Dragon Age General Discussion

Wow, you’re right.

Steam has all three games on sale for 10 dollars total right now if anyone doesn't have PC copies and wants them.

Finished DAO. I'm excited to play Awakening because it's only going to be the second time for me.

The one time I played Artificer was with my main Inquisitor (before I decided Rogue wasn't traumatic enough for his backstory and remade him as a Mage) and found it worked much better with dual wield than Archery. Whenever I used Varric he would never get close enough to enemies to make real use of all the elemental mines. But as a dual wield Rogue I would pretty much obliterate everything either in stealth or with the mines and accompanying explosions. Key was to go heavy crit/crit damage on gear/daggers. He was ridiculous with how strong it was. (Compared to Varric who was just garbage with it though maybe that was more an AI/Bianca issue. Maybe as an Archer Inquisitor you might have better luck but the mines still need to be close enough to hit.)

Though to be fair, that character build was so OP I didn't even need the mines a lot of the time. Delicious, delicious crits combined with that fade touched material that would give extra hits.


The only Rogue I've played as Archer was Sera's spec, it's still powerful even after the nerfs and is the class I used back when I did my Nightmare run. Even after the nerf the different bottles are super powerful especially against dragons and other big HP targets.

Thanks for the advice farferello and Scottphoto! I have already given up on archery, and crafted some daggers for myself. I know myself at least. Hmmm, I will also probably go with tempest since I like it best with Daggers.

I just picked up Iron Bull. I plan to friend-point him up some so it won't be too rough on him when I side with the mages not long from now. Cassandra will just have to hate me until I get access to her quests. Probably won't recruit viv-Sera later on if at all. I'm still sad there are no female companions that are pro-mage freedom.

I made it to Skyhold and locked in my romance

Companion quests:

Next, I'm going to Crestwood to start a mountain of side content there and elsewhere while slowly progressing toward the next main quest.

theres a new romance Nathaniel mod, it was all cute til I saw it was only for female Cousland wardens... sigh I'm not gonna get cured from my straightphobia ever lol edit. Far let me know you can but it would look weird cause is only for female Cousland in mind, still rolling my eeeeeyes haha

Cousland/Nathaniel have crazy chemistry. Love him.

There's been some discussion on Tumblr lately that is of the "reevaluating Inquisition before Veilguard" variety and... I think my frustration with what they're bringing up and discussing, about how there is some thematic coherence in the idea of the character of the Inquisitor being totally subsumed by the role of the Inquisitor, and paralleling their experience in the In Hushed Whispers dark future to Solas's whole schtick, but...

Well, in regards to the "subsumed by the role" thing, I think the big problem in claiming this is that at no point does the Inquisitor really get to be explored as who they were - there are a couple of lines of background acknowledgement, but, literally, in terms of gameplay, the character BEGINS at the start of Inquisition, and we don't actually get anything about who it is being subsumed by the role. We lose the poignancy of that story because we don't really get any examination or exploration of what has been lost, and it just makes the idea lose weight, because sure, the Inquisitor only exists as the Inquisitor... But we don't get any concept really of what they've lost, just being told "that's gone, you're this now."

Like a loss is only meaningful if we understand what has been lost. It's the same problem of speaking about the lives lost at the Conclave - none of that MEANS anything to us, they're all just a bunch of faceless masses who existed and died and we have no emotional connection to them. Characters talk about loss, but it means nothing to us. It's the same thing with trying to claim that the story is a tragedy of the Inquisitor losing who they were - who they were is a blank slate that we the player then get to turn around and build. Sure, for those willing to build up a person in their mind, it's a loss, but in terms of what we have to build on, there's nothing in the game itself.

And as for comparing the dark future to what Solas is going through... I understand the argument, but there's a massive scale difference to account for. The dark future jumps forward a year. Solas woke up after MILLENNIA. People who were alive when the Inquisitor was displaced are alive and able to outright say "this world needs to be replaced with a better one." Meanwhile, after generations of Solas's absence, he's saying "those thousands of years of change are not worth maintaining, I must erase it all to bring back the world I knew." That's a VERY different thing, despite superficial similarities.

Like the point that I regularly hit on my Inquisition replays and hit that finale for Trespasser is that Solas literally refuses to answer the Inquisitor who had a positive relationship with him and asks "why does this world have to die, after by your own admission, you have been wrong about there being no value in it?" It comes across very much as the WRITING not having a good answer, so brushing off the obvious question.

And in the end, that's WHY I keep coming back to not liking Solas - he has in a lot of ways seemingly just completely HIJACKED the franchise. He didn't exist until Inquisition, and Origins, Awakening, and DA2 introduced a lot of storylines and elements that had nothing to do with this character, but Inquisition introduced him, and suddenly, he became the biggest feature of the universe, shunting those existing stories aside in order to take up all the oxygen in the room, to center everything on him being responsible and involved, and anything that he's not involved in is pretty much tossed aside - look at the Mage-Templar conflict, the storyline that DA2 built up to, a storyline that hinged on elements that at most only tangentially related to no more than the consequences of Solas's actions, only to dismiss almost entirely by the end of Inquisition's first act. There's the fact that Corypheus, a Tevinter magister who the lore claims to be responsible for the Blight itself, is nothing but a red herring and sacrificial plot device for Solas as the true villain of Inquisition. Hell, there's him doing whatever he does to FleMythal, a character who had been being built up as this figure in the background of the major players throughout the Dragon Age itself, seemingly killing her, when he himself says in Trespasser that the murder of Mythal was the very cause of him banishing the Evanuris.

It'd be one thing if Solas had been built up before even appearing, but the closest there is to that is Sandal's little Act III spooky prophecy-sounding words. That's the ONLY hint there is to Solas existing before Inquisition, where he takes center stage. It's not even that they cleared the board before his arrival, his arrival actively wipes the board off mid-game. As a result, yeah, he is legit the aspect of the franchise that, despite what can be interesting about him and what he can bring to things, I legitimately WOULD carve out of it if I could.