I'm curious - the people complaining about 'trash mobs' in DA1 - were they a) playing on PC and b) was the difficulty on or above hard?
The console versions, had no tactical view, the enemies came in convenient waves and it was possible to solo Flemeth with just a rogue on nightmare.
The PC version on hard had very meticulously laid out encounters - in fact, the only reason I replayed 3 times was for the combat. Have people here played Sacred 2 and Dungeon Siege 2? What is the standard against which were are measuring DA1 combat?
And DA2, if anything is more than likely to give us real trash mobs.
I played the PC version on hard.
The first 25-30% of the game was a challenge, because I was learning the mechanics and the optimal party/ability configuration - and so forth.
Once the primary party structure was in place - the VAST majority of battles played out almost exactly the same. Using 1 decked out tank, 2 buffers/controllers/healers, and 1 major DPS character.
So, a good 50-60% of all the combat was a total bore for me - because it was endless waves of samey encounters with 1-3 "hard" dudes that needed special care - and I dealt with most of them in the exact same ways.
As for the two dragons - I basically just had my tank hold aggro - spam healed him - and had ranged slowly kill it.
Pretty much zero effort involved.
Really quite boring towards the end - because battles came around each corner. The dwarven area was particularly poorly designed.
Bioware were never good at encounter design - and their games have always had too much filler combat, but Dragon Age was probably the worst I've tried from them.
Mass Effect 2 would have been almost as bad, if it wasn't for the battles being short and very easy. But it had an even more predictable encounter design - complete with "cover obstacles" telegraphing every single encounter in the game.
I'm not sure they even have human beings design levels anymore.
Strikes me more as a somewhat elaborate blueprint tailored with a few personal tweaks.