I played with Mage last time and there's way more options and actually interesting options playing as Mage. Rogue still quite interesting because you can backstab and stealth but Warrior is so boring that's painful.
Yep. Class balance in DAO sucks horribly. Reaver can give you long a str-based CC (Frightening Appearance) and Champion can give you a str-based AoE knockdown. If you are a weirdo you can make a willlpower-based Warrior and use the Templar's Holy Smite for a 10 second aoe stun, in which case you want Berserker as your second specialization so you can do something useful with all that Stamina and drop a Final Blow with it (and also because you'll need the damage Berserk gives you). You can also vary it up slightly by giving your Warrior a rank of Poison-Making and having him use grenades and poisons. I recommend putting one rank of Poison-Making on everyone for grenade spam, really.
Trap-Making is a great skill too but Rogues are easily the best for that, because of Stealthy Item Use. And traps get fucked over by cutscene battles that just reposition fucking everyone.
Mage have Arcane Warrior, Blood Mage, Shapeshifter, Elemental, etcs. The skills are actually fun
Shapeshifter is actually pretty shitty. It plays to none of a Mage's strengths and has basically zero synergy with the class in general. The animal form abilities aren't very good either, and the animal form is dispellable so it's unusable inside a Glyph of Neutralization too. Arcane Warrior is also retarded. It is trash when it comes to actually hitting things, but overpowered when it comes to making your Mage hard to kill. So the Arcane Warrior is not a Warrior. It's a Tank Mage. Blood Mage and Spirit Healer are potent though. Elemental is a bit on the weak side of what a Mage can do. Cone of Cold is about as much as you need and then you want to go for utility abilities like Mind Blast and
and feels like you've much more impact than Shield bash.. Taunt.. Useless Triple attack. Just seeing Alistar Skill tree make me want to sleep.
Yeah, this is the result of a shitty design where you think of the Warriors as the guys who just hit shit. They don't even have the tricks WoW's Warriors do, and DAO is blatantly stealing cues from it. So you've got a mess of cooldowns for variations on generic abilities to hit shit. Another problem was that they cut corners and didn't implement a root debuff, so instead they're all just stuns, making Pinning Shot and Claw Traps into some stupid things. Claw Traps especially.
The triple attack is often extra useless because DAO is real-time, not turn-based, so with the animation speed you actually don't really get anything out of the extended attack routine unless you have a mod that buffs the animation speed. Assault for instance does 4 attacks with +8 attack, +3 armor penetration, but -40% damage. You're better off just auto-attacking. Shield Pummel on the other hand gives you 3 attacks with normal damage, +10 attack, +2 armor penetration, and a decent stun. Overpower gives you 3 autocrits (the tooltip lies about only the last attack being a crit) and knockdown and daze debuff (-5 attack and -5 defense, again: tooltip lies). Two-Handed gives you Pommel Strike for one knockdown and Sweep for an AoE hit and knockdown, all of it str-based on a tree with only str-requirements, so it works decently with Champion for a third str-based AoE knockdown and Reaver for a str-based Frightening Appearance on top so you can run a pure strength build with numerous CCs. Stunning Blows also gives you a 50% chance of stunning an enemy when you crit (Tooltip lied: It isn't every hit, only every crit) if it isn't stunned already. But early on Dog is your best pick for a Warrior that does more than just hit shit. On the console version it even has access to the Warrior-exclusive talents. In Awakening, Warriors can actually make decent archers by abusing Spirit Warrior, but Pinning Shot is a cunning-based check so it works better for Bard Archer Rogues with Lethality.
Rogues generally have more abusable shit since a pure Cunning Rogue will do a 3 second AoE stun every 4 seconds (make two Cunning Rogues and you have AoE permastun). The Ranger pets also come with more abilities than show up on the UI, so if you set up their AI carefully when the pet spawns, they will use all kinds of shit. Stealthy Item Use also means they can just plant traps on enemies without trouble or throw grenades without breaking stealth.
You're supposed to role play.
Sounds like LARPing to me. There is no good reason to side with Werewolves unless you really just want them for your army. You're not presented any reason at all to do it, so you're really just picking mass murder for shits and giggles, because you felt like it.
It's possible this was something planned but cut early because they had no time to properly test it.
Nope. This stuff was cut very late. It was planned out pretty heavily. The Orzammar questline is very blatantly a continuation of the events of the Dwarf Noble questline, and the Dwarf Noble makes perfect sense as a third contender. You were flagrantly set up for a revenge plot and even promo pictures reinforced that:
All the way into 2009 they were still selling the Dwarf Noble revenge route as part of the game. People looked forward to it. People were disappointed. This wasn't "enslave nations with necromancy" type bullshit.
This is all big RPGs really.
Mostly Obsidian/Troika/Interplay and Bioware (especially under EA) really.