Imagine complaining about the spell selection in DAO in comparison to BG. The majority of BG's spells suck balls. Good luck if you're playing a Sorcerer without a spell guide.
Allow me to present you a detailed guide to spellcasting in Bioware RPGs then: If it only does damage, you don't really want it, unless it does such massive amounts of damage that it will destroy everything. If it fully disables or subverts enemies, you want it. If it buffs your party, you probably want it. If it negates the ability of your enemies to be a threat to your party, you want it, unless you have better options, as above. The other weighing factor is how reliably you think you can get those abilities to work. Fortunately in Dragon Age: Origins, as long as you max the shit out of your magic stat (which just so happens to be the only stat you need), enemies failing their mental and physical resistance checks is essentially guaranteed. The only thing you're left worrying about is the occasional spell resistance check, but if you want to ignore that you can just play party-buff style and use things like Glyph of Paralysis. Those are pretty much the main principles by which you judge magic to be good.
The complaint about DAO's spell selection is that it is riddled with overpowered shit, for the record.
Dragon Age was guilty of having too little monster variety. Baldur's Gate, in particular Baldur's Gate 1, was guilty of filling zones with useless crap enemies that add nothing to the game and just waste time. I advise people who think otherwise to replay Baldur's Gate 1 and walk around some of the zones, like I did recently. An easy example is going to visit Firewine Bridge. There should be a pack of skeletons+kobalds+dogs (?) there all located quite close together. Whilst Dragon Age also had trash enemies, it was nowhere near on the scale of Baldur's Gate 1. Maybe if the monster variety was used for interesting set piece fights instead of walls of 100 trash enemies, the variety would matter a bit more.
Dragon Age's monster variety was fucking horrible. Since all enemies behaved fundamentally the same way, you had 3 types of enemies for the most part: Warrior, Rogue, Mage, which is why despite magic being supposed to be rare there are entirely too many mages everywhere. Monsters were often like shitty Warriors or shitty Rogues, and Warriors and Rogues are already too similar in how they attack. DA was designed as a low magic setting and turned into high magic quick because they needed mage enemies to spice up encounters owing to the sheer fucking lack of creativity in encounter design. It was fucking bad. There's Slinks S3 Ravage mod to make encounters considerably less shit, but it's still a band aid on bad combat design.
In both setups you have a bunch of similar abilities. In both setups you choose what to use based on what's available. The main difference is that you'll have to rely on something other cone of cold while it recharges versus having to rely on something other than cone of cold because you're out of them for this battle. That decision is different, not saying it isn't, but I don't think either has objectively less value or strategy involved. It just depends on how well they're executed on.
The big difference is that in BG you have control over which spells, when, and how frequently you can cast them but in DAO you are auto-piloting abilities that refresh every battle. Cooldowns also result in asinine shit whenever you use Glyph of Paralysis, since if you want multiple glyphs up you need to wait 40 seconds before you can put down your second Glyph of Paralysis and then have 20 seconds before your first glyph expires. I don't think DAO is really doing better here.
I never played WoW but I played ToR and you basically sat there waiting to hit the ability buttons as they became available. That's shitty cooldown design. I didn't feel this way playing DA:O though, I would have to maneuver into the proper spot to use cone of cold, then get out of dodge, switch to a long range attack while cone of cold recharged, then move back in, etc.
Mostly because your abilities can friendly fire and in particular because you're using Cone of Cold, which is an ability that makes positioning matter since hitting your own crew has dire results, especially because it's bugged to only give a physical resistance check to the primary target (an enemy) while everyone else auto-freezes unless they have the spell resistance for it. Otherwise it would be easy enough to make the physical resistance checks with the broken gear and buffs available in DAO (just high strength builds helps a lot too) that are available in DAO. There are plenty of spells that will disable your enemies into the ground without any risk of friendly fire, including Glyph of Paralysis (which can hit multiple enemies at once), paralyze spells (Mass Paralysis has no friendly fire), Sleep, Waking Nightmare (a line which also gifts you the extremely high damage sleep+horror combo), Mind Blast (which is a low 3 second duration, but gains 1 second of duration for each fewer party member you have), and the Blood Mage's Blood Wound spell (which is disgustingly overpowered), and various single-target spells. Cunning Rogues are also capable of mass-stunning enemies with Captivating Song (which is disgustingly overpowered on a cunning-maximizing build, and with 2 bards like this, you will AoE permastun all enemies).
You also had a mana pool to consider. There was much more to it than a shit MMO style cooldown system.
You didn't have to consider mana pool. You got free out-of-combat mana regen and a shitton of lyrium potions that all scaled with your magic stat. Plus you had abilities like Spellbloom (should only be used with 2 or more mages in the party, tbh), Rejuvenate, Mass Rejuvenation, Improved Combat Training, and the Arcane Warrior's Combat Magic which all boosted mana regeneration (as did Shale's aura form and Leliana's Song of Valor, but that last one just sucks) and then you had gear that would boost your mana pool (anything that raises willpower or stamina works for mana pools) or reduce fatigue % (mostly Leather Armor set or Wade's Superior Medium-size Drakeskin Armor set, which is easy to equip with Arcane Warrior spec). Contemplating your mana pool is what you do if you are deliberately avoiding mana potions and not setting tactics that have both of your mages cast Rejuvenation on each other whenever they don't have it. Cailan's Arms weapon and shield set from the Return to Ostagar DLC also raise mana regeneration massively (but DLC items are generally overpowered, you can thank EA for that). This all added up to create the side effect of making Willpower a severely worthless stat to invest points in. Who needs to put stats into a large mana pool when you can equip items for that and recover mana endlessly anyway? Especially when your magic stat makes all your instant mana potions give you more mana (and your health potions give you more health, along with making healing spells more powerful, and your defenses much stronger, and so DAO mages do not need Constitution either).
You can also just go Blood Mage spec and use one of those items that reduce blood magic costs and cast spells from health while reserving your mana pool on sustained abilities. But honestly you don't need it and the way it hurts your incoming heals makes it a bother when you can already solve mana issues so many other ways, the easiest of them being just spamming lyrium potions, which are incredibly easy to obtain, scale with your magic stat, and every size potion has a separate 5 second cooldown. Blood Mage is a horribly overpowered spec anyway (Blood Wound and Blood Control are both broken).
I'm playing Pathfinder Kingmaker now and Octavia has 5 acid shot things. I basically save them for harder enemies, and when there's a hard enemy I press them and she uses them and then when she's out I rest. Same thing with hold person, emergency heals, etc. It's not really a different level of strategy at all, just a different equation to work out tactically.
Using spellcasters as damage dealers in PF: Kingmaker reeks of desperation and poor decision-making. Most of the time you just want to crowd control enemies or buff allies so that they can destroy your foes. I get that ranged touch attacks are good, but mages generally specialize into crowd control, debuffing, and buffing while leaving the damage-dealing to others who are much better at it.
Great, compare that now to BG2's warrior gameplay.
Yeah, D&D is generally shit at mundane classes. It's part of what makes D&D garbage. But DAO is attempting to be World of Warcraft more than D&D except it forgot to give mundane classes anything as interesting as what WoW had to offer them. On top of that, DAO features amazingly bad abilities like the Assault which lets you hit 4x and do 40% less damage on each swing (ie. you should just fucking auto-attack instead) and dull shit like Shield Cover, Shield Defense, and Shield Wall which are mutually exclusive sustained abilities competing for the same overall defensive purposes. In fact a fully upgraded Shield Defense is strictly better than Shield Cover, rendering the latter a complete waste of talent points. Woops. Some of the more exciting abilities for Warriors and Rogues are hits that crit, hits that inflict a brief debuff or stun, an AoE hit, or hits that are done with bonus attack and armor penetration/damage. For the most part, though, you find yourself overwhelmingly
not giving a fuck about the amazing diversity of generic abilities that feel like reflavored autoattacks for the most part (and depending on animation speed, might actually be worse than just auto-attacking anyway). The only things you vaguely care about are the stuns and the rest you can just ignore.
Rogues in DAO also have the exciting ability to auto-crit whenever they hit things from behind (or whenever they use the Duelist ability that gives them auto-crits), making them vastly superior damage dealers to Warriors for no real reason. They also get Lethality which lets them use Cunning in place of their strength stat for damage (which is strictly better than strength in damage dealing) on top of a few cunning-scaling damage buffs from Bard and Assassin. In addition, while both Warriors and Rogues have an archery tree, neither of them really have any specializations that really work with Archery. Rogue can use Ranger (which is nothing but an entire spec dedicated to giving you a choice of pet slots, except they neutered the pets for some daft reason - if you use the brief moment pet tactics appear to click on their tactics, you can see their full array of your pet's abilities and it is much, much better than the shit they show on the menu) and Bard (a party buff spec). Warriors can use Champion (a party buff spec with enemy debuffs, except the stun scales off of strength) and I guess Reaver for Blood Frenzy (which is a horribly overcosted ability for a very weak damage buff) but that's it (technically you can activate Berserker's Berserk ability in melee and switch to a ranged weapon afterwards, I think something similar is also possible with the Rogue's Duelist spec). Incidentally, both Dual-wielding and Archery have abilities with effects whose resistance checks scale off of Cunning, a stat that is utterly garbage for Warriors because they don't get Lethality. Not that archery really matters when you can have Mages obliterate people for all your ranged damage-dealing needs. They simply make all your archers feel redundant and inadequate. But Mages also make your Warrior tanks feel inadequate when they have the best damage mitigation by far.
And I haven't even gotten into the amount of bugged shit and lying tooltips in DAO's talents. Mundane classes were blatantly an after-thought. It feels like they slapped in a bunch of abilities on crunch time and called it a day.
Seriously though, it was a true pleasure to read your critique posts ITT, however I completely disagree. While DA:O really suffer from lack of mobs variety if we put that aside somehow, I can't see how that particular cooldown system with pools of recources and combos on top of that is unreservedly inferior to the BG2's one.
I don't mind resource systems, but DAO's combat has plenty of severe failings. Perhaps BG2 does too, but DAO is honestly not praiseworthy in its execution of combat or its execution of a cooldown system.
Where you have a cooldown on some powerful spell in DA:O, in BG2 you have highest circle with the only one spell which you may use once per battle. Where you think you can cast 3 fireballs in a row your mage can get interrupted due to casting time every time. Cooldowns for minor spells and abilities are insignificant. And you have sustained abilities for tactical variety as a huge bonus.
Honestly spell scarcity has some merits, but you rarely need to mash your highest level of spells. And in DAO your mages can get interrupted by damage too. It just so happens that they are targeted much less thanks to DAO's ridiculous aggro system, can stack absurd defenses that make them impossible to get hit and cause them to take next-to-no damage when they do get hit (Mages are by far the best tanks in DAO), and the Combat Training skills massively increase the damage thresholds mages can endure before their spells are broken (in addition to Willpower also doing this), which combined with the shorter casting times means that while the mechanic does exist, you probably never noticed it.
As for OP DA:O spells examples... you've lost me there, it can be said about BG2 w/o any hesitation. Is that a bad design? I'd say it where the fun is.
I feel like it takes effort to avoid having something broken in your build. Misdirection Hex, Death Hex, Cone of Cold, Glyph of Paralysis, Glyph of Neutralization, Mana Clash, Waking Nightmare, Blood Wound, Blood Control, Shimmering Shield, Force Field, and more are all game breakers. To a lesser extent Heroic Defense and Haste are also crazy. Spell Might, Spell Wisp, and Spell Arcane Mastery all raise your spellpower and with enough spellpower (or just maxing the magic stat) you will also break the game by making everything to do massive amounts of damage (especially if you stack Vulnerability Hex and Affliction Hex to nuke their resistances into the ground and equip items that raise your elemental/spirit damage) and all resistance checks auto-fail (because the resistance thresholds scale off of your absurdly high spellpower). Wynne's personal unique ability is also a freakishly overpowered source of spellpower (among many other things), especially after you complete her personal quest. Wynne can break 200 spellpower easily if you just pour her stat upgrades into magic and give her Spell Might and Spell Wisp.
And then on top of that you have abilities and specs that are garbage. Mage's Shapeshifter spec is ill-conceived and gives a small amount of rather uninteresting abilities while being full-on anti-synergy with the rest of the class. There were a lot of better ways to do shapeshifter, honestly. The Mage's Arcane Warrior spec is a ridiculous joke. They completely forgot to give it any offensive abilities whatsoever and just gave it a set of defensive abilities. The NPC Arcane Warriors all get actual Warrior talents on top of their Mage spells, but players don't. So you never feel like a Warrior with the Arcane Warrior spec. You feel like a Mage in an indestructible suit of armor with some ridiculous defensive buffs on top. Odds are it was meant to unlock Warrior talents but they forgot to include it or called it a day in the interest of keeping every spec at 4 abilities.
