Dragon Age is hard....

[DynamicPenguin]

My advice, get a Healer quick (Circe of Magi)and then proceed by doing Red Cliff because its generally quite easy, especially with a healer. The game is meant to be Hard, even on medium so dont feel to bad about it, thats why Tactics are put into the game, to make it more difficult and forces you to reconcider your entire strategie. In my party I have Morrigan for AoE, Alistair to tank, Wynne to heal and myself as a Human rogue to deal out DPS (Dual weapons school with poisons) Good luck to you.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

snip

I'm finding it fucking impossible on normal, and I'm a Dalish rogue.

I just keep playing though, and I win after much toiling.

Hey, it's making the game longer at least.

Glad I'm not the only one then. Are you on the 360 too or on PC?

Bring a mage, that helps, a lot.
I played a mage on my first playthrough and I never had to many difficulties in normal mode.

My general strategy was:
- Make sure everyone jumps on Alistair, teach him Shield Wall and such to survive.
- Cast Blizzard if attacked by a mob of ranged fighters/mages to disable those.
- Keep your party out of it and focus them on the melee fighters coming to you.
- If you like, you can cast Tempest over the Blizzard, for added (and thanks to Blizzard unavoidable) damage.
- Cast Cone Of Cold on as many enemies as you can
- Follow with Stone Fist (shatters them, remember, Wynne has it too). Make other party members shatter some more with critical hit making attacks like Overwhelm and Critical Strike.
- If some still stand, use Sleep, Horror and Waking Nightmare in that combination.
- Clean up whatever survived the blizzard.

Some extra things that can help:
Make your tank Taunt enemies that go after your mages.
Glyphs are awesome. Combine Glyph of Repulsion and Glyph of paralysis and you get a paralysis explosion, stunning everything in a huge radius. Wynne can use Glyphs as self defense.
All your mages should know Heal. Order them to use it on whoever has less than 50% health, high priority in the tactics screen.
Crushing Prison, Petrify and Force Field can disable a powerful enemy so you can deal with them later.
Put in your non-mages tactics that they should drink a potion when below 25% health. Put in your mages (especially Wynne) tactics that they should drink a lesser lyrium potion when below 10% mana. Be sure to craft a lot of these! They are cheap to make.

Wow, very thorough advice there... definately gonna try some of that. Thanks

 

[CmdrGoob]

Warriors are fine, when I played a warrior on nightmare, I thought many parts were easier than with a mage on hard... it just depends.

What type of warrior are you making? What skills/talents? Who are your party members?

I've been using sword and shield talents, shield bash, pummel that kind of thing. Simple vanilla warrior stuff.

I usually roll with Sten, Leliana and Wynne (though I just met Zevron so trying him out, and am on my way to collect Shale)

OK, sword and shield style then. Got your specializations yet? If you can get champion and upgraded warcy, that's a great talent. Make sure you have taunt since you are a tanky style warrior, you need it to keep enemies focused on you. Try to get as much strength as possible with a bit of dexterity; the bonuses you get from levelling alone are enough to give you plenty of hitpoints and approximately enough stamina. Get some poisons skills when you have some spare skill points, bombs can do great damage and poisoning your weapon can be a handy little damage bonus; even 1 point in poisons at least lets you use any bombs and poisons you find.

Make sure Wynne is constantly using heal, regeneration and group heal, especially on you because you should be tanking. Fiddle with the tactics to help her do this automatically. Make sure she is using haste, too, and have her cast the defensive buff on you for tough fights. Make sure everyone is using their disabling skills as much as possible, either with the tactics screen or micro it yourself, and target tough enemies with disabling skills as much as possible.

You can buy as much elfroot as you want at the Dalish elf camp and as much lyrium dust as you want at the mage tower, buy up plenty and keep good stock of health and mana potions.

 

[TPiddy]

Yeah, these are some good suggestions. I was struggling with my mage, but found it significantly easier once I started experimenting with the tactics screen. It's a must have to succeed, especially on console... Here are a few things I found that worked well...

1. Make sure all of your non-healer characters drink their own health poultices. Set to 50% for anyone who has less than 300 health. Once they get over 300 health I find it's better to set it to 25% or you'll be wasting a lot of them. Also, don't use the "Use Item" menu for this, if you keep scrolling down you'll see "Use health poultice: least/most powerful".

2. Melee characters should have an entry in their tactics that tells them to use an AoE talent when surrounded. Something like two-handed sweep, war cry or whirlwind, but this can be changed to your liking.

3. Try using the targeting system to focus your attacks. I always make sure that one of my melee characters has an entry to tell them to attack anyone that attacks me, or to attack the person I'm attacking. I'll also typically set one of them to attack the guy with the lowest health. These are great to thin the numbers.

4. Mage characters are their own special joy. Wynne is a spirit healer so you could learn something like group heal. Also, be sure to put at least one entry in to tell her to heal an ally with low health, but also an entry to tell her to heal herself if she has low health. What I typically do is put the first entry as casting heal on an ally with less than 50% health, and my second entry is to cast group heal when wynne herself has less than 50% health. I do this because if Wynne is taking damage I can be pretty certain that the rest of my party has as well.

Also, try getting the Ranger class specialization for Leilana or Zevran. Don't do both, because you can't have more than one animal companion, regardless of how many rangers you have in your party. However, the animal companions are quite helpful and they help to even out the numbers a bit.

 

[Zero47]

It's all about a balanced party.

*You need a tank.
*You need a mage (order of importance: crowd control, buffs (HASTE), damage).
*You need damage dealers, one of them rogue to make sure you gett all the loot.

Generally mages are really effective because you can micromanage them alot.
Mage > Arcane warrior makes for really strong characters if you do it right,
get most of the buffs, all fo the AW spells, pump stats in magic and you're set.

 

[achilleas.k]

I dunno whatz wrongz with u, I'M BETTER THAN YOU HAHA!!!

...

Sorry I couldn't resist.

One general tip. Use your party. In all other Bioware games, I just let the party go with default actions, here I micromanage everything and I find that the game is quite challenging, but not impossible, on hard. I'm not particularly good at RPGs, but if playing WoW for 3 years has taught me anything, it's how to play in a party. A few friends of mine who have even more experience than me at RPGs found DA:O to be harder for this reason. Party managing is half necessary at normal and a must at higher difficulties.

high_castle and Jovlo pretty much covered it, but here's a few things I'd like to re-iterate (and add):
- Keep your inventory stocked up on health and lyrium potions.
- Have your tank (or if you're the tank) use taunting abilities so he can soak up the damage and avoid having stray enemies attack lightly armoured allies.
- Use tactics for potion consumption: Health for the tank and lyrium for the healer is important.
- ALWAYS have a healer in your party and a designated tank with a shield. I use Alistair and once he gets those sustained shield abilities up (shield wall) he's unkillable (with Wynne healing him constantly of course).
- Concentrate fire. If you're playing tank, have a rule for the two damagers to follow your target. If you're a damage dealer, follow the tank's target and have the other damage dealer follow him too. 2 enemies alive for the entire fight deal more damage than if one of them dies half way through.
- Protect the healer. I always keep a rule on a rogue to stun any enemy that's attacking Wynne, or I do it myself (I play a rogue).
- Beware of enemy mages! Those fireballs are a *****. Mages are more dangerous not only because of the damage they cause, but because, depending on the aggressiveness set for your allies in the tactics screen, an ally may not chase a ranged attacker. I keep Alistair on aggressive for this reason and also to make him jump in the fight without me having to have to tell him to.

There's no weak class. Even if you build a pure healer and have no combat skills, your party is a very powerful tool and being a healer and keeping them alive is just as important as dealing damage (if not more important). Just remember to keep the composition of one tank, one healer, two damage dealers. You can also carry a warrior hybrid with you or a shapeshifter mage instead of a pure damage dealer. That way, if you come across a large group or a couple of coloured name tags, you can use the hybrid warrior as a tank or shapeshift the mage into a bear and split the damage between your two tanks.

Hope this all helps.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Well you're not alone, I'm playing the PC version and I've found the game takes great pleasure in killing you, mercilessly. The tactic I usually use is when coming upon a large group of enemies, I'll have my party stand some distance off and then try and lure the enemies over one at a time to get slaughtered. Of course that doesn't help with the random encounters while travelling though.

 

[Cosmic Naginata]

I've been playing though the PS3 version as a Rogue and a Mage. You need to go into the tactics menu and make sure your companions will look after themselves; take the necessary potions to replenish health or mana. The latter is really important if the battle gets drawn out and it will for the boss fights so your companions will exhaust themselves and fall quickly.

From experience don't have Morrigan cast blizzard and if you do let her shapeshift you may want to setup a condition for her to switch back otherwise you'll have to do it manually.

I usually have 2 mages and 2 warriors/rogues with the overall strategy being to have the party endure and the mages in particular not exhausting their mana levels. Grenades and poisons that stun are good too.

 

[TheNamlessGuy]

DELETED

 

[Kaim89]

I agree that it is hard in many parts, like the dragon you meet when searching for the urn or something to heal the Redcliff guy, it was fucking insane.

 

[YoUnG205]

I think for you should have chosen mage instead they are far easier to play with.

 

[Zero47]

I agree that it is hard in many parts, like the dragon you meet when searching for the urn or something to heal the Redcliff guy, it was fucking insane.

If you beat that when you 'met' it you are hereby declared winner of Dragon Age.

 

[HSIAMetalKing]

I suggest that you roll with a party of a tank and three mages, all with Spell Might, and each with at least one of the Primal AoE spells-- Inferno, Blizzard and Tempest.

Do so, and you will have won Dragon Age. Sometimes I feel a little cheap... but honestly, no amount of swords can compare to summoning a whirling, frigid lightning storm on fire.

 

[achilleas.k]

Oh oh oh and something else I forgot to mention earlier:
Don't forget to activate abilities that benefit the whole party. Auras are GOLD! (Warrior shouts/cries, bard songs and mage auras).

EDIT: Am I the only person that doesn't use cone of cold and AoE abilities? I find that the friendly fire is too much to have these in the tactics yet I see everyone suggesting them. When I had cone of cold on my mage's tactics she'd freeze more allies than enemies!

 

[flaming_squirrel]

The difficulty curve in dragon age is INSANE, playing as a warrior there are some rooms that no matter how many attempts were made I couldnt clear them without turning the diff down. In others I was forced to exploit the enemy AI in order to win.

 

[Abedeus]

Rogues have it really hard. I found out that the hard way, at the beginning.

 

[HSIAMetalKing]

Oh oh oh and something else I forgot to mention earlier:
Don't forget to activate abilities that benefit the whole party. Auras are GOLD! (Warrior shouts/cries, bard songs and mage auras).

EDIT: Am I the only person that doesn't use cone of cold and AoE abilities? I find that the friendly fire is too much to have these in the tactics yet I see everyone suggesting them. When I had cone of cold on my mage's tactics she'd freeze more allies than enemies!

I've found that it's easiest to use mage AoEs when you have only one tank holding aggro and the rest of your party is composed of ranged DPS. Once you get the enemies under control and focused on the tank you can easily unleash AoEs while (hopefully) avoiding your tank-- although sometimes I like to freeze Alistar before he goes charging away from the group to attack a random archer.