Dragon Age: Origins?

[LibraryOgre]

Ok, so I'm back to playing this, because I got a wild hair and decided to try to get through it again.

I am playing a Dwarven Noble Rogue, which is the only thing I have ever played in my 10-15 times trying to get through this game. I just so want to like this game, but, in so many ways, it sucks.

Like, you know what I *love* about Baldur's Gate? If you want a talky character... get a good charisma. That's it. There's a number of ways you can get and keep a good charisma, and you can get some really impressive charisma by the end of the series (I think a permanent 20 is achievable; maybe 21). I don't have to put points into a talking skill, taking away from my ability to do other things. I just... have a charisma. Lock picking? It's a thing you can do. But you have other options to open a lock, if you didn't put some of your limited skill points into lock picking.

I'm trying to hit all the skills I will need. I want to be able to do this. But the game just FIGHTS me.

[Keltest]

Having a main character rogue is hard because, as you noted, you need to put points into the Obligatory Protagonist Skills on top of all the important rogue stuff, however if youre playing a melee rogue you should be able to mostly focus on finesse, which is the lockpicking and persuasion stat, and eventually you can set it up so that is your primary damage and accuracy stat for your weapons. I believe you need to pick assassin as one of your specializations as well.

[Lord Raziere]

Last time I played it, I got all the Charisma and talky options because I knew that those were like, the best things to get in the game, because they are only useful on you. no one else persuades everyone, so the only one being social matters is yourself and it helps basically throughout the entire game to get the ending you desire. I'd rather have the charisma options, and a certain point I just maxed them out and worked on my duel-wielding. I have other rogues to pick locks for me. I personally don't see the problem, though I never played baldurs gate and am pretty used to the bioware set up of social persuasion since things like Jade empire and KOTOR.

but then again, the character I've most often played is outcaste dwarven rogue in this, so maybe I'm just used to the rogue build since its my favorite.

[Aeson]

I don't have to put points into a talking skill, taking away from my ability to do other things.

What else are you going to do with a Rogue's skill point every other level, though?
- Combat Tactics is worthless on the character you're controlling, and the computer isn't very good with (melee) Rogues anyways.
- Combat Training is a skill tax that you'll eventually have to invest in, but between your class Talents, the rank you'll have in Combat Training for being a Dwarf Noble, and the possible second rank you might have in it if you invested your 'free' skill point into it at character creation you probably don't need to invest in it any time soon.
- Poison-making is required to use poisons, but you only need the first rank in order to use poisons, Rogues have that by default, and there's no particular reason I can recall to invest further in it on your main character rather than on a companion like Zevran or Leliana.
- Trap-making is required to lay traps, but you only need the first rank for that and preparing the battlefield wasn't particularly useful to my recollection, and as with Poison-making I cannot recall any particular reason to invest in it with your main character.
- Herbalism is entirely unnecessary for the main character, as far as I am aware.
- Survival is nice, I guess, though it's oddly more useful indoors than outside.
- Stealing is mostly irrelevant, though you can occasionally get something interesting from it.

[factotum]

It does seem like a bit of an odd complaint to me. You're not a solo character in DA:O, so you don't need to do everything yourself--just concentrate on the stuff that only you need to be good at, like speech skills, and let your party members do the heavy lifting.

[Morty]

I don't think there was such a thing as a "talky" character in Baldur's Gate. Having high Charisma unlocked some options now and then, but it wasn't super relevant. That being said, Origins' skills are definitely a bit of a mess. But as others noted, persuasion and weapon training are the only two skills you really need, as such. Everything else runs the gamut from "irrelevant" to "nice to have but not too important".

Putting lock-picking on the same list as talents was certainly a spectacularly poor idea, though, since rogues have fewer of them than warriors and mages to begin with. Origins is full of things that serve no purpose other than genre emulation.

[GloatingSwine]

It does seem like a bit of an odd complaint to me. You're not a solo character in DA:O, so you don't need to do everything yourself--just concentrate on the stuff that only you need to be good at, like speech skills, and let your party members do the heavy lifting.

Depends if you want two rogues though.

DA:O is one of those games that's heavy on the rogue tax. If you don't have a rogue with lockpicking skills there are loads of boxes you ain't opening (and you get XP for opening them, which is more valuable than anything that was going to be in them, frankly).

However, the lockpicking talent isn't actually necessary because lockpicking is actually dependent on Cunning and each rank of lockpicking just adds +10 Cunning to your effective score for lockpicking. If your effective Cunning is 70 or better you can open every lock in the game.

And once you have the Lethality talent you can use Cunning instead of Strength if it's higher for damage, and Exploit Weakness on the Assassin tree adds cunning again on backstabs. So just hit the minimum strength for the weapon you want to use and pump cunning and you can save talent points on the lockpicking skills and get monster backstabs.

Traps and poisons are a bit rubbish too so you can ignore them.

So just get a wizard or two set up to immobilise everyone with hold/mass hold/crushing prison and drive your rogue around getting hilarious backstabs all day.

[halfeye]

I usually go the wizard route, but the one time I tried something else it was a Dwarven rogue.

I still haven't completed the game once.

[Cespenar]

I wouldn't worry too much. Trying to hit all the requirements in a RPG is rarely as important as that small part of our brain that often tells us.

I'd instead focus on "am I actually enjoying the game as a whole?" Or not.

[Mr_Fixler]

From my memory of several rogue playthroughs the problem of "too many things I want" is really only an issue in the beginning. Toward the end (and expansion) you will be swimming in them and have everything maxed.

I don't think the game punishes you too hard on the lockpicking unless you are going for a perfect game. There may be a chest or two that you can't open but you know in your heart of hearts it's gonna be trash loot at that point of the game anyway.

[GloatingSwine]

But can you even be said to be a heroic adventurer if you’re leaving chests unpillaged?

It just feels wrong.

[Cespenar]

But can you even be said to be a heroic adventurer if you’re leaving chests unpillaged?

It just feels wrong.

I try to think of it as potential training for other, low level adventurers. So it's altruistic as well.

[Aeson]

Depends if you want two rogues though.

Why would you need to have two Rogues in the party? Cunning is a thematically-appropriate attribute for a silver-tongued Rogue, at least going by the name, and as far as game mechanics go it's the attribute you want for both persuasion and lockpicking, and then as you mentioned Rogues can largely ignore Strength due to getting Lethality later in the game (and there's also that the armor penetration bonus from Cunning might not be all that much worse than the damage bonus from Strength, especially if using weapons with low base damage and attribute modifiers, what with an extra 0.5 damage that gets through armor being worth more than infinite damage that doesn't). Beyond that, the persuasion skill doesn't draw from the same pool of skill points as the lockpicking skill, and while the lockpicking skill does compete with combat skills, a backstabbing Rogue or an archer probably doesn't gain much from investing in combat Talents because backstabbing is a lot of damage, the archery Talents are such a sorry lot that it's normally better to just auto-attack, and the rest of the party can probably handle crowd control better than the Rogue can.

[Morty]

So just get a wizard or two set up to immobilise everyone with hold/mass hold/crushing prison and drive your rogue around getting hilarious backstabs all day.

Whatever the problem, "throw magic at it" is probably the answer. Or you could do the combo with two glyphs, whichever those were, and mass-paralyze enemies without a save to resist. As long as none of your crew got caught in it.

[Rynjin]

Since you've tried to play the game 10-15 times with the exact same setup...have you considered trying something different?

Elf Mage is the way to go IMO if you want "talky" options, mostly because that combination of factors gives you a huge amount of dialogue options, both positive and negative. People hate you for your race, your existence as a Mage, AND as a Grey Warden, so you have a lot to prove. It's great.

[Winthur]

archery Talents are such a sorry lot that it's normally better to just auto-attack

I don't have even a fraction of expertise for DA:O as I do for the IE games, but I was under the impression that my archer Leliana has no problems wiping the floor with everything.

[LibraryOgre]

I confess I'm thrown by this. It's really easy to cover all the skills across your party.

(May not apply if you're thinking in terms of soloing being a default the game should plan for.)

There are a number of quests that require your PC to have the skill, or happen early enough that you don't have the ability to get those skills to your party.

[Aeson]

I don't have even a fraction of expertise for DA:O as I do for the IE games, but I was under the impression that my archer Leliana has no problems wiping the floor with everything.

Did I say that archery was bad? I'm pretty sure I didn't - I said that archery talents are bad.

[Morty]

I remember archery being rather weak in Origins, only to become almost mage-tier broken in Awakening (where the game largely abandons what pretence of balance it ever had). But it's been a rather long time since I played it, and last time I did it I'd installed various mods. Among which were a rebalance mod and a mod to speed up combat animations.

There are a number of quests that require your PC to have the skill, or happen early enough that you don't have the ability to get those skills to your party.

You can always respecialize to get those quests, respecialize again to the build you actually want and the do those quests at your own pace. Besides, I think they're kind of... skippable, on the whole.

[NeoVid]

If your goal is mainly to just complete the game after all this time, you could drastically reduce the difficulty by making use of how it's a game with absolutely no game-breaking exploits.

[Aeson]

You can always respecialize to get those quests, respecialize again to the build you actually want and the do those quests at your own pace. Besides, I think they're kind of... skippable, on the whole.

(Unmodded) Origins doesn't have a respecialization option, as far as I am aware - that was only available from Awakening onwards.

[Giggling Ghast]

Why would you need to have two Rogues in the party?

To hear their banter, of course.

[Morty]

(Unmodded) Origins doesn't have a respecialization option, as far as I am aware - that was only available from Awakening onwards.

Hmm, true. I forgot you needed a mod to do it.

[Dienekes]

Isn't this like, the point? You get a scarcity in the beginning so you have to choose which path you wanna go down. You can be the talky guy, or the lockpicky guy, or the trappy guy. But not all together, at least not in the beginning. By the end of the game you become the ubermensch that can do everything. Or enforce that you rely on your allies. You can pretty easily get one of the other two rogues to be your walking lockpick.

[GloatingSwine]

Elf Mage is the way to go IMO if you want "talky" options, mostly because that combination of factors gives you a huge amount of dialogue options, both positive and negative. People hate you for your race, your existence as a Mage, AND as a Grey Warden, so you have a lot to prove. It's great.

Plus you can have the peak comedy party of three wizards and a dog.

Because DAO is in no way balanced and wizards are always better.

(Arcane Warrior with massive armour and all the defensive spells is pretty much impossible to kill on any difficulty).


(My favourite character was a City Elf Rogue though).

[Winthur]

Did I say that archery was bad? I'm pretty sure I didn't - I said that archery talents are bad.

That was a derp of mine, sorry.

(Unmodded) Origins doesn't have a respecialization option, as far as I am aware - that was only available from Awakening onwards.

Did Bioware ever give a reason why Sten only ever has one specialization?

[Lord Raziere]

Did Bioware ever give a reason why Sten only ever has one specialization?

He is a Qunari. he is from a culture that tells people they should go into their specialized role and stay in it forever to an insane degree that causes more harm than good.

its just mechanics matching the setting.

[Aeson]

Did Bioware ever give a reason why Sten only ever has one specialization?

Not that I'm aware of, but Lord Raziere's explanation seems reasonable enough to me. Mind you, I think it's also a bit of an awkward explanation, mechanically, since the lack of a second specialization means that Sten has nothing to spend talent points on aside from things completely irrelevant to a two-handed weapons warrior four levels before a warrior with two specializations would. The Templar, Reaver, Berserker, and Champion specializations might not have particularly much in common with one another, but they're at least all potentially useful to a warrior supposedly exclusively specialized in two-handed weapons whereas the Archery or Dual-Wielding or Weapon-and-Shield talents mostly aren't.

[Morty]

I'm fairly certain it's a bug and I sincerely doubt it's any kind of statement about the Qun, barring a quote from one of the devs/writers on the subject.

[Dienekes]

Did Bioware ever give a reason why Sten only ever has one specialization?

Officially? No.

Unofficially I remember hearing a story awhile back that it's kinda a holdover from some odd design decisions. Essentially, originally every specialization was going to have a companion attached to it. There was going to be way more companions, including an Avvar Barbarian Reaver character. Many of them were dropped and didn't actually get fleshed out all that much. Anyway, the end result was they had this Qunari companion who was developed enough, interesting enough, and gives a more relevant view of an important culture than the Avvar. But he does not fit the Reaver specialization at all. And the other Warrior specializations were already given to the other warrior companions. So he gets shipped with nothing.