Dragon Age - v1.02 Patch

A fairly hefty patch for Dragon Age. Here are the Balance and Gameplay sections of the patch notes:

Balance

• Daggers now apply 0.5 points of damage per additional point in dexterity and 0.5 points of damage per additional point in strength, as originally intended. This increases dagger damage for high-dexterity characters.
• During combat, mana or stamina reserves now correctly regenerate more quickly when reserves are low. This allows players to occasionally use an talent or spell in the later stages of lengthy fights.
• When exploring, mana and stamina now regenerate more quickly at higher character levels. This reduces downtime between fights.
• The spells Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold, and Blizzard now have shorter durations and/or longer cooldowns. This ensures that combatants can no longer stun-lock each other by repeatedly casting the same spell.
• The cooldowns for several low-level sustained abilities are now shorter. This ensures that players are not penalized for accidentally deactivating them.
• Certain battles were not scaling properly, resulting in excessively difficult fights. They now scale as intended.
• Enemy corpses now drop health poultices and money more appropriately, resulting in less clutter in the player's inventory.

Gameplay

• In rare cases, enemy corpses were selectable when they contained no loot. This no longer occurs.
• Party members whose combat tactics were set to defensive behavior no longer stop attacking after using a spell or talent.
• In rare cases, combat tactics conditions could fail to determine whether a character had enough mana or stamina to use an ability. This no longer occurs.
• The Rally talent no longer repeats its audio effect if it is active during certain conversations.
• The Rally talent no longer deactivates upon area transitions or conversations.
• The Shimmering Shield spell now deactivates when the character is out of mana.

The Steam version has already been updated. Hit the link above for the file, otherwise (37Mb).
More information.

Nice!

The only thing to fix a bit more is bows issue and when they do that I'm finally gonna buy and play that game!

Enemy corpses now drop health poultices and money more appropriately, resulting in less clutter in the player's inventory.

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I wonder what this means. It's not as if poultice and money was cluttering the inventory...

hmmm... I wonder why they needed all of 37mb for a few basic tweaks...

Uh oh, so my Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold, and Blizzard focussed mage has just been nerfed. Thanks, Bioware.

I may leave this patch off until I replay with another build (if ever).

vanedor said:

I wonder what this means. It's not as if poultice and money was cluttering the inventory…

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It means they drop more stuff (poultices and potions) that stack within your inventory without using slots. Result = more room left in inventory.

joxer said:

Nice!

The only thing to fix a bit more is bows issue and when they do that I'm finally gonna buy and play that game!

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Ha ha. Actually, as this patch players and NPCs alike I've found (much like the unofficial dex fix) that this patch makes the game harder, not easier.

Thrasher said:

Uh oh, so my Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold, and Blizzard focussed mage has just been nerfed. Thanks, Bioware.

I may leave this patch off until I replay with another build (if ever).

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I doubt they've been nerfed that much. Besides, the cooldown for CoC was ridiculously short.

I agree about CoC.

But my whole build was built around these spells. So on their own I'm sure it's not a big deal, but all together probably a very big deal.

I'm not experimenting, and taking a chance that this breaks my game....

Thrasher said:

I agree about CoC.

But my whole build was built around these spells. So on their own I'm sure it's not a big deal, but all together probably a very big deal.

I'm not experimenting, and taking a chance that this breaks my game….

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I guarantee you will be back to winning every fight without a challenge within 20 minutes of adjusting to the new settings.

Dhruin said:

[*]Certain battles were not scaling properly, resulting in excessively difficult fights. They now scale as intended.

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I wonder if this updates your saved games, as far as areas you're presently in.

It looks like the Hotfix page no longer has the file as this patch fixes half the problem (daggers, but not short bows or crossbows). It's likely a good idea to remove that hotfix until a new one gets created.

Melvil said:

I guarantee you will be back to winning every fight without a challenge within 20 minutes of adjusting to the new settings.

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This was never the case.

Know all they need to do is fix it so I can leave buildings and I'll be able to play.... no word on the memory leak yet?

Ive reached a point w/ my lv14 crew that my fights are becoming routine on normal difficulty, and Ive backed way off on using Morrigan's CC abilities. I have to admit that I do love "sleeping" the enemy, then "waking nightmare" and "horror". But the game does have some really ridiculously tough and unexpected spikes at times that could use a little tweaking imo, like the full on bandit total overwhelms out of nowhere… and I think that's partially because of the propensity of bandits to use some bows in their swarm - which have been ratcheted up x5 w/ the dex hotfix.

Thankfully my rogue has just become a freakin wrecking machine, and actually using combat stealth, poison, traps, and bombs….. woah. Im surprised they havent nerfed those things, then again I dont think most people take the time to use them. That's literally the only way Ive survived the bandits, nailing them w/ bombs and traps, Morrigan cant cooldown quick enough to fire off another CC

Well, I hope this tweak is as it says, just for daggers and I can remove the dex hotfix and quit fearing bowmen instead of mages and monsters lol

Does anyone know how you can tell which version you're running?

Thrasher said:

I agree about CoC.

But my whole build was built around these spells. So on their own I'm sure it's not a big deal, but all together probably a very big deal.

I'm not experimenting, and taking a chance that this breaks my game….

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If anything, the game was broken with the pre 1.02 versions of those abilities. All 4 of those spells are still excellent in 1.02. It was quite easy to have CoC's duration be longer than its cooldown in 1.01, which is pretty broken. It's still a very, very powerful spell.

Crushing Prison was a long duration CC+DoT that did not break on damage, and instant cast. Toning it down was needed. It's still very powerful, btw, essentially a one-shot kill on white mobs. It's great to take out an enemy Mage. Combined with Overwhelm (Dog) you can immediately eliminate 2 white enemies from each fight.

Force Field was completely broken when used defensively on your tank. I don't know if that exploit still works or not, enemies should not target invulnerable characters. I think they just reduced the duration though, which is still a good thing. It completely removes one character from a fight, that is potentially an enourmously powerful ability, so again, toning it down is a good thing.

Blizzard is still awesome. I love to drop that on groups of archers/mages. Or combine it with Grease in a choke point and force the entire group of enemies to run through it.

This game still needs a lot of balancing. Too many terrible spells, and still several that are overpowering, bordering on totally broken. Mana Clash is still insane. That spell can take all the mana and 75% of the health from some orange bosses. Basically it's an IWIN button versus casters. It should probably be changed to single target, and its damage nerfed by a lot. Just taking away all a caster's mana is huge.

This is a good patch, a good step in the right direction.

If you're finding the game too hard, and found you were relying on abusing the nerfed spells to get by, then I would suggest turning it down to easy until you get the hang of it a bit better. Control seems to be the key to winning in DA. CC is very, very powerful. Control the battlefield, ensure that enemies are focusing on your tanks, keep those tanks healed, and focus your killing efforts on one monster at a time. The key is to eliminate sources of incoming damage so that your tanks can soak up the rest without dying before you can heal them.

To check version, run the configuration program then click Game on the left side. (Not exactly intuitive.)

Loving the money-instead-of-junk thing so far!

...enemies should not target invulnerable characters

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Enemies AND allies, thank you. "My weapon is ineffective!" Well duh, maybe you should try shooting somebody else instead of the one with the big force field around him? Grrrr....

Has anyone heard anything about patches regarding the console versions -- or is this patch applied to all versions of the game?

No, this particular patch is PC only.

Perhaps the console versions are updated automatically when you log in?