DA:O Impossible random encounters?

Dragon Age: Origins

Thaurin

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This is just ridiculous. I'm ready to put Dragon Age away and just go play New Vegas that I bought this weekend, even while I was having a lot of fun.

Upon leaving the mage tower, which I didn't have too much trouble with, I'm again faced with an encounter (the trading guys who want to sell me some stupid book) when traveling to my next destination that kills my party off within 10 seconds. So, I'm basically stuck with no options. One main problem is that my main guy, a two-handed sword warrior who actually has some means of crowd control, gets stunned and then is out of the race for 20 seconds at least. I can't do anything with him. Am I missing something and can I break those debuffs?? If not, it just seems like automatic party wipe to me. What kind of game design is that?

Maybe I'm not smart enough to be playing RPGs and I should go back to Halo and stuff. Not that I was ever very good at Halo.

P.S. Yeah, yeah. Get the mages. I can't even find the mages with this stupid Xbox 360 interface!
 
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Okay, I lied. I committed a cardinal sin and lowered the difficulty to Casual. Of course, this meant I won the fight within 15 seconds, instead of being slaughtered in 10. What kind of game balance is that?!
 
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Woah dude, woah.

I remember some difficult encounters early game, but nothing like what youre describing. 10 second wipe of your entire crew? As soon as the encounter begins, cant you pause then direct all fire at the enemy mage?

Then again, like you said youre playing the 360 version. I'm not exactly sure how to advise you on that. May want to play some fallout and cool down a bit, come back later to it. That always helps me when I'm getting owned especially hard…
 
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Yeah, what I tried to was a two-handed sweep right away to at least stun a group in front of me for a while, but I couldn't even finish that move before my main character was stunned.

I had no idea where those mages were. I'm limited to the over-the-shoulder view each of my party's characters have. I can't zoom out or scan the battlefield too much. Even then, most of my party has 3 or 4 debuffs on them the first few seconds after the battle begins.

I'm probably not using my entire party efficiently. That's a console thing, probably. I focus on my own character, the one I created. But everyone dies so fast, it's close to impossible to keep anyone alive. Yes, I can pause, but throwing all healing on even one character can't save him because they're all in the line of fire and health goes down too fast.

Laying down complex tactics seems to be much harder on Xbox 360. I'd be interested in hearing how others dealt with that, if there actually are console players here. ;)

See, it's not like I want every battle to be a cakewalk and just go with the story and dialogue, but the latter is what's especially enjoyable to me. Playing on casual seems like a coward's way out. I just want to be able to find some tactic that works when I run into a group of enemies, and not have to race through the interface before the party is dead within 10-15 seconds.

Shit, I really am a console kiddie now, am I not? ;)
 
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I played on the console and found the targeting systemto be a bitch. I played a mage and frequently my spells were cast at a different person than the one I thought I was targeting, making it overly complicated to win some of the battles.

I too switched to easy on occasion because even when I did target everyone correctly it was impossible for me to win some battles. Only after I've concluded more than half of the game I got the right spells to win battles like these. Throw a fireball to knock them over, followed by an area spell that interrupted their spellcasting and often killed most of them. If you have a mage in your party then go for the fireball spell and an area spell like inferno or blizzard.
I also found myself frequently using the cone of cold spell for more close range combat. The spell freezes opponents for a while, allowing to hurt them a lot before they unfreeze.
 
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I have difficulties dealing with games that are unfair to me. :) Getting stun-locked (having control taken away from you) is one of the worst offenders. I'm glad to hear that it's not necessarily bad choices on my part resulting in a gimped party.

I actually took Cone of Cold for one of my mages recently. I should probably check that out right away. But as my two-handed warrior is a pretty good crowd controller, I was mainly focussing on him.

Well, difficulty is back to normal and I'm at camp going through some new dialogue with my characters, so it's all good again for the time being. Just needed to scream at something. :)
 
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I only remember one random encounter that was practically impossible - the mass wolf scenario if encountered at a low enough level. There are just too many wolves, all capable of knocking someone down while damaging them (Shred or whatever the ability is called - the Mabari dog has it too).

I seem to recall actually having to lower the difficulty in that one when I bumped into it too early.
 
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The toughest one for me was a huge group of guards encountered when travelling between sections in Denerim. It was 6-8 fighters backed up by 6-8 archers, and it seemed pretty much impossible without decent aoe spells.
 
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The key to making these battles easy is by casting disabling single and area of effect spells like blizzard, cone of cold, earthquake, the telekinesis line (especially crushing and mind blast), the glyphs, grease, and fireball to some extent.

As Myrthos said, start your battles with these, and it becomes cake (most of the time) especially if you have 2 casters, 3 is overkill (I think).

The game becomes significantly more easy the more casters you have and use effectively.
 
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That is good advice, Thrasher. I know what the OP is going through as far as the very early game goes, i.e., before you have a decently potent spell-caster. Once you get spells such as fireball, you gain some very useful crowd control capabilities. I read a few replies earlier about the bandit group with a lot of archers in back behind infantry - in this instance I'd use fireball or something similar to control the archers and then cone of cold will allow you to quickly dispatch the infantry. Then later in the game you get goodies like crushing prison for eliminating single, more powerful opponents…good times :biggrin: Never underestimate using a mage with good strategy.
 
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Not done with the game yet, but I also had the experience that these (semi)random encounters on the world map were frequently much harder than pretty much anything I encountered on the actual missions - more enemies, mages with insta-kill fireballs and other AoE spells, etc. So far I never really got stuck, but these random encounters were pretty much the only times I had to reload more than once so far, and in one case was forced to go back to an earlier save and change my party composition to get past one of these. I agree with Thaurin that the balance felt a little off in that respect.
 
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I especially found the difference between normal and easy very big. If it was impossible for me to win a fight on normal, switching to easy made it a piece of cake, taking away all the challenge. They should have made 'easy' less easy.
 
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They should have made 'easy' less easy.

There's a mod that does just that - it brings the easy difficulty level closer to the normal setting. I haven't used it myself, but it seems like it's exactly what you're looking for.
 
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Yeah, but I played the Xbox version ;)
 
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As far as I remember the first official patch made easy even easier after some requests, balancing is a bitch.
 
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I especially found the difference between normal and easy very big. If it was impossible for me to win a fight on normal, switching to easy made it a piece of cake, taking away all the challenge. They should have made 'easy' less easy.

Exactly, that's also my experience. I may also not have invested in enough mage spells for crowd control, but I think I have a Cone of Cold tucked away somewhere. Those wolves were a bitch, to be sure. Also, not being able to alter your party configuration just before the fight is stupid. I can't try out different tactics that way if my party composition isn't suited for the situation.
 
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Exactly, that's also my experience. I may also not have invested in enough mage spells for crowd control, but I think I have a Cone of Cold tucked away somewhere. Those wolves were a bitch, to be sure. Also, not being able to alter your party configuration just before the fight is stupid. I can't try out different tactics that way if my party composition isn't suited for the situation.

For some reason the party selection bugs me anyway. I know its there for gameplay reasons, I can intellectually appreciate that. But from within the game... Here I have all my friends, my band of brothers and sisters! Two warriors, two mages, two rogues, a golem, and a wardog! The elite! A friggin' force of nature! And you ask me to go save the world against several armies of darkspawn WITH ONLY THREE COMPANIONS AT A TIME???? WHY OH YE GODS, WHY????
 
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