Only one I lost was Isabela. Thought I had enough friendship with her, but she didn't come back with relics. Bitch.
Hmm, did you go to the Arishok instead of helping her get the relic? I lost her when I did that.
Interesting to read various experiences people have had. It seems the overall consensus is "good, but not great".
I've completed it three times now (one for each class), which is more than enough. Overall, the class balance seems better than Origins, where mages were superior in practically every way. Despite that, I've found certain balancing issues in DA2 as well:
- Melee rogues are a bit too weak, especially since Defense seems less useful than it was in Origins.
- Ranged rogues are probably a bit too strong, especially with the Assassinate talent (top talent of the Assassin school). My biggest Assassinate was slightly above 20.000 damage in a single shot.
- Tanks seem to be doing too little damage; I'm fine with the fact that they're not dishing out immense amounts of damage, but they have serious problems holding aggro whenever there's a rogue present. This is actually the main problem for melee rogues - they're not supposed to tank, but they end up tanking most of the time due to their damage. At least ranged rogues can kite stuff around while still doing damage.
- Certain spells are still a bit too good, while others are a bit too weak. Haste, for example, is incredibly powerful.
- The autoattack damage of 2H warriors is a bit low.
Other than that, the balance seems pretty good.
By the way, the savegame import thing actually does have an impact. For example, Alistair can not only be met as King Alistair, he can also be met as a drunkard in the Hanged Man if you picked Loghain and let Alistair live.
I feel like the level of impact based on the savegame is fairly spot on. It would seem odd if everyone and their favourite cat showed up in Kirkwall all of a sudden - they're still busy in Ferelden.
Also, I've seen many reviews, interviews and so on that claim the feature is rubbish compared to the import feature of ME2. Excuse me? The import feature of ME2 was a disgrace - unlike Origins to DA2, the ME2 import was supposed to be something of a main feature and not just a "nice to have feature" like it was in DA2, yet it had zero impact on the game as a whole. Sure, there were a few extra NPCs here and there and people talked to Shepard in slightly different ways, but overall your actions in ME1 did nothing to change ME2.
If anything, the import feature has as much of an impact in DA2 as it does in ME2, despite the fact that DA2 is not a direct sequel in terms of story (which ME2 very much is).
Edit: And yes, I agree Dasale - Merrill can become quite the power house, especially with maxed out Spirit and Primal schools in addition to her blood magic. I found the nature line of her special tree rather rubbish though.