DA: The Awakening - Exclusive Interview @ Grey Wardens Fansite

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During a promotional event held in Germany last week, fansite for Dragon Age: Origins, Grey Wardens, talked to Fernando Melo, Biowares online producer. The interview moves in different directions, but here's a snip where Fernando speaks about the fiasco that was Return to Ostagar:
The delayed release of Return to Ostagar caused a fair amount of drama within the community. While these things happen in the world of software development it never paints a good picture of the company, at least not in the eyes of the average End User. Is there anything BioWare has changed in their digital distribution methods to better combat such a delay in the future?
This was a big blow for the team as well. We really wanted to make this a special content piece for fans to enjoy over their holiday season, and the team worked extremely hard to try to make that come true.
Instead Return to Ostagar (RtO) was to become something along the lines of a ‘perfect storm' for us where a lot of small faults and circumstances, not only internally but also externally to us, all came together at the same time and in a really awkward time of the year. This managed to divide everyone's efforts and attention in such a way that issues got through the previous processes that normally would have spotted it - certainly well before it ever made it to the public.
Since then, RtO has turned into an important case study for us, and we've changed quite a lot of our own process actually - not only with how we develop and test our content and patches, but also in how we will communicate these going forward.
More information.
 
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they keep mentioning in these interviews that the rogue and warrior are underpowered in the game. The rogue is underpowered? Granted, they arent the aoe nuke of a caster, but played right theyre really quite powerful. Without even using poison and all their little goodies, just backstabs and crits alone they can really take a chunk out of the enemy forces.

Warriors, I havent really gotten into speccing out other than Alistair, and I guess his damage could be better. ROgue's being underpowered tho, I dunnno… sounds like people crying who dont know how to play one and want to have them as front line tanks.
 
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A dual-wielding Warrior will have the same redicilous output as a dual-wielding Rogue. I have no idea how people can claim they are underpowered - they're not as good at packs of enemies, but they are significantly stronger against most tough enemies. Mages have fairly rubbish damage against single, tough targets.
 
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Only warrior subclass that is underpowered is two handed warrior. They deal lots of damage per hit but they also seem to miss a lot which is why their dps sucks. Also because of lacking dexterity 2h warrior suffers poor defense rating. Lastly most of their abilties require great stamina pool which means that you have to sacrifice strenght or constitution to be effective talents wise but it means that you're going to do less damage per hit and your accuracy suffers. Or you have less hit points -> dead faster.

Dual wielders, archers and shield&sword warriors are just right. And I wouldn't make those classes more powerfull..they already dominate battlefield enough. Rogue DW is still the biggest damage dealer (mages aside;)

. Mages have fairly rubbish damage against single, tough targets.

Try casting some of hex line spells and after that cast.

Storm of century (ice storm+lightning storm -> overkill), grese+fire ball (medevil napalm with knockdown effect:) any spell from the ice line + stonefist (great combo). Crushing prison (one of the most powerfull single target spells in the game). sleep+horror (really easy to pull off), Mana clash (instant kill to almost any magic user/undead in the game).
 
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Try casting some of hex line spells and after that cast.

Storm of century (ice storm+lightning storm -> overkill), grese+fire ball (medevil napalm with knockdown effect:) any spell from the ice line + stonefist (great combo). Crushing prison (one of the most powerfull single target spells in the game). sleep+horror (really easy to pull off), Mana clash (instant kill to almost any magic user/undead in the game).

Still rubbish at single, tough targets - i.e the final boss. None of those spells will come close to the damage of a dual-wielder on such targets, as they are immune to most spell effects (if I recall correctly, the final boss hardly even takes damage from Storm of the Century, which normally kills enemies within one or two ticks).

Another example is the named Revenant, Gaxxkang. Mages are complete rubbish against him (compared to dual-wielders).
 
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Another example is the named Revenant, Gaxxkang. Mages are complete rubbish against him.
Mana clash.

The Awakening seems like a seriously underwhelming expansion so far.
(edit: the above comment was my reaction to the video interview, not this one, somehow I mixed up the threads)
 
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I hear that - a return to an underground Dwarven ruin?

For those who hated the Deep Roads section of the game, this will not be good news. Bust out a totally new environment at least for us to explore!
 
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I didn't like Deep Roads that much because it's hack & slash all the way, but the setting was fine.
 
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