1. I personally find DA:O to be comfortable and fun on hard and do not use any health poultices or healers.
Been there, done that.
With health poultices any educated consoletard can make nightmare ++ (they're not limited by cooldowns in DA:O so you can chug away your ineptitude).
5sec cd iirc, but all the potions were on separate cooldowns (lesser hp pot, regular hp pot, big one). And yes, the potions are dumb.
If I were to use Storm of the Century I would probably auto-win 50% of encounters on any difficulty.
Probably would, but it's far from the only way to cheese encounters.
I don't use traps or grenades because I prefer to sell them and buy overpowered gear that will last the whole game rather than one encounter.
You realize for the price of one of those OP gear pieces you can probably buy over 1000 small claw traps, right? Those little things that basically stun enemies for 15 seconds and do 100 damage? Also, a decent stock of nades can take care of almost any dangerous encounter.
I never use party AI because the encounters are too varied to support that.
Good call.
2. Two mages - while being the right tactic - and all the grenades in Thedas will not guarantee you a breeze through an encounter.
Really? It only takes 1 rank of poison-making to be able to use a nade. 1 nade does 80 AoE damage, so with 4 party members that's an instant 320 AoE damage (instakills most mobs). Now rotate grenade types to circumvent cooldowns and you are quickly dropping bosses.
Sometimes no matter what, the templar will smite one of your mages the microsecond you open the door, or a mage will knock your entire party down with the first fireball milliseconds before you finish casting yours.
This never happens to me. Do you know why? Because my rogue stealths ahead and opens the door, then I pull the mobs across a corner with a few traps, where I can get my mages to fire first, right as they are busy walking around the corner.
Other times a critical spell (eg force field on a boss or the second half of a spell combo) will fail and then there are too many elites on the battlefield for it to be even close to 'easy'.
You don't force field the boss. If you have two mages you get your tank to taunt and you rotate force fields on your tank, who will never resist the force field. Since force field doesn't reset mob aggro, all the mobs will be happily targeting your invulnerable tank while you pick them off one by one. You might aggro the mob you are picking off while doing this, but if you want to be slow about it you can combokill each mob before they do anything. Of course, you could also just run two cunning maximizing bards. Captivating Song is a sustained ability causing AoE mental resistance checks vs. Bard's cunning every 4 seconds to avoid getting stunned for 3 seconds. With two pure cunning bards you have enemy-only AoE permastun.
If you really play on nightmare then you know that this happens a lot,
I do. That's why I don't make the same mistakes you do.
so why all the e-posturing about how you breeze through the whole game? We both know that is impossible simply because of the random way the game decides who gets the first shot, and the fact that shit happens and attacks miss and spells fail.
I like how you realize your strategy regularly blows up in your face and, instead of wondering if you're doing something wrong, you simply decide that it's impossible for anyone else to do better than you.
I'd also dare say that your fist playthrough on whatever difficulty was not a cakewalk. The game only becomes potentially easy when you know what's coming and are familiar with the skewed power curves of the party members and abilities (and the bugs).
Total cakewalk, actually. I rolled a mage on my first playthrough and I was using Glyph of Paralysis, potions, heals, nades, DLC promo items... Turns out Glyph of Paralysis makes a lot of encounters easy, especially when you use it on the Ogre boss on Tower of Ishal. (Also turns out Glyph of Paralysis ignores spell resistance iirc.) And I was pulling mobs around corners all the time to get the drop on them. You know the arcane horror boss fight in the ruins? I killed him from the top of the stairs by shooting arrows into its face (this is how I pull mobs). Thanks to funny boss script teleportations, it kept teleporting around downstairs so it never got remotely close enough to do anything so it died. I didn't have Mana Clash to instantly murder enemy mages, but Glyph of Neutralization would completely negate them anyway. Once I got Force Field shit got stupid. At first I was trying it on bosses but then I started dropping it on tanks. Back then FF's duration wasn't nerfed so it only took 1 mage to rotate it on your tank. That was a 0 death playthrough. And yes, it was on nightmare difficulty. (I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned I never played another difficulty.)
3. Just because you and I can generally* breeze through* on nightmare, and one or two hardcore nuts have probably soloed a rogue (though the youtube vids looks suspect) does not make DA:O easy.
The main challenge in soloing as a rogue is not getting bored to death from stealthkilling anything dangerous. When you can stealth, stand next to someone, and toss nades at them until they die without ever destealthing or provoking a response, it's not a challenge.
I stay in touch with 3 friends who I played D&D with ages ago. 2 of them ragequit because of combat difficulty. 1 of those I managed to talk back into giving the game a chance and - with 3 emails of pro-tips- he's now on his 3rd playthrough. My consoletard neighbor bought it by mistake and ragequit just after Lothering because he was raped by the random wolf encounter and 20 realoads didn't work.
DAO's failure wasn't gameplay difficulty as much as it was learning difficulty. They should've done a proper old-school manual.
The high dragon grab and crushing prisons can be interrupted but of course that requires a companion thus not solo.
Go ranger spec. The bear pet has Slam for a knockdown and the wolf pet can do the Dread Howl AoE stun if you edit its tactics right as you summon the pet, but you'll want to use the Advanced Tactics mod to make decent use of DIY AI shit. Also, pets can just draw aggro and let your rogue backstab shit to death.
Rogues can't solo every encounter due to the reasons I specified. A lot of red-named dorkspawn casters (but a few human mages as well) have more HP than mana, thus even if manaclash doesn't get resisted it will merely remove half of their HP-bar not preventing them from casting crushing prison on you.
Use a pet. Use stealth. Really, that's about it. As for Mana Clash, if you precede it with a Mana Cleanse (which is bugged to give mana instead of removing it...) it will murder them solid.
Were it not for these mechanics any high defense rogue/warrior could solo the game but as it is I think not. Those solo kills of high dragons I've seen on youtube for example were all obv console versions, where the dragon either doesn't even do the grab attack or it hardly deals any damage.
Anyone can solo kill the high dragon.
