Dragon Age: Origins combat is better than Baldur's Gate 2

[Butter]

Bioware don't get credit for Icewind Dale.

 

[Cryomancer]

nwn is worse than any of those

NWN1 innovated by bringing MP and player made modules. Could be better if they followed more the P&P rules...

 

[jackofshadows]

And in DAO your mages can get interrupted by damage too

Yeah, forgot about that but it's correct for high tier spells only, right? Also when it rarely happens it usually means that you're already fucked anyway.

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.

Well, can't argue with that, honestly. Question is: what's worth praising then? Pretty much every rich RPG combat system can be properly raped as you colorful described in this case. Otherwise it probably would be a some shallow system, isn't it?

Specialisation balance and some design choices are the joke, absolutely. As well as most warrior/rogue active abilities usability (but again, at least they have some neat sustained/passive options, unlike in BG2).

Overall: whew, what a post, man. It almost made me go for DA:O install to abuse the shit out of it, even more so now

 

[Theldaran]

We can rest assured that Obsidian won't be making an isometric RPG anytime soon. They may make some RPG, but it will be formulaic and trendy to please the masses.

To put Obsidian to make a multiplayer game. Such dishonour SMH.

 

[Suicidal]

As someone who completed DA:O on the hardest difficulty and even enjoyed some parts of it, I can't understand how some people would in any way defend the combat of that game. It's literally 50+ hours of wiping identical groups of 4-5 legally distinct orcs with aoe spells and the occasional boss fight in which you have your fattest character stand in front of it and heal spam him till the boss dies.

Not that the combat in BG 2 is much better, but at least the enemy pool consists of more than 10 mobs.

 

[Semiurge]

As someone who completed DA:O on the hardest difficulty and even enjoyed some parts of it, I can't understand how some people would in any way defend the combat of that game. It's literally 50+ hours of wiping identical groups of 4-5 legally distinct orcs with aoe spells and the occasional boss fight in which you have your fattest character stand in front of it and heal spam him till the boss dies.

Not that the combat in BG 2 is much better, but at least the enemy pool consists of more than 10 mobs.

AoE spells are not the only way to obliterate practically anyone, it's laughably easy to exploit the AI by using forcefield on the ally currently targeted by the boss and having your ranged allies and rogues chip away its health while it's attacking a target that can't take damage!

Should someone more vital like a mage get targeted she (or another mage) can cast forcefield on herself.

 

[DalekFlay]

First, I never said I had trouble. The issue with DA:O was the sheer number of mind-numbing combats against the same creatures over and over again every three steps. It was agonizingly tedious. It kills any thought of even considering another run through the game, knowing I will have to face that shit again in the end. It's like they just couldn't be bothered to introduce anything original or any story elements to the end of the game and just decided to pad it out with five and a half hours of constant combat while you wander around a group of caves that look similar.

Only area where the trash mobs bothered me was the Deep Roads. They're heavy elsewhere too, but the game being designed around cooldowns and per-encounter health means average combat encounters go much faster and require less attention. Not saying that's good or bad, it just makes them less painful.

 

[NJClaw]

As someone who completed DA:O on the hardest difficulty and even enjoyed some parts of it, I can't understand how some people would in any way defend the combat of that game. It's literally 50+ hours of wiping identical groups of 4-5 legally distinct orcs with aoe spells and the occasional boss fight in which you have your fattest character stand in front of it and heal spam him till the boss dies.

Not that the combat in BG 2 is much better, but at least the enemy pool consists of more than 10 mobs.

AoE spells are not the only way to obliterate practically anyone, it's laughably easy to exploit the AI by using forcefield on the ally currently targeted by the boss and having your ranged allies and rogues chip away its health while it's attacking a target that can't take damage!

Should someone more vital like a mage get targeted she (or another mage) can cast forcefield on herself.

Yeah, but Force Field only makes AoE spells even better since you can cast them without worrying about damaging your allies.

 

[Absinthe]

Which I cannot really comment on, as I haven't played the game in ages. Perhaps will do soon to refresh my memory. Not very clear what do you mean with auto-piloting skills. That you use them without thinking?

Yes. That the pattern in which you deploy your abilities becomes a rote exercise before long. It helps that so many encounters are fundamentally the same shit too.

How is this so here but not in BG? Because of the limited number of casts? Wouldn't having to deal with cooldowns actually make you think twice before using a spell that you may need later?

The issue is that you don't need them later. You're almost always better off spending them now so you can use them more times in the same fight. The only abilities you contemplate holding in reserve are healing spells, usually. And hard disables, in the sense that there is no point to stunning enemies that are already stunned.

It seems to me this would be more an issue of the spell selection and encounter design rather than cooldowns themselves.

Sure, and cooldown-based design can be executed well. It just isn't in DAO.

About the Glyph of Paralysis' issue I cannot say much, I should replay the game to remember what it did. Perhaps this issue could be solve either by altering how fast it recharges or by giving skills "charges", which allow you to use them multiple times and each finished cooldown gives you back 1 charge.

The easiest way to solve it is to remove all cooldowns when out of combat, use a glyph cap, and if you have glyphs active at cap, you get a 30-40 second CD on your glyph at the start of combat. Charge-based is also an option but at any rate you should not do cooldowns out of combat if you're already doing full out-of-combat recovery and never implementing timed missions.

Yes but my overall point is that if it's done well, which it is in DA:O, then that stuff spawns different strategies, not worse strategies.

The strategies that revolve around Glyph of Paralysis trivialize the game.

• Step 1: Trap a corner with 2 glyphs (and maybe small claw traps too) (with a large enough span of open terrain, just place traps on a straight line between you and enemies and keep enough distance they have to run over them).
• Step 2: Stealthed Rogue scouts ahead and pulls enemies from absurd distance with a bow then runs across corner/wherever you put the traps.
• Step 3: The idiots will walk over your traps and instantly 2 or more enemies (a single glyph can affect more than one enemy, on occasion) are CC'd.

Once you get into the habit of long-distance pulling another design flaw becomes apparent: You can only pull enemies within your LoS, so carefully managing your distance allows you to split up enemy mob packs by ensuring only a portion of them appear within your LoS. It's even possible to cast giant AoEs on doors and kill enemies on the other side without beginning combat. (It's also possible to trap the door and then open it, or trap a corner, have the rogue open door, then pull enemies and run to the corner.)

This long-distance pulling also reminds me that kiting gets really fucking dumb in DAO because they utterly failed to factor this obvious possibility into their combat mechanics/AI, so you can effortlessly aggro monsters and kite them in circles, and if for some reason it isn't easy enough as is, you can add a movement speed bonus (Swift Salve, Haste, or Stinging Swarm form) or give enemies a movement speed penalty (too many abilities to count). Makes you wonder what was going through their heads if they implement slow effects in the game but never ponder kiting as an abusable strategy. I mean, just what are you even implementing movement speed slowing effects for? Probably just thought of them as generic RPG debuffs, eh? DAO's a mess of brainless design alright. Still, it's easier to just rotate forcefields on a now-invulnerable tank who won't de-aggro because DAO's aggro system is hot garbage too.

The game is balanced around one paralysis glyph at a time,

It is not. Initially the tooltip mentioned something like a cap of being able to have 3 (or was it 4?) glyphs of paralysis at the same time at max. But the cooldown and fixed duration made it impossible to have more than two. Even now it mentions that there is a limited number of glyphs you can sustain simultaneously. If they wanted you to have 1 paralysis glyph at a time, they would've simply made a 1 glyph cap.

and the combat scenarios designed around it,

You must be joking. Preparing Glyphs of Paralysis and Small Claw Traps will turn most combat encounters into jokes. The design in no way compensated for the ability to abuse traps. Also when they nerfed the shit out of Grease Fire because idiots didn't understand the principle of not standing in fire, the Grease Trap + Fire trap combo got ruined (along with the spell combo). Then again pre-nerf Grease Fire was pretty OP. You could do massive piles of damage with that stunt. In addition to all that, there are also a number of triggered cutscenes leading to combat that will completely fuck your traps by gratuitously repositioning fucking everyone and other encounters where combat is not initiated until after a predictable point, letting you load up endless amounts of traps on a location and insta-kill your enemies. Sometimes when you walk up to a dialogue with enemies before killing them, you can just drop a dozen traps at their feet first. Why not? It's not like the enemies in any way, shape, or form react to the use of traps. They'll just bluster into them and get fucked, always. Such exquisite design. They really designed their combat around the use of traps alright.



That also reminds me, combat scenarios frequently suffer from no actual design at all. The overwhelming majority of combat encounters are nothing but sheer fucking trash mobs which do not pose a real challenge. It's fucking horrible. They needed a lot more hand-designed encounters or at least put in more enemies that can actually do fairly scary things to you if you don't pay attention (seriously, install Slinks S3 Ravage mod to make encounters less mind-numbingly awful). Which brings me to yet another issue with DAO's combat design: Courtesy of free and infinite out-of-combat regen, these trash encounters fail to serve any purpose at all other than being wastes of time and bundles of exp and loot. Normally, without effortless recovery, they at least tended to serve a purpose as a form of attrition, forcing you to ration out your resources carefully and manage injuries so you're still in good condition for the next fight. That same encounter that's a joke when you're in top condition becomes pretty scary if you just had a boss fight with your party injured, your mages low on spells, and you don't have many items to use. Even leading up to a boss fight it's a bit of a different equation, asking you how much you're willing to expend to purchase victory here without putting yourself at risk down the line. But in DAO you are always in perfect condition at the start of every fight. If you suck, maybe your characters have some injuries (which make for really small debuffs) since you get free revivals for dead party members too, but you can easily remove those with Lesser Injury Kits.

Then again expecting quality from Bioware's combat encounters is probably a bit too much. These are the guys who thought level scaling and stat-padding was a clever way to handle combat difficulty. Still, DAO is a fucking mess of fail and mediocrity.

so it's not inferior just different. The limitation breeds different tactics.

Stop being a fucking apologist. It's shit design that wasn't thought through. The "different tactics" this limitation breeds is that I found myself casting a glyph, waiting 40 seconds, casting a 2nd glyph, then pulling monsters across whatever corner where I placed my glyphs so I could get 2x paralysis and have 30-20 seconds left before my 40sec CD was up (so occasionally I get to benefit from 3 glyphs of paralysis per mage in a single battle). It wasted my time because it was designed so you could use multiple glyphs. It was merely inconvenient to do so due to half-assed last-minute changes. A lot of the coding in DAO suggests to me that these people don't have very strong conceptualization skills and often resort to shitty bandaids (and produce loads of buggy code). It's inferior, alright.

Same with being able to do cone of cold pretty often, heal repeatedly, etc. In Pathfinder I'm avoiding damage as much as possible, in DA:O I'm more managing damage, but both involve thought and planning. In a shitty system not designed and balanced for tactical use of cooldowns it would be an issue, but you can say the same thing about poorly designed per-encounter games.

Make no mistake, it is very possible to avoid damage in DAO. As a Dwarf (or using DLC items, but all DLC content is broken and best avoided, except Shale), you can gear your way to 100% spell resistance. You can also stack enough defense that enemies cannot hit you at all unless they are the very rare enemy that uses Perfect Striking (which is Ser Cauthrien, really), and even then it might be possible to cheese a defense score high enough. Stack these two and you basically cannot be hit except by the rare non-spell effect or ability that auto-hits (I think Overwhelm auto-hits). I think with DLC items and Rogue's evasion talent (or Arcane Warrior's Fade Shroud) you can also stack up 100% dodge. Yes, in DAO Mages get to have the best dodge, the best defense scores, the best armor rating, and the best elemental resistances. They can also self-buff their physical and mental resistance scores to make them non-issues. At least Warriors can get +100 attack for a while with Perfect Striking and Rogues get auto-crits, but if a Mage casts Curse of Death all misses become hits and all hits become auto-crits on the victom of their choice too. There's also a curse that turns crits into hits and hits into misses for the enemy of your choice. And in Awakening a Rogue has an ability that gives him 100% dodge for 15 seconds and Mages can run around with Fade Shroud and Fade Shield active for +45% dodge before factoring in items, because Awakening content is stupid like that.

Yeah, forgot about that but it's correct for high tier spells only, right? Also when it rarely happens it usually means that you're already fucked anyway.

It applies to all spells, I believe. It's just that the high tier ones have obvious and longer casting times.

Well, can't argue with that, honestly. Question is: what's worth praising then? Pretty much every rich RPG combat system can be properly raped as you colorful described in this case. Otherwise it probably would be a some shallow system, isn't it?

It's precisely because the design is so shallow that the system is so easily raped. The fact that magic is a god stat for mages and dexterity is a god stat for everyone else is a pretty clear design failure. The fact that warriors have so many abilities offering such ridiculous variations on the same stunts is another failure. The fact that they forgot to give Sten a specialization or racial stats is also a failure. Absurdly convenient potions on extremely low 5 second cooldowns which can be circumvented by rotating different size bottles is also a failure. There are so very many failures in design.

Specialisation balance and some design choices are the joke, absolutely. As well as most warrior/rogue active abilities usability (but again, at least they have some neat sustained/passive options, unlike in BG2).

I'm honestly annoyed with how many of them are basically the exact same shit with a slightly different flavor. I already pointed out how shield & sword has 3 excessively similar mutually exclusive sustained abilities. Oh, and Dual Striking has an animation bug that causes every 3rd hit to never connect (woops). I think if you practice animation cancelling you can get much higher damage with that one. And the Assassin's Lacerate talent does not work because it was originally designed as a sustained ability so because Lacerate's code checks if the sustain is active in order to do something, it now does nothing. Arrow of Slaying suffers from someone not realizing that the carat symbol (This one: ^) does a bitwise xor operation instead of an exponent, so that one doesn't work properly either and becomes oddly exploitable depending on the specific level difference between yourself and your opponent (level difference of 0 and preferably 1 are better than otherwise, but a level difference of 2 and 3 is bad, but 4 and bigger is solid damage, albeit worse than if it worked as designed), but the entire ability is pretty much dogshit since it's only good for killing trash mobs and does garbage damage against boss mobs. And a number of abilities that propagate from their target (Chain Lightning, Scattershot), will fail to hit further enemies if a target dies (because the programmers didn't account for the possibility that these abilities might kill their targets, which would cause them to become a different type of object when they're trying to propagate from the object in question).

And on top of that there are a large number of talents that do not, in fact, perform like their tooltips describe (like Stunning Blows, Destroyer, Flurry, and Punisher, among others). And then you have talents that are shitty passives or worthless effects, like Dual-Weapon Mastery, which after the 1.02a dex-to-damage patch was a shit idea since if you invest into 36 dex you typically don't want to switch to 100% strength weapons instead of 50% dex daggers. Reaver's Blood Frenzy is also pretty horrible, since you gain +1 damage for each 10% of max health you are missing and as a sustain it consumes a large amount of stamina plus it gives you negative health regen. Templar's Holy Smite and Reaver's Aura of Pain also both do terrible damage. The only good news about those specializations is that Templar's Cleanse tends to be useful (the mana draining hits are not, when you have shit like Mana Clash, Mana Cleanse, and Glyph of Neutralization at your disposal) and that Holy Smite can do a 10 second aoe stun (but it has friendly fire risks and the resistance check scales with the Templar's willpower, which is typically garbage) and the Reaver's Frightening Appearance is similarly a 10 second targeted disable, which is based on strength. Reaver can also self-heal with Devour, but you already have health potions for that.

Overall: whew, what a post, man. It almost made me go for DA:O install to abuse the shit out o[Qf it, even more so now

If you want more abusive shit, there's a heartbeat bug on how DoTs are resolved causing the same DoTs to tick multiple times if you stack them, so if you cast Walking Bomb and then Virulent Walking Bomb on a target, WB will tick normal and VWB will tick double. Stack mages and you can do stupid things here. Or if you get bored, you can make a party of shapeshifting mages and have them cast synchronized Poison Spit with Spider Shape to destroy pretty much anything and I think synchronized Stinging Swarm too. Then again with enough spellpower you can murder enemies with your autoattack alone (which auto-hits). That also plays into anothing design failure of the Mage class and Arcane Warriors: There is no fucking reason to switch away from staves if you want auto-attack damage, since you already have monster damage (unless you are aiming for auto-crits with Curse of Death, anyway). Anyway, this shit is also why the Corrupted Spider Queen can brutally murder folks when it starts stacking Poison Spit attacks on them. They removed the 2x damage from the Corrupted Spider Queen's Poison Spit because it did too much damage but apparently fucking no one noticed that it was doing geometrically scaling damage instead of linearly scaling damage.

Given the sheer amount of fucking bugs and fail in the game's combat design, you really have to wonder how fucking bad their playtesters are. Any decent game tester knows how to do destructive testing and notice when shit's acting wonky, but obviously not these guys. It's like they got a random bunch of casuals to do their playtesting for them. I feel like they followed the old maxim of "We'll test it in production" and then for bonus points all their patchwork was completely half-assed too. So many broken quest flags that went unfixed and so many broken spells and talents that went unfixed. In 1.02a they raised cooldowns and altered durations on a number of OP spells, including Cone of Cold, but no one fucking noticed that they forgot to make it give physical resistance checks to anyone who is not the direct target of the spell (the rest just get auto-frozen).

Also traps and poisons are abusable. Really, make sure to put 1 rank of Poison-Making on every party member so they can use poisons and grenades. When it comes to poisons, more is better. Stack everything you can. IIRC you can stack all the poisons in the game (including multiple ranks of the same poison) and do giant rainbows of bonus damage with each swing, unless they stealth nerfed it in a later patch. When it comes to traps, Small Claw Traps are where it's at, since the duration and physical resistance check is the exact same for small and large traps. Lures (in particular Overpowering Lures) are also solid. DAO frankly suffers from an excess of disables, and it's clear that immobilize (like from Small Claw Trap) was originally intended to be a separate effect, but they just made them into hard disables as placeholders and then just shipped it like that without ever fixing it. And when a Rogue has Stealthy Item Use you can just throw grenades at enemies and plant traps at their feet without ever de-stealthing. Makes the solo Rogue run a joke.

I didn't even mention the DLC abilities from Warden's Keep. Those are all broken and just full-on cheat codes, honestly, because that's how EA wanted to make money in DLC design: Keep the production costs fucking low by cutting corners (Did you know that Leliana's Song DLC was originally supposed to take place in Orlais? Budget cuts - and a shitty development tool that made doing anything unnecessarily arduous compared to the NWN days - resulted in the infamous DLC level reuse instead.) and bait people into buying it with OP prizes and fucking DLC salesmen in your party camp and DLC salesmen in random encounters. They even did that OP DLC items shit to the Collector's Edition and pre-order exclusives. Odds are the patches suffered from EA mismanagement too, but I'm sure a good part of the blame is uniquely Bioware's for being inattentive programmers and playtesters. Honestly, you should disable all of the Bioware DLC (other than Shale) if you want to maintain some semblance of balance. And you should install a bunch of mods to fix broken combat and quest content (Dain's Fixes, Qwinn's Ultimate Fixpack, Detailed Tooltips, and Two Specializations Sten are recommended).

As someone who completed DA:O on the hardest difficulty and even enjoyed some parts of it, I can't understand how some people would in any way defend the combat of that game. It's literally 50+ hours of wiping identical groups of 4-5 legally distinct orcs with aoe spells and the occasional boss fight in which you have your fattest character stand in front of it and heal spam him till the boss dies.

Not that the combat in BG 2 is much better, but at least the enemy pool consists of more than 10 mobs.

Pretty much. Slinks S3 Ravage mod comes strongly recommended to make trash encounters less mind-numbingly bad.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

As someone who completed DA:O on the hardest difficulty and even enjoyed some parts of it, I can't understand how some people would in any way defend the combat of that game. It's literally 50+ hours of wiping identical groups of 4-5 legally distinct orcs with aoe spells and the occasional boss fight in which you have your fattest character stand in front of it and heal spam him till the boss dies. Not that the combat in BG 2 is much better, but at least the enemy pool consists of more than 10 mobs.

It is not about defending it. It is a comparison with BG2. BG2 have more enemies, but the combat is still worse because moment to moment gameplay feels shitty. The gameplay of DA:O, while simpler, it is much more enjoyable. I don't understand why you keep looking for an additional reason beyond that.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Baldur's Gate: Time Stop, Spell Trigger, a fuckload of defense spells, a fuckton of defence piercing spells...
Dragon Age: haha Cone of Ice go brrrrr x333

 

[DalekFlay]

The strategies that revolve around Glyph of Paralysis trivialize the game.

I found your post really interesting as an example of how certain traps and glyphs can be used. However the ability to cheese the game with certain mechanics doesn't really relate to the overall cooldown debate. There are plenty of videos about cheese tactics and soloing the game for RtwP games as well. The core point I was making was that combat design can still be challenging and tactical whether it's balanced around per-encounter abilities or cooldowns. It just takes a good developer designing things correctly and both can be just as engaging, but in different ways. If you feel DA:O wasn't designed well due to the strategies you pointed out then fine. I've never been one to look for exploits (or use traps for that matter) so it never effected me, but I get it. However I don't think it changes my overall feelings on the matter, that cooldowns aren't inherently worse, just different.

 

[Absinthe]

I don't think cooldowns are inherently worse, but that they are poorly executed in DAO and the overwhelming majority of games, and that you have to wonder what you're doing if you're implementing both cooldowns and stamina/mana as a mechanic, since both of them already operate as a limiting factor against spamming spells (of course, a lot of bad designers think of mana as "just generic RPG things" you gotta have so mana pools are too easy to trivialize, like in DAO). In addition players prefer to have a measure of control over what options they can use instead of having the game designer make that decision for them with cooldown mechanics. And any time you have gameplay boil down to "play with yourself" instead of "interact with your enemies" (because you thought ability rotations were the way to go) you're probably failing as a designer on some level.

 

[NJClaw]

Just to understand what everyone is talking about: what are some examples of games where cooldowns have been well implemented?

 

[Anonona]

Just to understand what everyone is talking about: what are some examples of games where cooldowns have been well implemented?

It has been a long time since last I played, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think to remember Guild Wars 1 being quite a decent implementation of such. Particularly, classes like Mesmer where designed in a way that made timing and correct use of skills essential to shut down enemies, and a good Mesmer was extremely effective. I'll venture to say that even a game like Xenoblade Chronicles did an ok job with some of its characters, as many of the skills interact with one another and combat was very fast. You or the enemy could die in seconds, and holding on onto skills or using them usually meant a great difference. Because the skill pool was limited, it also meant that you had to be careful with skill selections. But it did have the "rotation" issues, specially with certain characters so is an iffy example. And perhaps I'll be booed for this, but D:OS2 wasn't half bad, spells usually had multiple effects and different possible combos, together with memory limiting how many of this skills could you take and the AP system, meant that combat was at times like "optimization puzzles", choosing when to use certain actions and when to wait for a bigger effect. Of course there were many issues with encounter design, armor system and skill selection among others, but the combat system itself was decently competent.

 

[Cryomancer]

Just to understand what everyone is talking about: what are some examples of games where cooldowns have been well implemented?

Not on RPG's. But on Red Orchestra 2, my MG 42 can overheat, so i need to wait cooldown or change the barrel. Autocannons on War Thunder overheat(can be fixed mid air on arcade but need to land to repair on more realistic difficulties)

• Has a explanation to why exist
• Makes sense
• Doesn't take out your attention from the game

In general, large caliber automatic cannons like my 50mm Me 262 variant, overreats with few shots.

a 50mm shell is so deadly

 

[JarlFrank]

One thing that DA did better than BG was that it had less trash fights.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh

DA is the one game that gives me PTSD flashbacks whenever I think of it because it had countless copypasted trash encounters in every single dungeon room. At least twice as many trash encounters as both BG games combined.

 

[Nano]

At least twice as many trash encounters as both BG games combined.

Sounds to me like you have your nostalgia goggles on.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

One thing that DA did better than BG was that it had less trash fights.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh

DA is the one game that gives me PTSD flashbacks whenever I think of it because it had countless copypasted trash encounters in every single dungeon room. At least twice as many trash encounters as both BG games combined.

Lilura, we wish to defer to your authoritative expertise.

 

[Lagole Gon]

These are not comparable because trash combat in DA:O takes much longer. Such is the nature of shit cooldown mechanics and level scalling.
It takes much longer until it doesn't. They graciously turn off scalling near the end.

 

[luj1]

It has been a long time since last I played, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think to remember Guild Wars 1

I wanted to say GW 1 too, what a great game

 

[Lilura]

Lilura, we wish to defer to your authoritative expertise.

Everyone must bow to Jarl's knowledge of the trashmob.

 

[Cryomancer]

I have heard that on the first game with cooldowns - Avalon: The Legend Lives, it was more like a "soft" cd vs a hard cd.

What i mean, but soft vs hard? Hard caps is like gothic, you can't use a weapon if you lack the strength, softcaps are like dark souls where your weapon is far from being effective, but your lv 1 sorcerer can use black knight halberd, clunky but he can use. The same applies to cooldowns for eg, a wreid SCI fi game where a sci-fi implant allow you to produce fire but it can overheat(which BTW is a good explanation to cooldowns). A hard cooldown would be like "you can't produce fire", a soft cooldown would be like "you take CON damage, become fatigued and must make a FORTITUDE save with X DC or lose control over your flames"

And honestly, soft stat requirement and soft cd managing seems way better.

You kill ~3k enemies during playthrough of bg2

Except that 99% of this enemies die from a single fireball/wail of the banshee.

Trash mobs on high lethality games aren't a problem.

 

[JarlFrank]

At least twice as many trash encounters as both BG games combined.

Sounds to me like you have your nostalgia goggles on.

No. I have replayed both BG games more recently than I played DA. I don't like BG1 overly much and have stated so on multiple occasions, because of generally lame encounter design and a bland setting compared to BG2. But even my not-so-well-liked BG1 has much better encounter design than DA.

Comparing body counts of the games isn't how you do a proper comparison. A game may throw 50 mobs at you but there are 10 different varieties of mobs, or a game may throw 40 mobs at you but every mob is the same. Which one has more trash mobs? Answer: the game with 40 mobs, even though the total number is lower, there is less variety compared to the other game, which makes the combat against these mobs more repetitive and therefore a rote exercise in performing the exact same tactical movements again and again.

The BG series has a huge variety of different enemies, especially BG2. You have plenty of mob fights in both games, but many of these are challenging to get through. Not every mob is a trash mob. Copypasted and trivial to beat mobs are trash mobs. Due to variety and challenge, the mobs of the BG series are not as trash mobby as the mobs of Dragon Age.

Trash mobs in BG1 could consist of xvarts, goblins, bandits, orcs, gnolls, wolves. In BG2... uh... I don't actually remember BG2 having any trash mobs as such, since its level design is focused on unique hand-placed encounters with a huge enemy variety. Even when you encounter trashier enemies they tend to be arranged in a way that makes them interesting (like the orcs shooting at you from behind a wall at the start of Firkraag's dungeon: a generic enemy, but placed in a way that makes the encounter intersting, therefore not trash).

Meanwhile in DA I remember slaying my way through the exact same hurlock encounter dozens of times. A single dungeon would consist of half a dozen rooms on each level, and each room would contain the exact same copypasted hurlock encounter over and over again. In the werewolf forest, it was the exact same werewolf encounter over and over again in each room. There was some variation throughout the game, but no variation within levels themselves. If you went through a hurlock-themed dungeon (Deep Roads, for example) hurlock encounters were all you ever got.

Part of what makes trash encounters so trash is also their closeness to each other. If a game has 20 goblin mobs but each of these has half a dozen other fights in between, it won't feel as trash mobby as when these 20 goblin mobs appear right after each other. Dragon Age would often drop the same copypasted encounter on you a dozen times in the same dungeon.

This is why Dragon Age felt so tedious to me. Copypasted encounters that weren't very challenging chained next to each other so you'd fight the same encounter two dozen times in a row with no variety in between. Terrible.

 

[Lilura]

An even-handed overview of BG's combat encounter design, posted on the 'Dex [link]