Mycroft Holmes said:
Overcompensation implies weakness. I fully believe I am correct, so there is no overcompensation.
Anyone who is overcompensating fully believes they are correct. In fact it is impossible for that person to even acknowledge the possibility that they might be wrong, that is part of the problem.
Don't take it too personally though, I was exaggerating for effect.
Mycroft Holmes said:
I wasn't better than them or even necessarily smarter than them, I just played the game in a different way that allowed me to take things easier while still winning.
I hate to say it, but I think maybe you're putting yourself down.
Even I know that raw APM is a terrible measure of skill, because it's easy to artificially inflate it by spamming or making actions which are not very useful. Of course there's a difference between just being fast and being effective, heck that's something which has been drilled into me too.
I've never been a big Blizzard gamer (other than a period playing World of Warcraft which we do not speak of) but I used to be quite good at chess. I wasn't the best in my area or anything, but I could play in tournaments and get a decent ranking. I don't know if you know much about that, but in tournament chess you're timed, and some players in junior tournaments do get very into times as evidence of skill. The thing is, the really good players in the adult game tend to be those who have no problem spending 10 minutes on a single move (1/3rd of the total time you're allowed), I learned very early on that time is a false economy and that patience is the way forward.
To be honest, this probably carries over. I still overall tend to prefer turn based games to real times ones for this reason, and I tend to pause a lot in real time games which allow it. Heck, my
favourite game of DA:O was one where I played a rogue and honestly tried to make traps work. I suspect I'm one of the very few people who always uses rogues to scout encounters in RPGs where that is possible (it wasn't in DA2, and I found that really annoying). So there you go. Your criticism is fair enough, but I don't think it applies to me or to the particular strategies I use because if anything I play over-tactically and over-cautiously.
Mycroft Holmes said:
Well you weren't if you found other spells and classes to be not strong enough.
No. No.
There's a whole list of spells which are useful, and actually the classes are not too bad (although I do think warrior probably needed to be made more exciting to play). The problem emerges in the fact that there cornerstone abilities in every class (particularly mage and rogue) which can have a huge effect on the game when compared to other abilities. This doesn't mean those "weaker" abilities are useless, because the game is set up so that any ability is better than none, but they are often highly situational or simply do not give a particularly useful benefit. For the few times in the game you're going to benefit from feign death, something like momentum or lethality will help you out in every single fight.
This isn't true in every single tree or ability, but it's true in many.
You've probably worked out that I used to play Magic the Gathering as well, so I know the difference between something being "imbalanced" in the sense of being strictly better (i.e. simply doing everything something else does more effectively or cheaper with no additional stipulations or negatives) and imbalance in the sense of something being more generally useful than something else, and yeah, there's not very much of the former in Origins, but I'd still contend there is quite a lot of the latter.
I think I've been overfocusing on the spell combos, but some little examples.
Cone of Cold - Its cooldown is so low that you can keep a pretty large group out of the fight indefinitely, and it works as both damage and crowd control. There are plenty of abilities which are signficiantly harder to get which are far less useful than cone of cold.
Blood Wound - It's a bit like crushing prison (already a very good spell) only it works on groups with no friendly fire. Okay, it's not
strictly better than crushing prison, but it's far far better than any other blood mage spell, including the level 4 one, and actually much better than most of the other specialization spells in general.
Arrow of Slaying - Okay, so you know archery is not very good. Well, this and scattershot are the only reason to play an archer in the vanilla game. The big issue is that it has absolutely no logic in how it works (the table of random numbers I posted a while back is the damage multiplier for arrow of slaying, with the first number being the level difference between you and your target) so unless you have the ability to see enemy levels and have written down the table it's often difficult to know how to use it, but when it works it's insanely powerful. Not only does it kind of carry the archery tree all by itself, it's potentially one of the highest single target burst-damage abilities in the game (discounting mana clash).
Song of Courage - This is a good example of something which looks cool on paper but is kind of silly when applied. It works fine at normal levels of cunning. However, if you're pumping the vast majority of your points into cunning, which you can do with this talent, you'll end up getting more attack and damage than you would from the duelist tree, and bonus critical chance to boot, but
for the entire party instead of one person.
While, I have to say, it was really fun working this out, this kind of excessive synergy is something which should be quite easy to pick up on.
Momentum - Momentum was clearly designed with two-weapon warriors in mind. It makes them a bit more effective but not overpowering. The armor mechanics (which are better in Origins, another thing I'll say) make really fast attack speeds less overwhelming than you might think.. until you're playing a rogue.
Rogues will end up with very high armor penetration and the ability to deal automatic critical damage. They also tend to use weapons with a high speed modifier. Anything which increases a rogue's attack speed has a
massive effect on damage output, far more so than with any other class. This means that an ability which is decent enough on warriors can easily become the entire focus of the two weapon tree for rogues.
There are quite a few of these, I could probably go on for a while.
Mycroft Holmes said:
Yes there is one that is absolutely retarded and can kill any mage spell, but by and large I found that there are a superfluous number of equally viable options when building a character.
Oh yeah, I agree there are often multiple options, particularly once you've picked up your cornerstone abilities. What I actually don't agree with is that there are anything like as many as in DA2.
Mycroft Holmes said:
Meanwhile I found DA2 to have a rather extremely balancing problem for nightmare. In that mages and rogues to some extend could absolutely not even take a single hit on nightmare mode without the game being completely ruined and having to reload.
Yeah, they should have scaled the force mechanics better.
Force overall was a good idea, but it did get kind of silly on higher difficulties.
Mycroft Holmes said:
2) it's not about a small core of generally useful abilities. I filled up my entire bottom bar stretched all the way across on a 1080p monitor and i used 85% of them in every encounter.
Of course you did. There's no point not to.
That doesn't mean they actually had much of an effect though.