DA:O My melee fighters do no damage

Guys, have you done all the companions' side quests and had enough private conversations with them to get their approval up to 100% ? I'm not sure if you guys have finished the game yet, but it is possible to finish the game without doing the characters personal quests and finding out how they tick.

You can do it that way.

If you want to do it in a proper roleplay manner and see them as real people (although I tend to see them mainly as fighters and assess them according to their combat usefulness) - it is interesting to find out how they :'tick' .

Even if you look at the game from purely a combat POV, one needs to keep in mind that, (as I'd said before), increasing your companions' approval rating makes the characters gain stat levels, (for free) which makes them and the whole group more effective in battle.

Yeah, yeah -sure- it is of course about RP as well; but then consider: Shale has stood forgotten and motionless in the middle of a village for years and years and years. Before that, the golem was controlled by a mad scientist type mage, who did all sorts of experiments on the golem. That golem now sees you as a potential similar exploiter than the mage had been. Is it not a wonder that she's a bit strange? Might it not be worthwhile to win her trust and help her adjust to the world now that she is mobile again, and free, which she had never been since she became a golem?
I had actually found Shale surprisingly sociable, taking her golem status into account. (Much more so than either Sten or Oghren, for instance)

Have you done Morrigan's personal quest yet? Do you know what Flemeth was raising her for? Don't you think that being raised completely alone in the wilderness by a pretty strange "mother" would have made you into a defensive person with some weird ideas? Remember, she never had any normal social contact to have enabled her to learn social skills and normal emotional responses.

Morrigan is actually the only character that I have at 100% and have no problem keeping her there, we get along fine. I dont see why people have such a hard time getting along with her. Maybe youre the one w/ the problem, not her ='.'=

As far as damage goes, all i can do is give you some rogueish advice. Give them a level in poison, they only need one level to use it. I coat Alistairs blades once and awhile during particularly nasty battles. It stacks, so if you have several poisons going on you get several different extra damage modifiers, several chances to stun, so on and so forth. I know, Im always pushing poison on people but hey - it's what's worked for me so far.

Dont forget your abilities either, you should be at zero stamina because your firing stuff off all the time. If youre not using your talents youre not using the char to it's fullest potential

Well so you guys see no difference between characters writing in the Witcher and in DAO? And see no difference between evil/good writing in the Witcher and in DAO?

Well I could be wrong or even be the problem , but for me there's a huge world between the two. Well I'll need collect some example to try explain how stupid and non realistic I feel some reactions of some characters.

I can see that there is no definite good and no definite evil in either The Witcher or in DAO. I don't know how many times you have played either game, but I've tried out different options in both games, and with many of the choices there is an up side and a down side no matter what you choose.

It's always a kind of : sacrifice this to gain that - but it's never a clear-cut moral decision. In DAO, you often only see the consequences at the very end of the game, much as you did with Witcher.

Ok here two examples that make no sense for me:

I have check the first example but I'm almost sure of the second so didn't check, I'll let you counter check if you want.

EDIT: I'd be curious you quote any example like that in The Witcher. In The witcher when a character behave in a weird way you get clue on possible reason of the behavior. When a character do a choice there's a reason like more general interest, and the story explains it or give the clue. You don't let the player in front of an illogical behavior with no clue or interrogation about it. Make such behavior understandable 30 hours later is a very poor writing and I doubt any DAO final explain such behavior I quote.

Um, when I talk about choices, I meant really big, proper choices, like ….- I'm not talking about the petty bitching/grumbling of some bad-tempered people, why even listen to them or care what they say?

You sound like you are still very early in the game, and I've told you before that all your characters are unpleasant and grumble like this if you have not worked at getting their approval rating higher.

The thing wih Morrigan is that she didn't want to come with you on expedition in the first place- her mother had ordered her to come with you, - so she is very much like a grumbly teenager, because she is in a place where she didn't really want to be- but will let up on her mumbles and grumbles as soon as you work on her disposition a bit. Just give the girl a necklace or some earrings for pete's sake, and otherwise just ignore her grumbling until she gets more polite because you managed to work up her approval rating.

She is not "evil" btw - she is simply a pragmatitst, who does not see "morality" in the unpractical way that a church would preach -she was not raised with those kinds of moral values - she was raised as a survivor, and that is how she views your choices: are these choices the best choices in view of achieving you end goal. What you are talking about (the grumbling) is nothing to do with the "grey choices" I was talking about. I was talking about scenarios like in the Witcher where you had to decide if you were going to save Abigail or not; where you decide if you are going to side with the elves or with the order; etc.

I will not give examples similar to that kind of thing in DAO, since you seem to be still very early in the game, and so might other people be who read this thread, and I don't want to put too many spoilers.

Why don't you finish the companion quests and finish the game first, and then we have this discussion again - from a more informed background, and without fear of us who had played the game giving out too many spoilers?

PS: Let's put some spoiler tags around the spoilers we have already posted..

Well I can't read your spoils yet (thanks for using spoils tags).

Here I got another irritating Morrigan stupid behavior:
Well for me, just a totally stupid behavior alas not to highlight how stupid is Morrigan but to show how she likes the evil side. It's one example among too many where the Morrigan pragmatism you quote is destroyed by her behavior.

Seeing the reaction of Wayne (this end in a stupid useless fight) it's clear that not only Morrigan will bore me to death. This stupid fight is a typical example of what I hate in this game and why I dislike a lot the poor writing in DAO, some other writing points are good but it's spoiled by stuff like that. Quote that for wayne point of view I won't argue if it make sense or not, it's more bad story organization, in despair state, make this choice, it's very hard to believe even from a blind devot.

I wasn't talking about your choices but about NPC behaviors, very changing writing quality in DAO, from up to bottom alas too much bottom to not be irritating. The gray thing isn't abstract choices but it's a whole and all about situations and NPC actions and interactions, on this The Witcher show a much better writing quality, a lot more mature and not superficial.

I have PC approval to 25 to 40 but I'm already bored to constantly struggle against approval low down through adventure dialogs.

I'm not very far in the game but still played a significant part (Lothering+Warden+Stone prisoner+Redcliffe up to close end + Started Circle Tower for Redcliffe). Again a late end could explain some behaviors, but I doubt it explains any weird behavior I quoted.

It's a matter of relatively basic technical writing, you can't let a player in a disbelief for a long time without to organize your story for it. You need provide something to justify the disbelief and start the famous suspension of disbelief. For example you need highlight in some way interrogation related to the disbelief, to point there's an explanation even if not clear. Or you need provide clues, right or not, about possible explanations, or you provide some explanations but should not let the player in a disbelief state a too long time. Even if you are right and end explain many thing, on this point the writing quality is still very poor in DAO, The Witcher is a lot better, you can't even compare the two.

Dasale said:

Here I got another irritating Morrigan stupid behavior:

Spoiler

Circle of mage, met wyne and the girl is stupid enough to not be able to understand that in the situation she should shut up. Nor she can understand that helping the mage to get more help from more people is the way to go.

Click to expand...

Well,

I agree that reactions of some companions may be irrational here and there
but why would you expect them to behave rationally all the time? Plus, in such cases you never loose a substantial amount of approval points anyway.

Is it the character who is irrational or the writing? You could argue that any bad character writing fall under the category of irrational behavior, that's a bit easy.

Also yes if you dig through the whole dialog tree you'll find some better writing but well that doesn't improve a weak part of the tree. Add 3 sane apples this won't make the rotten apple more sane.

Eventually my problem with Morrigan is that it's impossible to believe in some of her base character postulate. There's two main points:

• Give such a low value to life and to help is weird, so she is agree I just cut her throat because her voice sucks?
• In some way she is tolerant and in some other way she isn't, she is tolerant with evil stuff and not tolerant with good stuff. For me it's not human irrational behavior, just irrational writing, more simply, poor writing and impossible to believe character.

Dasale said:

Well I can't read your spoils yet (thanks for using spoils tags).
Here I got another irritating Morrigan stupid behavior:

Spoiler

Circle of mage, met wyne and the girl is stupid enough to not be able to understand that in the situation she should shut up. Nor she can understand that helping the mage to get more help from more people is the way to go.

Well for me, just a totally stupid behavior alas not to highlight how stupid is Morrigan but to show how she likes the evil side. It's one example among too many where the Morrigan pragmatism you quote is destroyed by her behavior.

Seeing the reaction of Wayne (this end in a stupid useless fight) it's clear that not only Morrigan will bore me to death. This stupid fight is a typical example of what I hate in this game and why I dislike a lot the poor writing in DAO, some other writing points are good but it's spoiled by stuff like that. Quote that for wayne point of view I won't argue if it make sense or not, it's more bad story organization, in despair state, make this choice, it's very hard to believe even from a blind devot.

Click to expand...

Hmm, perhaps this all made more sense to me, because I'd played through most of the origins, including the "mage" origin, so I have a bit of background on the Mages' politics.

I'm going to put some of this in spoiler tags, just in case, because some gamers like to discover things gradually, but please feel free to open the spoiler Dasale, I am writing it for you.
Ok, only people who have not finished Ostargar yet, need to avoid the following spoiler tags:


Morrigan simply does not like to be persecuted, which is why she hates the Mage's Circle. On the other hand Wynne is very much a bit of a condescending preachy type - and her self-righteousness caused her some trouble in her past, as you will find when you do her personal quest. With my style of play, I had to endure quite a lot of irritating preaching from Wynne, who tends to be overly prim and proper.

In any case, - like I have said many times over - if you just speak kindly to your people (except Sten- you need to be firm with him), and treat them with kindness and give them gifts, their approval of you will increase to a point where they trust in you enough to accept your decisions.

Btw. I used both Wynne and Morrigan when entering the Circle Tower quest, and although I had a bit of bickering from Morrigan's side, I didn't lose any approval points there. I simply made the correct dialogue choice, and Morrigan instantly shut up.

Working a bit on one's cunning and persuasion stat helps not only with persuading your companions, but with NPC's in general, which can lead to better loot and better outcomes with many of your quests.

Ok, now a bit of a spoiler that you need only avoid if you had not fetched Shale yet:

@Dasale, regarding the scenario where you went to fetch Shale:

For the Stone prisoner part, I read the spoil and disagree, I saw at least two dialog branches where Morrigan reaction was weird and negative.

For the mage tower event I quoted, I dislike Morrigan reaction I quoted but well this one could not be the best example about reactions that make no sense.

My character has 2 levels of persuasion but also is male (and elf), my first character was female as I always do because I prefer have a nice female ass right under my nose during all the game than an ugly male ass. I restart for trying rogue and male because of Morrigan, to avoid have 2 mages in the team and curious to see what was the development with Morrigan. How I look at Morrigan now is rather ironical but at least I don't regret the rogue choice… well except when I'm cursing the game when I get a rude fight I can't beat at first tries.

All of this is going to end in zero DAO party NPC that I found really attaching, but that's not new thing, only BG1 escape this rule for stuff linked to Bioware. For me Bioware never knew writing well, particularly characters and books, with the weird exception of BG1 story and characters (BG1 books was the most boring stuff a game ever get), I'm sure someone important in writing left at end of BG1.

Well I'll stop the arguing about this, perhaps when I'll finish the game I'll come back to it in a separate thread dedicated to spoils and this subject.

I have finish the game, didn't explored all options, for example I made only personal quests of some companions, but I'm ready for any spoil. To avoid (boring) spoil tags I open the thread tagged with spoil alert to continue this discussion:
About Companions Psychology (SPOILERS ALERT)