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

[Cryomancer]

Not only that. Baldur's Gate 2 trash encounters are masqueraded by the amazing questing. Most games only includes none or only one stronghold. BG includes different stronghold for different PC classes AND different quests with unique dungeons to each PC class. Solo the planar sphere as a sorcerer was hard due the fact that a lot of enemies are golems and you need to fight enemies able to cast tier 8 magic while you can only cast tier 5~6(reached lv 12). This is just a SIDE quest on chapter 2. All BG from chapter 1 to the final of ToB is amazing.

I had to cheese in many parts to solo the dungeon.

In fact, this topic made me start another BG2 run while i have ZERO interest of re playing DA:O.

 

[Absinthe]

According to this post:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...gate-series-thread.80753/page-22#post-3109600
You kill ~3k enemies during playthrough of bg2
How many enemies you will kill during DAO playthrough?

Answer this and we will know which game has more trash mobs.

Also ~3k, but much more with DLC and expansion. And they are slower to kill. See: Roguey's post here.

 

[Sharpedge]

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.

That is why I say replay it more recently, I replayed DA:O last year and replayed BG only a month ago. BG 1 is filled with trash mobs. DA:O has trash as well (which I did not deny by the way) but its not on the same scale as BG.

 

[Cryomancer]

Trash mobs on DA:O - Cast spells on 666 second cooldown to prepare the battlefield and spam the same rotation that you already used 666 times and waste another 666 hours of your life.

Trash mobs on BG1/BG2 - Cast Skull Trap/Cloudkill/Wail of The Banshee and end the encounter in 6 seconds.

Seriously. Most mobs from end of chapter 4 can die by a single cloudkill

cloudkill

BG2 also allows you to combo spells in very interesting ways. Examples?

• Animate dead + cloudkill + ice storm (undeads taking and taking zero friendly fire damage)
• Delayer blast fireball + fire elemental/efreet
• Spell Sequencer + 3x casts of skull trap dealing up to 60d6 MAGICAL damage at lv 20
• Spell sequencer + 3x lower resist to reduce enemy magical resistance by a lot
• Spell sequencer + 3x Greater Malison to reduce enemy saves by a lot.
• Chain Contingency + Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting which reduces the greatest drawback of the spell(casting time) and can end a high level encounter one cast, few creatures can survive 60d8 damage in a instant;
  
• Summon Efreet + Incendiary cloud. Incinerate enemies while your Efreets are safe
• Black blade of the disaster + Haste + Stoneskin + Mirror Images + Tenser's Transformation or like i like to say "fuck the enemy magical resistance/immunity"
• Improved Alacrity + anything with low casting time ===> a lot of people complain about it being OP, but is a necessity to solo ToB

I defeated the enemy from the video bellow using summons to distract him, but her strategy is amazing.

Spoiler

Anyway, there are a lot of debate among BG community if Skull Trap is better or worse than Fireball. IMO Skull Trap is better since can be used as a trap, scale up to lv 20 instead of 10, enemies cast way less spell Immunity to protect thenselves VS necromancy than vs evocation, deals magical damage, far less resisted than fire and the tradeoff is that is more subjected to friendly fire. Be able to deal 20d6 magical damage with a "mere"(for high level standards) tier 3 spell is so amazing... Here is a long debate/poll and note that around 50% of players prefers fireball and 50% Skull Trap https://sorcerers.net/community/threads/poll-fireball-vs-skulltrap.20149/

With Dragon Age in other hands, everyone knows which one are the best spells.

 

[Silly Germans]

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.

To be fair, Baldur's Gate 1 also suffers from the copy paste in certain areas. The Nashkel mines are kobolds after kobolds, the Gnoll fortress is one big trash mob and
i think there were some areas where you fight nothing but the same bandits. One forest also throws nothing but spiders at you. But it also has areas that are mixed
and combat is faster so it isn't as tiresome as in DA:O. And it doesn't repeat such areas multiple time, i guess that is the biggest offense of DA:O.

 

[Lacrymas]

How many enemies you will kill during DAO playthrough?

According to Roguey -

Everything else suffered from too few enemy types in general, but I don't think it beats PoE in terms of sheer quantity of pointless fights.

Near-completionist kill count for PoE: 1300 Near-completionist kill count for DA:O: 2600-2800

 

[Absinthe]

That's a near-completionist count of the main campaign, not counting DLC and expansions. Judging by Roguey's screenshot there, with the strongest boss defeated being the Archdemon, there was no Awakening, Witch Hunt, or Golems of Amgarrak completed, seeing as they all have higher level boss monsters. It's possible Return to Ostagar and Warden's Keep were not done either. And Leliana's Song and Darkspawn Chronicles are both stand-alone DLC modules. Most people simply do not bother to purchase any DLC (because they suck) and are just playing Base Game + Stone Prisoner. So if we're talking Ultimate Edition completionist count rather than DAO base game completionist count, the number of trash mobs will be much, much higher.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm playing DA:O casually currently with a bunch of mods, especially difficulty ones, because it has fully voiced German dialogue and a ridiculous amount of text, so if I manage to finish everything I'd report back with a screenshot. You have quite a lot of things to mod to make it playable, along with deactivating the rofl-inducing items that come with the Ultimate Edition.

 

[Roguey]

DA:O is significantly more combat dense than both BG and BG2. My admittedly non-completionist run of BG with the expansion was 861, a little over 700 without the expansion. The more complete BG2 was a little over 1000, 2000 with Throne of Bhaal.

That being said, you can kill enemies in DA:O quickly if you master the magic system. The shattering mechanic helps a great deal (don' t use a patch greater than 1.02 so you can do it to lieutenant-ranked enemies). Plus mega-awesome aoes like storm of the century.

 

[Absinthe]

If you don't use a patch greater than 1.02 you can also use Grease Fire to obliterate swathes of enemies. They stealth nerfed that in 1.04 and never mentioned it. 1.02 does introduce the garbage dex-to-damage change though. And without 1.04 Witch Hunt won't run. If you use Dain's Fixes you can also obliterate enemies fast with Spell Wisp, Spell Might, lightning damage gear, and Chain Lightning spells. Otherwise Chain Lightning will fail to bounce because it kills its targets. If it's not killing well enough, consider adding Stinging Swarm. One-shotting enemies is the easiest if you use the Entropic Death spell combination (Death Hex and Death Cloud). But with enough damage any AoE will kill large amounts of enemies. If you have the patch but want to run the un-nerfed version of Grease Fire anyway (affects a Tower of Ishal fight where a Grease Fire occurs which will obliterate the party if you don't get out of the fire, just like pre-nerf), download this.

For non-mages the only one-shotting moves available are Final Blow from willpower-based Warriors (which is a joke build, but you do get the 10 second aoe stun from Templar's Holy Smite to work on top of your giant Final Blow so it is a functional build, especially with the bonus damage Berserker spec gives), or just hitting someone in the back with a giant maul for autocrit (wear crit damage boosting gear too) as a pure cunning Rogue because Mauls get the highest strength multiplier, resulting in massive damage with Lethality and backstab autocrit, and flanking compensates for your low attack score anyway, especially once you add Song of Valor.

 

[DalekFlay]

That's a near-completionist count of the main campaign, not counting DLC and expansions. Judging by Roguey's screenshot there, with the strongest boss defeated being the Archdemon, there was no Awakening, Witch Hunt, or Golems of Amgarrak completed, seeing as they all have higher level boss monsters. It's possible Return to Ostagar and Warden's Keep were not done either. And Leliana's Song and Darkspawn Chronicles are both stand-alone DLC modules. Most people simply do not bother to purchase any DLC (because they suck) and are just playing Base Game + Stone Prisoner. So if we're talking Ultimate Edition completionist count rather than DAO base game completionist count, the number of trash mobs will be much, much higher.

My recollection is that only Awakening and Stone Prisoner are worth doing. Though I think Witch Hunt was referenced in DA:I.

 

[NJClaw]

That's a near-completionist count of the main campaign, not counting DLC and expansions. Judging by Roguey's screenshot there, with the strongest boss defeated being the Archdemon, there was no Awakening, Witch Hunt, or Golems of Amgarrak completed, seeing as they all have higher level boss monsters. It's possible Return to Ostagar and Warden's Keep were not done either. And Leliana's Song and Darkspawn Chronicles are both stand-alone DLC modules. Most people simply do not bother to purchase any DLC (because they suck) and are just playing Base Game + Stone Prisoner. So if we're talking Ultimate Edition completionist count rather than DAO base game completionist count, the number of trash mobs will be much, much higher.

My recollection is that only Awakening and Stone Prisoner are worth doing. Though I think Witch Hunt was referenced in DA:I.

Awakening is more than a simple dlc, it's a proper expansion with an impressive amount of content. On its own, it's bigger than all the other dlcs combined.

Witch Hunt is a despicable joke. As a kid I loved Morrigan and, since I never had the chance to play Witch Hunt, I always wondered how her arc really ended and felt like I was missing something important. I played it for the first time this year and now I really wish I didn't. Morrigan is barely in it and the conclusion is really underwhelming and doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if you sacrificed yourself to kill the archdemon.

 

[Roguey]

Morrigan is barely in it and the conclusion is really underwhelming and doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if you sacrificed yourself to kill the archdemon.

None of the DLC is canon if you died, but they let people import their characters so as to not screw them.

 

[Nano]

The weird thing is that Awakening does have an Orlesian Warden, unrelated to the DAO Warden, that you only get as the protag if you start Awakening without importing. But if you do import a dead Warden they just get resurrected. What a strange waste of development resources.

 

[Semiurge]

lightning damage gear

Were any of the elements even different? Lightning doesn't affect mana nor does cold slow stamina regeneration, or so I recall. The only difference was that some enemies are immune to fire or cold, but none are immune to lightning which made it the wisest choice.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

DA:O is significantly more combat dense than both BG and BG2. My admittedly non-completionist run of BG with the expansion was 861, a little over 700 without the expansion. The more complete BG2 was a little over 1000, 2000 with Throne of Bhaal.

Fucking autistic robot people

 

[Yosharian]

DA:O with zero magic on the hardest difficulty was a pretty fun run. I used a Dwarf rogue iirc

 

[Absinthe]

Were any of the elements even different? Lightning doesn't affect mana nor does cold slow stamina regeneration, or so I recall. The only difference was that some enemies are immune to fire or cold, but none are immune to lightning which made it the wisest choice.

Lightning reduces a non-mage's stamina by an amount equal to the damage dealt. It's a special property of lightning damage, but I don't think the other elements have effects. It was one of those half-assed things. Cold damage usually comes with freezing or slowing effects though, but it's not an inherent property of the damage (which makes frost weapons simply worse than flame weapons). The real reason I mentioned lightning was just because Chain Lightning can obliterate a lot of enemies very quickly without any risk of friendly fire, assuming you installed a fix so that it keeps bouncing when a target dies, that is. If you're fine with risking friendly fire you can just throw fireballs on enemies with lots of spell damage and +fire gear. Cooldown is extremely low to boot. For one-shotting bosses Entropic Death is the way to go or Mana Clash if we're only trying to one-shot mages.

DA:O with zero magic on the hardest difficulty was a pretty fun run. I used a Dwarf rogue iirc

Zero magic runs are still pretty easy if you just start abusing grenades, poisons, runes, traps, and/or build your characters for crowd control. Alternatively if you just run pure dex builds on everyone it becomes virtually impossible for your party members to get hit by anything other than magic (so stack spell resistance) or those attacks that automatically hit (like overwhelm). Pure cunning rogue duo will also permastun enemies and do massive damage with 100% strength-based weapons.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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

Well, it obviously is, Politician , duh! It allows me to LARP so much better!

Spoiler

 

[Semiurge]

Lightning reduces a non-mage's stamina by an amount equal to the damage dealt. It's a special property of lightning damage, but I don't think the other elements have effects. It was one of those half-assed things. Cold damage usually comes with freezing or slowing effects though, but it's not an inherent property of the damage (which makes frost weapons simply worse than flame weapons). The real reason I mentioned lightning was just because Chain Lightning can obliterate a lot of enemies very quickly without any risk of friendly fire, assuming you installed a fix so that it keeps bouncing when a target dies, that is. If you're fine with risking friendly fire you can just throw fireballs on enemies with lots of spell damage and +fire gear. Cooldown is extremely low to boot. For one-shotting bosses Entropic Death is the way to go or Mana Clash if we're only trying to one-shot mages.

I played it vanilla for as long as I could, it was already too late to apply any 3rd party patches when I got to Denerim and the game engine started to collapse under those few dozens of npc's and low poly houses in the market area. This was @ 1440p and the game really hates resolutions above 1080p. I never actually checked, but I doubted that old saves would've been compatible with the patched game. In the vanilla game there's a chance that mana clash could make the game crash so I chose not to pick it, and with the overpowered DLC gear the combat became trivial even on the hardest difficulty.

 

[Absinthe]

EA honestly did a lot to drag down DAO. There was the overpowered DLC gear and also just a lot of bad cuts and simplifications that occurred in the last year when EA took over Bioware.

 

[Roguey]

EA honestly did a lot to drag down DAO. There was the overpowered DLC gear and also just a lot of bad cuts and simplifications that occurred in the last year when EA took over Bioware.

Bioware did that all on their own.

 

[Lacrymas]

I don't think this game could've been significantly better even if they didn't cut corners or introduce op DLC gear (which you can disable anyway). The writing and lack of encounter design, mob variety and build diversity are what drag it down. Those things are mediocre at best from the very beginning, so it's not about budget or cut corners. The least they could've done is expand the specializations to affect how a character plays, i.e. more specializations like the Arcane Warrior, which I find the most successful out of all of them. I feel DA:O is lacking in effort in pretty much everything except map design and world building, and maybe companions (in terms of content and banter) but they suffer from the overall Disney-esque approach to the writing.

 

[Nano]

The writing

How in the world could anyone think DAO's writing is bad if we're strictly talking about video games? The writing, and character writing especially (not just companions), is way above the industry's average. Certainly better than BG2's, in any case.

lack of encounter design

Huge exaggeration.

but they suffer from the overall Disney-esque approach to the writing.

The what approach to the writing?

 

[Lacrymas]

Like I said, the writing is mediocre at best and it doesn't go anywhere. DA2 has better writing. In DA:O it comes off Disney-esque due to the way characters are framed and the overall adventuring with your bubbly companions to save the world from evil. Loghain is the crazy kook, Anora the manipulative bitch, Alistair a literal blond knight in shining armor who is framed to be rooted for, etc. The lack of encounter design is not an exaggeration, it's all the same all the time.