumably due to higher spell power. Also, nature resistance only goes up to 75 as before, even though her equipment gives her a higher nature resistance.

For comparison, here is how I had built Alistair at level 19:

In combat, he was doing roughly twice the damage of Morrigan in spider form. Sorry I don't have any screenshots of that, the floaty numbers are hard to catch.

So take from this what you will. I'm sure there are better pure shapeshifter specs than these. In fact if the player character is a Shapeshifter, you'll have a lot more stat points to play with, so you'll be able to optimize much better than I could with seven levels worth of points to play with. I just wanted to see the effect of higher strength vs. higher magic, and how effective the damage was. Answer: it's not. It seems to me that Shapeshifting is fine as a support ability, useful when you run out of mana, but it really isn't strong enough to stand as a primary spec.\\

The bottom line is that Dragon Age Shapeshifters are not the same as WoW Feral Druids, and if you are expecting to play them that way, you'll be disappointed. Chances are pretty good that this is by design, too.

[Kaptain K N00b]

I find shapeshifter the worse class of all 4 mage specs, but to say its entirely useless would be a lie. The swarm form, while not inflicting very high damage makes up for it being able to hit multiple enemies, making you near invincible consuming mana instead of hp (and if u are a mage u should have high willpower meaning lots of mana), being hard to hit and being extremely fast, so its perfect for kitting enemies, can help a mage survive situations u wouldnt even expect a tank to survive, and the morphs are certainly good to avoid those enemies with grab and overwhelm (i find it great against drakes).



Overall i'd say if you want a mage class to deal maximum damage and crowd controlling, this class is not for you. But if you want to have some fun, and/or want a class that mixes good survival with flexible tactics you may want to consider this class, works best when mixxed with paralyzing spells to give u a chance to swap forms.

[Sarethus]

The only reason I would want a Shape shifter as a specialisation would be for an RP aspect or if this was different type of game, non-combat aspects.



Example:



Sneaking into the Fort with Morrigan: She could just turn herself into a bird/cat etc and just sneaked in that way.



Morrigan suggestion of Killing Loghain when we first talk to her: Easily done, turn to bird -> Get inside his camp/room -> Turn to ordinary poisonous spider and bite Loghain = Dead Regent.



Branka looking down at you from a ledge while she forces you to go through Carriden's traps? Both you and Morrigan transform to birds, fly next to Branka, transform back and give her a kick to the backside and make her have to solve the traps alongside you.



Like I said Shapeshifting might be the worse combat specialisation but I could easily see it being one of the best ones for out of combat stuff IF Bioware had DESIGNED it that way.

[AlainNagel]

It's not that well implemented if you compare it to the Ranger-talent. Rogues are apparently better at this than mages.