Dragon Age 2 - How Do You Play It?

It's not about best, it's just stupid to add magic to a Warrior. It's dumb to add strength to a mage. It's moronic to stack to constitution on a rogue.

The game isn't made to be you can be whatever you want. The abilities your have determine what weapons you can use. So stacking majority of your points into Dexterity or Cunning for a Warrior is just brainless if the 2H weapon does the most damage with strength. Plus the gear determines what you stack, the Champion Armor for Warrior which is the best armor in the game for Warrior requries 31 constitution. Strength also increases fortitude which ensures your warrior doesn't get affected by physical damage as much, knocked back etc. Read the description for each of the attribute and you would see there really isn't any reason to deviate from the main 3 attribute for each class, meaning there is no benefit to do so.

Just because your username is baka on this forum doesn't actually mean you have to be one.

 

I just aggro mobs with my warrior and run away on nightmare 90% of the time to avoid stuff spawning around me. Overweight creatures get stuck in narrow passages and are easily dispatched lol.

 

Err..............hope you don't think D1 or D2 were rpg's or that D3 will be one. They're better known as Hack n' Slash games, which is fine because the Diablo series never pretended to be an rpg, like ME and DA2 are doing.

 

FYI on AMD, the game runs fine with DX11, MLAA, and VSync. FPS range about 40-60. No screan tearing and MLAA looks better than 8x AA for this game.

 

mushishi what ATI GPU are you using atm.

 

Know what would be awesome? If you could kill one of your companions. I have two who disagree with me on everything, practicing magic that I don't to be part of my entourage. Bioware should allow me to kill them, not just let them go, kill them.

 

For me there are 2 main factors when identifying RPG.
1. You spend a lot of time reading dialogs (not too much though, else its a "quest".
2. You spend a lot of time on character tab min/maxing builds / skills etc.

Dragon age 2 sort of fits atm. Its all about how you play also:
If you play on easy, click through dialogs and just use "automatic skill up", then yes — its hacknslash.
If you do all the quests reading the stories and fighting on hard — its a lot like RPG though, not ideal RPG maybe but still.

There is another factor which is "open world / freedom" but its kinda resource intensive and you can mostly expect that from MMORPGS these days like WoW etc.

 

Another question - where can you buy armor for characters other than yourself/Hawke? Everywhere I look, all the armors have restrictions as Marion/Garrett Hawke only, while weapons can be bought for anyone.

 

You haven't noticed you can't buy armor for your companions yet?

You can upgrade their one piece armor. At any of the vendors look under the diamond tab and there might be an upgrade. And there are upgrades during some quests. Each companion has 4 upgrades.

 

I noticed, but I thought it was a bug or something.

 

there's a mod that removes armor restrictions

 

If it's not a bug then they must have put that restriction on for a reason... I'm just wondering what the reason is lol

 

It simplifies the game. Min/Maxing all the companions is very time consuming.

DA2 is all about action, action, action.

 

Yeah.............wouldn't want to spend more than 5 hours to complete a game, would we ?

 

Takes about 30-40 hours to finish the game.

 

Took me about 10 hours to finish act 1 (for the third time)... I think I did all the quests.

 

I just finished the game and all side quests on mostly Hard difficulty except for a few battles with high dragons on Normal. That took me 45 hours according to my saves.

 

Spoiler

Yeaaaaaah... if you side with the Templars, you'll get your chance.

2H Warriors are really powerful, yeah, but you'll have to make sure you don't have anyone else standing in the way. You could run with 3 other ranged characters like archers or mages and you'll be golden.

 

Not the companion I want to kill.

Spoiler

He ran whimpering he will get his revenge with his pathetic army of wussies

 

I'm using a 2H warrior with Varric, Anders, and Merrill. But the funny thing is that all 3 ranged characters have higher DPS than my 2H warrior... And before I can Whirlwind anyone, one of the mages uses fireball and blasts everyone away.

Spoiler

Before I had Bethany instead of Merrill because of her ability to heal, but you know what happens at the end of Act I...

 

Right now I am playing Rogue with 3 mages lol just going through my 2nd play through at the end of Act 1.

You can finish Act 1 in 4 hours(if you just earned the needed 50 Gold) and in 7 hours if you complete all quests

 

Just finished the game on normal. Took me 14 hours! Though I wish it was open ended... or allows you to repeat the game on difficult levels with your gear/abilities reserved (like in Diablo 2).

 

14 hours? You're not doing all quests?

I finished my 1st play through for 40 hours.

 

Same here. And all the reviews I've read from gamesites have said the same thing, 40 hours first time play through. But then again, this is Bioware's new formula of lazy. No plot, just whining from your companions and sidequests. Sounds about right to me, 10 hours of actual story plot, but really only 5 hours since the other 5 hours are voice acted dialogue and cut scenes.

But I'll admit DA2 is still better than a lot of games. Good thing The Witcher was better though and hopefully The Witcher 2 will trounce it for RPG of the year.

 

I did all the quests in the first 2 acts. I skipped "Mine Massacre" and maybe a few other ones from Act 3. I have subtitles turned on, so I usually just read the dialog instead of sitting and watching the superior acting of the animation. But I finished in 14 hours... and Hawke is level 19. If those of you who finished the game in 40+ hours had level 30 or something then I must have missed a lot more than I thought. Otherwise I only missed a few quests.
My fights usually end very fast as well. Hawke has 2-handed tree maxed, and a few other skills in Reaver. Anders and Merrill/Bethany have elemental tree maxed, and the rest of the points went in healing/passive abilities. Varric has the top left tree (forgot what it's called) maxed, and his special tree almost maxed. Fights against these guys usually don't last very long.

 

You missed a lot more than that I suspect. You forget most of the quests have 3-4 parts to them. Also combat time on normal is like 1/4th the time on Hard/Nightmare.

 

I know most quests have have more than one part. What level are you when you finished the game? Or if you haven't finished, what level are you now and where are you in the story line?

 

Level 24, I tried to do every quest and I played on Hard difficulty.

 

I guess I did miss some quests... Oh well, game's done, just waiting for Diablo 3 now

 

That's exactly the way that I play it , sometimes it's almost impossible to survive though .

I was playing it on my old Dell Inspiron 9300 an I thought tha the graphics were just so so but playing it now on the G73SW-3DE with every thing turned up to max with one or two exceptions it's like a whole new game . The graphics are just beautiful , I have to keep pausing so the my grandsons can look around at all the scenery . DX 11 is something else , I was only able to use DX 9 . Anyway we're all really enjoying being immersed in the world od the Dragon .

 

It took me exactly 33 hours to do all the quests and feel content in the amount of gold I made before going to the Expedition. Playing this on hard, max settings dx9 with Stereo 3d on my 120 inch projection screen *drools*

 

my settings won't go past medium on dx9 and i installed the high res pack. What's wrong?

 

You can only choose high and very high if you change it to DirectX11

 

Actually, DX 9 with the High Resolution Packs can do wonders to the people who are running it on the DX 9 render. The High Resolution Packs are a must for this game if you want really good environments. The default DX 9 Medium graphics are even worse than the ones in DA: O in my honest opinion.

 

where can i get the high resolution packs for dx9?

 

There are no high-res packs for DX9, I'm afraid. You'll need DX11 to run the game on Very High.

Lmao. Can't wait til some DLC comes out that lets me smack him in the face.

 

You just said you already installed it. It's a checkbox option.

Texture has NOTHING to do with DX9 or DX11. And running it on Very High has nothing to do with texture patch either. The high res patch works with both DX9 and DX11. The only thing with DX11 is the options for Ambient Occlusion/Depth of Field. DirectX 11 also by default has improved shaders and lighting using DX11 Shader 5.0. DX9 I believe is Shader 2.0/3.0. You can run DX9 with high settings with high res texture patch, you just won't have the improved shaders, and of course a decrease in performance.

Which begs question, if you can run it in DX11 for DA2, why would you run it on the slower DX9? I have no idea, kinda stupid if you ask me. For DX11, just don't enable the AO/DOF, and your framerate should stay around 45-60 FPS with 2X MSAA enabled.

 

I found running DX 9 gains me more FPS than DX 11 High (DX 10) or DX 11 Very High (DX 11). However, the DX 10 effects obviously feel washed out with the DX 9 renderer of course and the textures feel a bit washed out in DX 9 as well, even with the HD Texture Pack.