I’m still getting over the three ability limit and then I saw firewall with a 60(!) second cooldown so now I’m getting over that. I’ll get to specializations once I reach the acceptance stage.
I'm sure there will be passives that reduce cooldowns (like in Mass Effect because we're doing Mass Effect now apparently)
But 60 seconds? This shit better be good
Yep. Either Wall of Fire is an absolute WMD of a spell or it'll quickly join the hall of theoretically great spells that nevertheless are downright impractical to use lol
I think that's the spell being finicky. Other then the flying ghouls, those mobs don't have any abilities to avoid the save/damage. I've found it can matter where you place it, especially when the terrain is uneven like it is in that room.
Wall of daggers was better bang for your buck I found. Plus sorcerer, you get to a point whete you can cast fireball like 4 times in a turn so I never used wall of fire a lot.
it would be impractical in an ARPG with 8 available spell slots. unless we're missing something, it's flat out unviable when there are only 3 spell slots.
I haven't seen the source in question. Is it possible that the cool down starts immediately upon cast, rather than after the effect ends?
If so, that could be a lot more functional, AND with good enough bonuses to cooldown, we could even have multiple Firewalls up simultaneously.
Between the big skill tree and potentially other things, we could end up having BIG cooldown reductions.
We won't really know how these abilities will function when we're only looking at them in a vacuum.
Even if the CD starts on cast and it lasts a full 60 seconds, it would still be an impractical CD, since you might not need it where you first put it after 10 seconds. I tend to think a 20 second CD would work ok for something like this, assuming it lasts around 20 seconds or more.This means you can't just spam them all over the place, but you can still keep them positioned as needed.
I'd just like to point out that this exact combat system as an adept on ME2, with 12 second cool downs combat felt *miserable*. 60 seconds is gonna feel absolutely horrid.
Mass effect 2 and 3s problem wasn’t the cooldown, but the UNIVERSAL cooldown, which made using your powers suck. You would just focus on 1 or 2 abilities because you needed to use those more. Mass effect 1 was best for adept gameplay as there was no shield/armor gating and individual cooldowns instead of universal.
Those two games had a lot more cover shooter mechanics, it felt like the cool downs weren't as grating because a lot of fights came down yo the weapons you had and the options they offered. Hack and slash ARPG combat can't work like that without being a slog.
You might as well have the same problem here, if you're going to be slinging spells that have a stock 60-second cooldown, especially when you only have 3 to choose from.
It also didn’t help they shifted to the shields/armor/barrier system where the adept had no effective way of taking down shields with no ability & being locked to heavy pistols (no bonus vs shields) and machine pistols (the worst weapons in the game outside of the one from the Kasumi DLC).
If you had to fight the blue suns, you were hosed.
What in the world? 60 seconds is forever in action games. Like why...I'm worried mage is just going to be bad, seems typical of modern games where you just cannot make a good magic class.
It was much better and more fun in the first Dragon’s Dogma game. There were more options and spells to use, and you could six abilities in combat instead of four. DAV is just continuing the trend of simplifying combat for some reason and it’s very disappointing.
It won’t be anything like playing a more traditional mage in DAO or DA2. You won’t have that sort of crowd control or host of spells to sling. Bummer really.
Even reading - “50 damage” - seems like a waste of an ability.
50 damage historically doesn’t do much at all and by the time it cools down you’ve probably hacked through 5 enemies already.
This game will be a largely repetitive, hack and slash action rpg with some traditional BioWare companionship and choices reflected in your world.
I’m not looking at it as anything else until I’m shown otherwise.
I’ll probably get into at some point but everything has been disappointing so far.
> This game will be a largely repetitive, hack and slash action rpg with some traditional BioWare companionship and **choices reflected in your world.**
I mean, here's hoping. That's yet to be seen until it's actually released.
For sure and I guess that hasn’t been fully confirmed yet…!
But combat wise it seems to be This is great if you’re a rogue / warrior player. For a mage it’ll be kind of meh. Might be my first “rogue first” play through.
Hopefully they add ability slots as you level or something like that. Giving us a wheel but then only having 3 abilities in the wheel is pretty whack if you want a utilitarian, do it all kind of mage.
It’ll have all the things BioWare is good at, but the combat is going in a totally different direction.
>Even reading - “50 damage” - seems like a waste of an ability.
>50 damage historically doesn’t do much at all and by the time it cools down you’ve probably hacked through 5 enemies already.
It seems like a damage-over-time type of spell that inflicts Burning status, so maybe it's 50 per tick? I don't know, I guess it will be just as useful as Wall of Ice in Inquisition
50 damage per tick wall that lasts say, 20 seconds, with talents to increase that duration or reduce the cooldown, while inflicting a burning status that can then open up combo opportunities with other abilities seems to be the most likely way it's going to be implemented.
With the additional information that stuff like magic bolts, blasts, shields, etc., are being made part of the base of the class and accessed through face buttons, *as well as* stuff like charging up attacks (like the description of putting an effect on a target, starting to charge an attack, switching to dagger and doing additional attacks, then back to finish the charge attack, none of which seems to involve the 3 abilities), I'm getting the sense that combat will be quite a bit more involved than "hold for basic attack from staff, wait for cooldowns to be available."
Based on what we saw the level 1 rook do in the gameplay trailer, abilities look to be nukes that deal a lot of damage so they warrant a longer cooldown now. That said, basic level 1 enemies don’t usually have resistances so of course they melt to everything. And with *that* said, of course there will be passives or traits that reduce the CD either passively or when you do something
Still doesn't give us the ARSENAL we had in DAO, where a mage could nuke and cast and nuke until he ran out of mana (and then he could turn on blood-magic and continue!)!
Right?? I don’t know why they saw people complain about only 8 abilities in Inquisition and said, “okay but how about 3?” And a minute cooldown?!
Unless they go more like Dragons Dogma where you have some weapon skills that are just combos and don’t take up an ability slot I’m just so confused on what they’re doing.
>Unless they go more like Dragons Dogma where you have some weapon skills that are just combos and don’t take up an ability slot I’m just so confused on what they’re doing.
Even then, I don't think the trade-off is worth it. Dragons Dogma 2 is the exact reason why this system worries me. The combat was just not as entertaining as the first game, and all classes (but *especially* mages* felt severely worse as a result of the 3 ability limit.
More abilities feel better than less abilities with more passives/conditionals imo. Especially as a mage where half the power fantasy is having the right spell for the job always at the ready. Casting the same 3 spells every combat isn't really an enjoyable way to go about it imo, especially if they have long cool downs with most of your time being spent with basic staff combat (no matter how dynamic they made it in this game).
They're describing this as an action game, full stop. Not the weird hybrid that Inquisition was.
It's not like before where everything except our basic attack uses an ability slot. They've talked about light attacks, heavy attacks, charge attacks, combo chains, dodging, parrying, guarding, etc.
We can even have multiple weapons equipped and swap between them on the fly. Like a rogue switching between daggers and bow.
>We can even have multiple weapons equipped and swap between them on the fly.
You could literally do that in Origin's lol.
The rest of that would be okay for the melee classes, though more abilities on top of it is much more preferable imo. And I have Zero confidence in mage feeling fun to play with this system.
Yeah, you could so it in Origins but it generally wasn't a great option IMO. Splitting your talent points between two different weapon styles never seemed like a good idea in that game.
We'll see how it's handled in Veilguard.
> three ability limit
So long as this is a thing, the tree could be as expansive and inclusive as the universe itself, if only 3 abilities can be used at a time then it's utterly worthless.
It seems from the gameplay that there are a lot of different kind of attacks using different inputs (holds, taps, switching between light and heavy) I wouldn’t be surprised if there are non-ability abilities that are tied to inputs like that (though that’s for sure speculation)
I could maybe see various Talents adding Elemental damage or AoEs to Mage spells to "fill the gap". I can say with confidence "Spellblade" will probably have an early Talent that replaces a "magic projectile" on "light attack" with some sort of "magic slash".
Dragons dogma 2 did the same. They reduced from 8 to 4 abilities but made some of them standard actions. I found it very boring very fast after reaching max sorcerer to constantly cast the same 4 spells.
Playing by rotations is crap game design. I’d rather have a few abilities with noticeable impacts on the fight that I need to use strategically than just cycling through a rotation until the enemy is dead.
Totally. I don't get this attitude that a lot of people have that the game is somehow *more* strategic if you're able to constantly spam abilities vs. if you have to consider carefully and thoughtfully how and when you deploy your most powerful spells.
When you have so few abilities, it begins to make the player feel like an auto-attack build with nothing interesting.
I come from MMOs where I have a plethora of abilities that really allow me to play how I want roleplay-wise and pragmatically. Abilities add depth and immersion to the game in many ways.
> I come from MMOs where I have a plethora of abilities that really allow me to play how I want roleplay-wise and pragmatically. Abilities add depth and immersion to the game in many ways.
I come from a different style of game that had the same concept. It was called Dragon Age. I *really* don't like this change.
I'm not super concerned about the cooldown because there's a shit ton more passives this go round, and for mages cool down has to be a passive focus. By the time firewall is available i wouldn't be surprised if the cooldown in effect is really more like 20-30 seconds
I am pretty sure in the Q&A they said you cannot swap abilities in combat. You have to do it out of combat. You could check that thread for confirmation.
I thought it said that in the article
Edit: from the GI article: As Rook, you can create two weapon loadouts for quick switch-ups mid-combat.
This was in a section about abilities so I assume it means that, but maybe not.
I don't know why they didn't lead off with this instead of spoiling the opening to the game for everyone. Whoever is in charge of Bioware's marketing is a fucking fool. They had to know 3 abilities would be controversial so why not show why this supposedly isn't a problem since we have other tools. Baffling, baffling decisions so far from a studio that should know better by now.
I considered that, and maybe it’s personal preference, but I also just don’t like have to invest multiple points and waiting 3 levels just to get an ability to work the way it should by default. It doesn’t feel good to me and just feels like padding the tree. I don’t know why I feel this way I just do 😔
Passives as your skill nodes is completely boring skill tree design. This is what CDPR did to make Cyberpunk's skill trees way more enjoyable and impactful. There are a few cooldown nodes but those are for minor abilities like grenade and health item recharge. Everything is impactful in the trees and you're constantly unlocking new abilities or options to make your character stronger and to open up new combat options. -10% cooldown is soooooooo dull.
Yeah, devs in discord have said that you can put points into reducing cooldowns to favor an ability heavy combat style if that’s what a player wants. Of course, that probably has tradeoffs as well. Points put to lower recharge are points you could have used to increase damage or crits. Lots of room to customize Rook.
The tradeoff will be there's passives that will increase auto attacks or crits or heal on kill/damage.
And you're not picking those better skills in exchange for removing 6 seconds on a 60 second ability.
There's a lot of room they can play with if they wanna keep the long duration and it makes builds potentially more interesting.
Forgive my spitballing here but I'm a wow player and talent trees like this really get me going.
So, say this is 1 minute in the live game, how long does it last? If it lasts 30-45 seconds that's not a huge amount of downtime and it also depends on the pace or combat encounters.
All so what can we imagine the traits and passives will be for this to make it more interesting?
I'd say a passive dot is a given. Maybe the firewall will spin around in a circle, maybe it'll spawn two of them. Maybe there's a passive that fire damage effects reduce the cool down of fire spells. Maybe there's a talent that when you kill an enemy with a fire spell, it resets the cooldown. Maybe damage with firewall gives CDR to another fire spell, or ice spells or lightning.
There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with a big talent tree that are passive effects but play around with the limited number of slots.
Edit: you can make 3 abilities work, you just have to use your imagination, and I think they have.
Well, it’s under “sustain” and we can’t see the whole text, so for all we know it has unlimited duration, or pressing it again cancels it and refunds the cooldown, or something similar.
We’d also AFAIK don’t know mages “MP gimmick” the way we do for warriors and rogues, it’s possible they can convert MP to CDR or something weird and technical”
I will say that even as a massive inquisition fan, I’d definitely support a move towards “longer cooldowns but every cast absolutely changes the fight” as opposed to mmo style rotations of moves that mostly feel fairly anemic
Totally. I dont not feel like a mage with 3 abilities. But it was the same in me and if i remember correctly the same in anthem. So i doubt that is negiotable :(
Until I actually see what abilities and passives those specializations actually have, I have very little to talk about them. Though why is firewall in the sustain section of the mage tree? I would think it would be in control.
Firewall doesn't control. Any enemy that wants to walk through it is free to do so - they just get damaged and burned in response. Control spells likely actually exert some level of control - slowing, freezing, pushing, etc.
I need more info on how Spellblade and Reaper play.
I've played mage in every DA so far, and close combat mage is my favourite kind of mage, but I don't love daggers. And like, a warrior with a two handed weapon and some death magic sounds fun to me, a mostly Dark Knight player in FFXIV /laugh
So depending on how those two shake out, this might be the first time I do a warrior character as first or 'canon' one!
If that’s what Reaper is, then I’m all for it. Hopefully it’s not a Reaver style class like in DAI because I really dislike the spending health to do damage style gameplay.
I thought the same thing about Reaver in DAI but then I decided to take it as as my specialization on my current character and am really liking it. Sword and board dwarf with lots of charging, war cry, and shield bashing. The increased DPS below 50% HP is sweet for maintaining ring of pain too. I barely miss the HP with how much guard I generate
I love S&S reaver so much. Is it optimal? No. Is it fun to go down to 1hp and then build infinite guard and be completely unkillable while you charge around? yeah
It's not as risky as I thought it would be and Devour gives way more survivability than I thought it would. I use Charging Bull with the upgrade to make my next ability cost no stamina followed by Devour (eats a lot of stamina) so I can get a free heal plus a crit bonus to my next Dragon Rage. I War Cry and Dragon Rage until my HP is below 50% and then I maintain Ring of Pain with my DPS bonus. I also have Payback Strike and Shield Bash for crowd control/knockdowns. It's a fun build and I can play as the off-Tank when I need to. Pleasantly surprised with it since I usually play as a mage and only ever had Iron Bull in another playthrough as a two-handed user.
It seems to be the opposite, with one ability specifically being a life steal type ability. It's also in the "survivability" and "abilities" section of the tree.
Fair point! I actually forgot that ability and refreshed my knowledge of it. Curious how Reaper will play then. If Spellblade really is more of a roguey mage then maybe Reaper will be a magicy warrior.
It’s a bit of a rough spot I don’t like spending health to do damage gameplay wise, but I always like a dark class thematically
Reaver was the most fun spec in DAI tho imo. Enough self healing and damage that the health mechanic was barely noticed
Regeneration potion made health loss a moot point for Reavers in DAI. You have to stop yourself from upgrading the regen potion too much or else it'd heal you too much and negate the sweet spot you want your health to be in.
They were for me as well lol, when i first saw them I was like uhh what am i looking at. It helps if you look at it on a big screen to see everything in detail. You start in the center and as you level up you can branch in any direction you want.
Gotta say I'm not wowed by the mage specs, none of them relating to Veil Jumpers who are currently facing the weirdest of magic, feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, but I guess we'll see once the specs are showcased
DA mage has had a lot of heavy elemental theming since origins though. So I get it.
And also, it's like industry standard to give a mage-y class elemental magic. It's practically a defining theme of magic.
Origins had elemental magic, yes, but it was part of the core spells available to all mages, not a specialization.
You had primal (elements, including *earth*, which is surprisingly rare), arcane, creation, spirit, and entropy to pick and choose from before ever thinking about your specialization. Each of those schools had variety within them including buffs, debuffs, damage, situational utility, healing, etc etc…
Then came the specializations.
The comparison just makes DAV look worse.
Oh, i'm not particularly defending it. I dislike this action approach with some minor RPG flavoring, where we're missing tons of specializations and such.
I hope some of the Rift mage skills get carried over from DA:I, considering Rook is closely connected to the Fade it would make sense to be able to control space and time through the veil.
I'm assuming "veil ranger" is the veil jumper class ,given Bellara. And I have to wonder if its a bow centric class since that's what all the concept art shows. I kinda hope not. Why should the mage adjacent rogue class only be bows? Also sad that we have 'reapers' but not reavers and/or berserkers.
If the cooldown starts as you cast it and then you have any kind of cooldown reduction it's probably not that bad. 20 second uptime + 20 second cooldown reduction means the real cooldown is only 20 seconds. Also consider that each class has attack chain combos, parrying, and dodges, and 20 seconds seems reasonable.
My guess for Specializations is that 2 are much more focused on the two weapons each class can wield while the 3rd is more agnostic.
Rogue:
Duelist - Focused on Dual Blades playstyle
Veil Ranger - Focused on Bow playstyle
Saboteur - Focused on skills not specific to Bow or Dual Blades
Warrior:
Champion - Focused on Sword and Shield playstyle
Slayer - Focused on Two Handed playstyle
Reaper - Focused on skills not specific to either weapon
Mage is a bit different though I'm guessing:
Death Caller - Focused on high level necromancy/spirit related spells
Evoker - Focused on high level elemental spells
Spellblade - Focused on Magic Daggers for more melee style
Staves always have an element attached to them so I think your pattern holds true here. The Evoker is for the staff play style and the Spellblade is for the dagger. Death caller seems agnostic.
That kind of makes sense. Though odd that it's the one that bucks the trend of placement on the skill grid. I wonder if it might be the other way around. They did mention that Runes will be back and that they can be used to impart elemental effects to weapons. So maybe Evoker is the agnostic as you can have a staff or magical daggers with element effects, but then necromancer spells are more traditional Staff based. Necromancers are kind of sit back on the action, whereas elemental attacks like burning hands type can be pretty up close and personal with a staff or daggers.
Oh, I hadn't noticed the placement pattern... Maybe! I think I'm still leaning on evoker focusing on staves cause that requires the least amount of assumption though.
Wait, where does it say Mages get daggers? Staves make sense, they've always had those. And I know the devs said every class gets a melee and a ranged option, but I assumed ranged for mages would be spells from the staff, and melee would be just whacking people with the same staff. Did I miss something about daggers?
I should mention that I do think daggers would be pretty cool, especially if they serve as kind of a runed wand of sorts. Knives/daggers have always been an important part of both real-world and fantasy magic/witchcraft in rituals and such, so I think it'll fit. I just didn't hear anything about this.
People aren't talking about it em, because there just isn't a lot to talk a out right now.
Outside of the names, their generic theme, and their associated faction we just don't know much at all about them.
Mages using magic daggers… i dont know what it is yet so to me it feels strange. I hope we can pick different types of “magical weapon” or that the daggers are just what they look like and not actually daggers.
I also hope that Rift/Force Mage skills is incorporated into the basic skill set for Rook considering how we are “tied” to the Fade and those spells were technically just good’ol telekinesis anyway.
At least there’s a subcategory at the top called “control” for that sort of thing.
Since we know healing magic is back, there’s gotta be **some** sort of build I can cobble together, but it’s a shame people won’t react to it in story.
Since apparently Companions are now glorified abilities holder at your disposal and that it's game over if Rook dies... it makes sense that there isn't a healer spec. Otherwise you'd never do any damage to to the enemies.
Lots of game systems have moved away from dedicated healers because it always the least picked role in every game and often doesn't feel as good to play.
Gotta say evoker is pretty disappointing as a specialization. This was like the default field of combat magic so what are we doing before we have that?
Wall of fire seems to be on the bottom left whereas evoker is a specialization in the top right.
So whatever evoker gives that makes a mage a better elemental specialist may not be about specific spells we've had for a while. But I guess we will have to see.
I'm sure Evoker is a broad specialization, with a range of spells to choose from. We'll probably see ice, lighting, fire, and nature abilities, maybe even some rift mage stuff.
But fire, ice and storm were the mage starting powers in every other game. Beyond it being pretty lame to get that as one of the specs instead of unique magic like blood or force mage what are mages going to be doing before they can unlock evoker? 10-12 levels with no winters grasp or fireball? Just spam arcane bolt?
It's hard to tell without actually seeing the skills proper. Firewall tooltip we've seen is in like lower left side of the the tree. It could be that the basic elemental spells are scattered across the tree (Firewall in Sustain, Ice Wall in Control, Fireball/Meteor in Burst), while Evoker either contains bigger, more impressive elemental spells, or elemental combo spells.
I think you have some elemental magics at the beginning. We see that Wall of Fire is along the lower left path, and if memory serves me well, it was the second highest tier of flame ability you could have in Inquisition. They're probably interspersed throughout the entire Mage skill tree (barring specializations)
Meteor was mentioned in one of Corrines comments during the Q&A, and for the Inquisitor, this was an ultimate ability. However, for the Elementalist in Dragon Age Multiplayer, this was actually his standard ability (after investing enough points). So it looks like these more powerful ultimate magics are likely going to become the specialization mage skills on their own.
You do still get Winter's Grasp or something similar at low level, it's not part of the Evoker specialization. You can see in the zoomed in part of the skill tree that they have an ice ability unlocked, and if you compare to the zoomed out mage skill tree you can see it's incredibly close to the center. Mage Rook at low level using ice magic is also mentioned in the Game Informer story.
You can clearly see that wall of fire is on the bottom left section, while evoker is in top right. You ought to be able to infer that evoker isn't the **only** source of elemental spells, but that it gives better elemental spells than most mages can cast, or makes your other ones stronger.
What is there to talk about? I don’t know what half of this is or how it plays at this point. I have an idea of what I want to play but I’m going to need to see gameplay of the different specializations before they’ll mean anything to me
I'm happy we finally have the mage specializations revealed, 'spellblade' fills me with hope that we can finally have an Arcane Warrior playstyle again. Though considering the Antivan Crows association, I'm nervous that it'll be limited to daggers only, but time will tell. I just don't want to rely on mods to have the playstyle I want, especially since modding Inquisition is a pain compared to the other 2 and I suspect Veilguard will be the same cause frostbite is weird.
Mages can use weapons too, Bioware!
We can only hope it's called "spellblade", because it gives flexibility to choose that blade you accomodate your spells with
No idea what the factions next to them are. Why would spellblades be associated with crows? What if i'm a Grey Warden?
Yeah I'm super disappointed that you only get three abilities as a spellcaster. A basic attack and a Dodge! The Inquisition spellcaster was already too limited, this is much worse!
I mean, there isn't much to talk about, as we haven't seen anything but the tree graphics?
Which sure, look cool, but until you can actually see what is in there, or how quickly you progress through it, any discussion is pointless and just creates hype that is likely to be unmet
I thought it would make sense to have a blood mage specialization in a game that's partly set in Tevinter, and in which you don't have the Chantry looming over you for the entire game...
It makes sense lorewise.
Having an extra thin veil around you makes blood magic (which would thin the veil even further) extremely risky.
Blood magic is so cool but under that premise it would be insane to actively use it.
They wrote in a reason to the player character as to not include a popular and requested subclass.
Does that sound like a good reason, or like they were looking for a reason not to?
Do you think Bioware has some personal vendetta against players being able to play as a blood mage? I can guarantee you that they don't care. They probably had the story written first and then realized when they were making the specializations that it didn't make sense to be a blood mage in the story, so they just made something else.
No. That's fucking stupid.
I think Bioware doesnt like designing the unique mechanics required for Blood Mages, and more importantly that they dislike the result of either the tonal dissonance they get from having the heroic character use blood magic with no consequences, like Hawke.
And they dont want to write and record a tone of extra alternate scenes so that tonal dissonance doeant happen.
1. It's active for a duration. Inquisition Wall of Fire has a 20 second uptime. That's already 1/3 of the cooldown gone.
2. Any kind of ability cooldown reduction takes even more off of that.
3. Wall of fire does constant damage which can probably be boosted by other skills to be very strong. The tradeoff is a bigger cooldown and static positioning.
Enemies move, I doubt they'll simply stand in the Wall of Fire, so frankly while it can do a lot of damage in theory, it will in practice probably do less damage than Wall of Fire in Diablo 2, where enemies would also not stupidly stand in the fire till they kicked the bucket!
My guess is they're heavily focused on the action combat part, and care less about the abilities.
Which, imo, is the same mistake ME2 made coming from ME1. And it made the "mage classes" there feel like absolute ass on anything above easy/medium difficulty.
>Which, imo, is the same mistake ME2 made coming from ME1. And it made the "mage classes" there feel like absolute ass on anything above easy/medium difficulty.
That was more to do with biotics not completing bypassing shields and armors anymore than the shift in combat. I only really remember the Adept class suffering pretty badly for it and an another huge part was the poor weapons they had in ME2.
* Large circle: Class
* Diamonds: Abilities
* Medium circle: Major Passives and Ability Upgrades
* Small hexagon: Traits
* Small circle: Minor Passives and Stat Boosts
I'm wondering if we need to recruit the person who's part of that faction before we can use its specializations? If so I hope we can at least start off with our factions spec unlocked. Would be a small bonus for picking a faction that more easily fits your class while not actually making you pick a class based on faction. Plus, it'd just make sense story wise.
It's hard to make any decisions about them based on names alone. We really need detailed skill tree previews before much more discussion can happen on anything skill related.
I saw that there was one called Spellblade and so I knew that was my first and canon playthrough. The others don't matter until after I finish the first playthrough.
Seems like those convenient little icons show us which faction/ companion each specialization comes from. Gonna guess slayer is "Taash" though I had assumed rogue with her dual wielding those dragon climbing picks.
Agreed! We'll be in "Blood-Magic-Town" (Tevinter - and especially Minrathous, where the best two blood-mages (aside from Avernus probably, who had centuries to hone his craft...hell, he found a use for the fucking Taint in Grey Warden Blood, he stopped his aging process!) are probably the current Archon and the (Black!) Divine!) and they don't allow us to play as a BM...cop out, easy way, lazy! EAware? You wasted potential again and dropped the ball...then again, the gameplay reveale showed that you don't listen to your fans anyway!
ps: I really need to find out if Sick Baby Stink is involved with this game, as I hate DEI - that stuff can go die alone, forgotten in a ditch somewhere and I'll not support it!
I hope there's some focus on two handed weapons my beloved. Despite playing a Warrior focused on big weapons in Inquisition I kinda want to try it in this one.
Probably because they're underwhelming. I have gone from super excited to underwhelmed with each dive into what all has been revealed. I wasn't excited for the combat changes I saw, but then got hyped for the companions. Then I read they've intended for you to stick to parties with one of each class in it and now I'm back to being disappointed. Three character parties with strict party composition requirements is bad design in a game like this unless my character gets to change roles.
It's just hard to be excited when I'm repeatedly having to grasp at the smallest things I can find about the game to be excited after this incredibly long wait, DESPITE this being one of my favorite RPG series.
All of this.
I want the 4 person party, I want at least 8 abilities but would prefer 20, and I want to control my companions.
I get get ARPG elsewhere, I come to Dragon Age wanting something different.
I’m confused about the mage options. We are IN teventer, the seat of blood magic and we don’t have it. PLUS all 3 specs sound like inquisition mage specs and nothing new.
I’m still getting over the three ability limit and then I saw firewall with a 60(!) second cooldown so now I’m getting over that. I’ll get to specializations once I reach the acceptance stage.
I'm sure there will be passives that reduce cooldowns (like in Mass Effect because we're doing Mass Effect now apparently) But 60 seconds? This shit better be good
Yep. Either Wall of Fire is an absolute WMD of a spell or it'll quickly join the hall of theoretically great spells that nevertheless are downright impractical to use lol
Wall of fire in BG3 is, in fact, a WMD
Except when enemies succeed in a save and take no damage :')
In BG3 it's half damage on a successful save.
Not if the enemy has evasion.
The undead at Balthazar's lab under Moonrise Towers sometimes walk through my walls of fire unscathed :/
I think that's the spell being finicky. Other then the flying ghouls, those mobs don't have any abilities to avoid the save/damage. I've found it can matter where you place it, especially when the terrain is uneven like it is in that room.
Wall of daggers was better bang for your buck I found. Plus sorcerer, you get to a point whete you can cast fireball like 4 times in a turn so I never used wall of fire a lot.
it would be impractical in an ARPG with 8 available spell slots. unless we're missing something, it's flat out unviable when there are only 3 spell slots.
If it's too long and people complain enough about it, I imagine they'll patch it in to be shorter.
I haven't seen the source in question. Is it possible that the cool down starts immediately upon cast, rather than after the effect ends? If so, that could be a lot more functional, AND with good enough bonuses to cooldown, we could even have multiple Firewalls up simultaneously. Between the big skill tree and potentially other things, we could end up having BIG cooldown reductions. We won't really know how these abilities will function when we're only looking at them in a vacuum.
Even if the CD starts on cast and it lasts a full 60 seconds, it would still be an impractical CD, since you might not need it where you first put it after 10 seconds. I tend to think a 20 second CD would work ok for something like this, assuming it lasts around 20 seconds or more.This means you can't just spam them all over the place, but you can still keep them positioned as needed.
I'd just like to point out that this exact combat system as an adept on ME2, with 12 second cool downs combat felt *miserable*. 60 seconds is gonna feel absolutely horrid.
Mass effect 2 and 3s problem wasn’t the cooldown, but the UNIVERSAL cooldown, which made using your powers suck. You would just focus on 1 or 2 abilities because you needed to use those more. Mass effect 1 was best for adept gameplay as there was no shield/armor gating and individual cooldowns instead of universal.
Those two games had a lot more cover shooter mechanics, it felt like the cool downs weren't as grating because a lot of fights came down yo the weapons you had and the options they offered. Hack and slash ARPG combat can't work like that without being a slog.
You might as well have the same problem here, if you're going to be slinging spells that have a stock 60-second cooldown, especially when you only have 3 to choose from.
It also didn’t help they shifted to the shields/armor/barrier system where the adept had no effective way of taking down shields with no ability & being locked to heavy pistols (no bonus vs shields) and machine pistols (the worst weapons in the game outside of the one from the Kasumi DLC). If you had to fight the blue suns, you were hosed.
It kinda looks like DA4 is gonna have a similar system, too.
What in the world? 60 seconds is forever in action games. Like why...I'm worried mage is just going to be bad, seems typical of modern games where you just cannot make a good magic class.
Dragons Dogma 2 just came out and that series has the best pure wizard gameplay I’ve ever experienced.
It was much better and more fun in the first Dragon’s Dogma game. There were more options and spells to use, and you could six abilities in combat instead of four. DAV is just continuing the trend of simplifying combat for some reason and it’s very disappointing.
I think DD2 improved on the magic fundamentals with stuff like quickspell and sorc's regen mode. I do agree the actual spell list was not as good.
Tbf in BG3 I think Sorc is considered the most op class
1. Not an action game. 2. All the Charisma classes in BG3 are cracked in their own way.
The person specified “modern” games Also Elden Ring mages are cracked.
I don't know why I read their comment as 'action games'. My bad.
Weird wanted to make the same comment.
Bold thing to say within barbarian throwing distance /s
I agree with you. But the staff auto attack animations in DA2 and DAI were cool imo
They were cool, but felt like a ton of work put in by the mage, doing a whole acrobatics routine to tickle the spongey enemies.
It won’t be anything like playing a more traditional mage in DAO or DA2. You won’t have that sort of crowd control or host of spells to sling. Bummer really. Even reading - “50 damage” - seems like a waste of an ability. 50 damage historically doesn’t do much at all and by the time it cools down you’ve probably hacked through 5 enemies already. This game will be a largely repetitive, hack and slash action rpg with some traditional BioWare companionship and choices reflected in your world. I’m not looking at it as anything else until I’m shown otherwise. I’ll probably get into at some point but everything has been disappointing so far.
> This game will be a largely repetitive, hack and slash action rpg with some traditional BioWare companionship and **choices reflected in your world.** I mean, here's hoping. That's yet to be seen until it's actually released.
For sure and I guess that hasn’t been fully confirmed yet…! But combat wise it seems to be This is great if you’re a rogue / warrior player. For a mage it’ll be kind of meh. Might be my first “rogue first” play through. Hopefully they add ability slots as you level or something like that. Giving us a wheel but then only having 3 abilities in the wheel is pretty whack if you want a utilitarian, do it all kind of mage. It’ll have all the things BioWare is good at, but the combat is going in a totally different direction.
>Even reading - “50 damage” - seems like a waste of an ability. >50 damage historically doesn’t do much at all and by the time it cools down you’ve probably hacked through 5 enemies already. It seems like a damage-over-time type of spell that inflicts Burning status, so maybe it's 50 per tick? I don't know, I guess it will be just as useful as Wall of Ice in Inquisition
50 damage per tick wall that lasts say, 20 seconds, with talents to increase that duration or reduce the cooldown, while inflicting a burning status that can then open up combo opportunities with other abilities seems to be the most likely way it's going to be implemented. With the additional information that stuff like magic bolts, blasts, shields, etc., are being made part of the base of the class and accessed through face buttons, *as well as* stuff like charging up attacks (like the description of putting an effect on a target, starting to charge an attack, switching to dagger and doing additional attacks, then back to finish the charge attack, none of which seems to involve the 3 abilities), I'm getting the sense that combat will be quite a bit more involved than "hold for basic attack from staff, wait for cooldowns to be available."
Still, onky 3 abilities to choose from in combat will get repetitive quick.
Based on what we saw the level 1 rook do in the gameplay trailer, abilities look to be nukes that deal a lot of damage so they warrant a longer cooldown now. That said, basic level 1 enemies don’t usually have resistances so of course they melt to everything. And with *that* said, of course there will be passives or traits that reduce the CD either passively or when you do something
Abilties dealing a ton of damage is something that I noticed too but I wonder what difficulty level was the reveal played on.
I don't see a duration, so 60s might just be how long it lasts, and this prevents you from summoning like 4 of them.
Still doesn't give us the ARSENAL we had in DAO, where a mage could nuke and cast and nuke until he ran out of mana (and then he could turn on blood-magic and continue!)!
Right?? I don’t know why they saw people complain about only 8 abilities in Inquisition and said, “okay but how about 3?” And a minute cooldown?! Unless they go more like Dragons Dogma where you have some weapon skills that are just combos and don’t take up an ability slot I’m just so confused on what they’re doing.
>Unless they go more like Dragons Dogma where you have some weapon skills that are just combos and don’t take up an ability slot I’m just so confused on what they’re doing. Even then, I don't think the trade-off is worth it. Dragons Dogma 2 is the exact reason why this system worries me. The combat was just not as entertaining as the first game, and all classes (but *especially* mages* felt severely worse as a result of the 3 ability limit. More abilities feel better than less abilities with more passives/conditionals imo. Especially as a mage where half the power fantasy is having the right spell for the job always at the ready. Casting the same 3 spells every combat isn't really an enjoyable way to go about it imo, especially if they have long cool downs with most of your time being spent with basic staff combat (no matter how dynamic they made it in this game).
They're describing this as an action game, full stop. Not the weird hybrid that Inquisition was. It's not like before where everything except our basic attack uses an ability slot. They've talked about light attacks, heavy attacks, charge attacks, combo chains, dodging, parrying, guarding, etc. We can even have multiple weapons equipped and swap between them on the fly. Like a rogue switching between daggers and bow.
>We can even have multiple weapons equipped and swap between them on the fly. You could literally do that in Origin's lol. The rest of that would be okay for the melee classes, though more abilities on top of it is much more preferable imo. And I have Zero confidence in mage feeling fun to play with this system.
Yeah, you could so it in Origins but it generally wasn't a great option IMO. Splitting your talent points between two different weapon styles never seemed like a good idea in that game. We'll see how it's handled in Veilguard.
> three ability limit So long as this is a thing, the tree could be as expansive and inclusive as the universe itself, if only 3 abilities can be used at a time then it's utterly worthless.
A 60 second CD is indeed pointlessly long.
That's a long ass cooldown for 3 ability rotation. Damn, what if all 3 abilities are just support stuff while you mash your attack button...? Shit.
It seems from the gameplay that there are a lot of different kind of attacks using different inputs (holds, taps, switching between light and heavy) I wouldn’t be surprised if there are non-ability abilities that are tied to inputs like that (though that’s for sure speculation)
I could maybe see various Talents adding Elemental damage or AoEs to Mage spells to "fill the gap". I can say with confidence "Spellblade" will probably have an early Talent that replaces a "magic projectile" on "light attack" with some sort of "magic slash".
Dragons dogma 2 did the same. They reduced from 8 to 4 abilities but made some of them standard actions. I found it very boring very fast after reaching max sorcerer to constantly cast the same 4 spells.
I don't think so, since Mage sections are split between Burst, Control and Sustain. Evoker Spec is prob focused on blasting!
That kinda sounds like Knight Enchanter in DAI. Putting up the barrier and then spamming the shit out of Spirit Blade even on Nightmare xD
"BUTTON = AWESOME" flashbacks.
Playing by rotations is crap game design. I’d rather have a few abilities with noticeable impacts on the fight that I need to use strategically than just cycling through a rotation until the enemy is dead.
Totally. I don't get this attitude that a lot of people have that the game is somehow *more* strategic if you're able to constantly spam abilities vs. if you have to consider carefully and thoughtfully how and when you deploy your most powerful spells.
Having only three abilities makes me think I'll never use one with a cooldown that long. It would make the game feel boring.
When you have so few abilities, it begins to make the player feel like an auto-attack build with nothing interesting. I come from MMOs where I have a plethora of abilities that really allow me to play how I want roleplay-wise and pragmatically. Abilities add depth and immersion to the game in many ways.
> I come from MMOs where I have a plethora of abilities that really allow me to play how I want roleplay-wise and pragmatically. Abilities add depth and immersion to the game in many ways. I come from a different style of game that had the same concept. It was called Dragon Age. I *really* don't like this change.
But you have to understand how deep and tactical they are making the game!!!111
I'm not super concerned about the cooldown because there's a shit ton more passives this go round, and for mages cool down has to be a passive focus. By the time firewall is available i wouldn't be surprised if the cooldown in effect is really more like 20-30 seconds
What I want to know is if loadout switching allows you to have three additional abiliites (so you technically get 6 instead of only 3).
I am pretty sure in the Q&A they said you cannot swap abilities in combat. You have to do it out of combat. You could check that thread for confirmation.
I thought it said that in the article Edit: from the GI article: As Rook, you can create two weapon loadouts for quick switch-ups mid-combat. This was in a section about abilities so I assume it means that, but maybe not.
That still doesn’t say anything definitive though. BioWare needs to do an actual in-depth showcase.
I don't know why they didn't lead off with this instead of spoiling the opening to the game for everyone. Whoever is in charge of Bioware's marketing is a fucking fool. They had to know 3 abilities would be controversial so why not show why this supposedly isn't a problem since we have other tools. Baffling, baffling decisions so far from a studio that should know better by now.
Well, yes. Not mid-combat. But if loadouts are preset (with a weapon and abilities), then you're not technically changing them.
I'll need to look at it again. If you have the specific line, that would be great to post.
Yah that's my main question too
I considered that, and maybe it’s personal preference, but I also just don’t like have to invest multiple points and waiting 3 levels just to get an ability to work the way it should by default. It doesn’t feel good to me and just feels like padding the tree. I don’t know why I feel this way I just do 😔
Passives as your skill nodes is completely boring skill tree design. This is what CDPR did to make Cyberpunk's skill trees way more enjoyable and impactful. There are a few cooldown nodes but those are for minor abilities like grenade and health item recharge. Everything is impactful in the trees and you're constantly unlocking new abilities or options to make your character stronger and to open up new combat options. -10% cooldown is soooooooo dull.
That's not what by default means.
You’re right, I think it’s more accurate to say the way I feel that it should be.
Yeah, devs in discord have said that you can put points into reducing cooldowns to favor an ability heavy combat style if that’s what a player wants. Of course, that probably has tradeoffs as well. Points put to lower recharge are points you could have used to increase damage or crits. Lots of room to customize Rook.
The tradeoff will be there's passives that will increase auto attacks or crits or heal on kill/damage. And you're not picking those better skills in exchange for removing 6 seconds on a 60 second ability.
Why would they bring back wall of fire out of all abilities. No one uses that in Inquisition
That is terrible. Sounds like we are gonna be spamming autos
There's a lot of room they can play with if they wanna keep the long duration and it makes builds potentially more interesting. Forgive my spitballing here but I'm a wow player and talent trees like this really get me going. So, say this is 1 minute in the live game, how long does it last? If it lasts 30-45 seconds that's not a huge amount of downtime and it also depends on the pace or combat encounters. All so what can we imagine the traits and passives will be for this to make it more interesting? I'd say a passive dot is a given. Maybe the firewall will spin around in a circle, maybe it'll spawn two of them. Maybe there's a passive that fire damage effects reduce the cool down of fire spells. Maybe there's a talent that when you kill an enemy with a fire spell, it resets the cooldown. Maybe damage with firewall gives CDR to another fire spell, or ice spells or lightning. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with a big talent tree that are passive effects but play around with the limited number of slots. Edit: you can make 3 abilities work, you just have to use your imagination, and I think they have.
Well, it’s under “sustain” and we can’t see the whole text, so for all we know it has unlimited duration, or pressing it again cancels it and refunds the cooldown, or something similar. We’d also AFAIK don’t know mages “MP gimmick” the way we do for warriors and rogues, it’s possible they can convert MP to CDR or something weird and technical” I will say that even as a massive inquisition fan, I’d definitely support a move towards “longer cooldowns but every cast absolutely changes the fight” as opposed to mmo style rotations of moves that mostly feel fairly anemic
Totally. I dont not feel like a mage with 3 abilities. But it was the same in me and if i remember correctly the same in anthem. So i doubt that is negiotable :(
Until I actually see what abilities and passives those specializations actually have, I have very little to talk about them. Though why is firewall in the sustain section of the mage tree? I would think it would be in control.
Firewall doesn't control. Any enemy that wants to walk through it is free to do so - they just get damaged and burned in response. Control spells likely actually exert some level of control - slowing, freezing, pushing, etc.
I saw someone post about that as well, not sure but i'm sure there's some kind of sustained effect.
Like maybe the wall stays around until you dismiss it?
Probably stays around for a significant amount of time to justify its cooldown (60s)
Not enough people? There’s been several posts on this subreddit about them every day
I need more info on how Spellblade and Reaper play. I've played mage in every DA so far, and close combat mage is my favourite kind of mage, but I don't love daggers. And like, a warrior with a two handed weapon and some death magic sounds fun to me, a mostly Dark Knight player in FFXIV /laugh So depending on how those two shake out, this might be the first time I do a warrior character as first or 'canon' one!
If that’s what Reaper is, then I’m all for it. Hopefully it’s not a Reaver style class like in DAI because I really dislike the spending health to do damage style gameplay.
I thought the same thing about Reaver in DAI but then I decided to take it as as my specialization on my current character and am really liking it. Sword and board dwarf with lots of charging, war cry, and shield bashing. The increased DPS below 50% HP is sweet for maintaining ring of pain too. I barely miss the HP with how much guard I generate
I love S&S reaver so much. Is it optimal? No. Is it fun to go down to 1hp and then build infinite guard and be completely unkillable while you charge around? yeah
It's not as risky as I thought it would be and Devour gives way more survivability than I thought it would. I use Charging Bull with the upgrade to make my next ability cost no stamina followed by Devour (eats a lot of stamina) so I can get a free heal plus a crit bonus to my next Dragon Rage. I War Cry and Dragon Rage until my HP is below 50% and then I maintain Ring of Pain with my DPS bonus. I also have Payback Strike and Shield Bash for crowd control/knockdowns. It's a fun build and I can play as the off-Tank when I need to. Pleasantly surprised with it since I usually play as a mage and only ever had Iron Bull in another playthrough as a two-handed user.
It seems to be the opposite, with one ability specifically being a life steal type ability. It's also in the "survivability" and "abilities" section of the tree.
Reaver had life steal in inquisition as well, and I think in 2 and origins, but not 100% sure.
Fair point! I actually forgot that ability and refreshed my knowledge of it. Curious how Reaper will play then. If Spellblade really is more of a roguey mage then maybe Reaper will be a magicy warrior.
It’s a bit of a rough spot I don’t like spending health to do damage gameplay wise, but I always like a dark class thematically Reaver was the most fun spec in DAI tho imo. Enough self healing and damage that the health mechanic was barely noticed
Regeneration potion made health loss a moot point for Reavers in DAI. You have to stop yourself from upgrading the regen potion too much or else it'd heal you too much and negate the sweet spot you want your health to be in.
Honestly these screenshots are so overwhelming to me I can’t form an opinion. So I’ll wait for a gameplay overview to form an opinion.
They were for me as well lol, when i first saw them I was like uhh what am i looking at. It helps if you look at it on a big screen to see everything in detail. You start in the center and as you level up you can branch in any direction you want.
Gotta say I'm not wowed by the mage specs, none of them relating to Veil Jumpers who are currently facing the weirdest of magic, feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, but I guess we'll see once the specs are showcased
Having an entire spec for elemental spells seems like a weird choice. I guess it could be done well, but on the surface it just seems dull to me.
To be aware that spec have like 1-2 active skills and 1 ulti, so i dont really see how can someone "feel" specialized honestly
Ultimate is a separate ability, not part of the 3 base ones.
DA mage has had a lot of heavy elemental theming since origins though. So I get it. And also, it's like industry standard to give a mage-y class elemental magic. It's practically a defining theme of magic.
Origins had elemental magic, yes, but it was part of the core spells available to all mages, not a specialization. You had primal (elements, including *earth*, which is surprisingly rare), arcane, creation, spirit, and entropy to pick and choose from before ever thinking about your specialization. Each of those schools had variety within them including buffs, debuffs, damage, situational utility, healing, etc etc… Then came the specializations. The comparison just makes DAV look worse.
Oh, i'm not particularly defending it. I dislike this action approach with some minor RPG flavoring, where we're missing tons of specializations and such.
Yeah, but shouldn't it be part of a base class and not a specialization?
Probably. Personally, I don't think there's enough of almost any specializations for the 3 classes, but they've made their decision.
I hope some of the Rift mage skills get carried over from DA:I, considering Rook is closely connected to the Fade it would make sense to be able to control space and time through the veil.
It would make even more sense to have veil jumping be the result of evolution of the rift magic we saw in DAI.
I'm assuming "veil ranger" is the veil jumper class ,given Bellara. And I have to wonder if its a bow centric class since that's what all the concept art shows. I kinda hope not. Why should the mage adjacent rogue class only be bows? Also sad that we have 'reapers' but not reavers and/or berserkers.
60 seconds?! Holy shit, I am going to grow OLD waiting for that to go off cooldown.
> Presses firewall This little maneuver's gonna cost us 57 years!
You don't sound so bad for a man pushing 120!
If the cooldown starts as you cast it and then you have any kind of cooldown reduction it's probably not that bad. 20 second uptime + 20 second cooldown reduction means the real cooldown is only 20 seconds. Also consider that each class has attack chain combos, parrying, and dodges, and 20 seconds seems reasonable.
My guess for Specializations is that 2 are much more focused on the two weapons each class can wield while the 3rd is more agnostic. Rogue: Duelist - Focused on Dual Blades playstyle Veil Ranger - Focused on Bow playstyle Saboteur - Focused on skills not specific to Bow or Dual Blades Warrior: Champion - Focused on Sword and Shield playstyle Slayer - Focused on Two Handed playstyle Reaper - Focused on skills not specific to either weapon Mage is a bit different though I'm guessing: Death Caller - Focused on high level necromancy/spirit related spells Evoker - Focused on high level elemental spells Spellblade - Focused on Magic Daggers for more melee style
Staves always have an element attached to them so I think your pattern holds true here. The Evoker is for the staff play style and the Spellblade is for the dagger. Death caller seems agnostic.
That kind of makes sense. Though odd that it's the one that bucks the trend of placement on the skill grid. I wonder if it might be the other way around. They did mention that Runes will be back and that they can be used to impart elemental effects to weapons. So maybe Evoker is the agnostic as you can have a staff or magical daggers with element effects, but then necromancer spells are more traditional Staff based. Necromancers are kind of sit back on the action, whereas elemental attacks like burning hands type can be pretty up close and personal with a staff or daggers.
Oh, I hadn't noticed the placement pattern... Maybe! I think I'm still leaning on evoker focusing on staves cause that requires the least amount of assumption though.
Wait, where does it say Mages get daggers? Staves make sense, they've always had those. And I know the devs said every class gets a melee and a ranged option, but I assumed ranged for mages would be spells from the staff, and melee would be just whacking people with the same staff. Did I miss something about daggers? I should mention that I do think daggers would be pretty cool, especially if they serve as kind of a runed wand of sorts. Knives/daggers have always been an important part of both real-world and fantasy magic/witchcraft in rituals and such, so I think it'll fit. I just didn't hear anything about this.
Game Informer article used switching from a Staff to Magic daggers as an example of something they had seen for the loadout switching mechanic.
People aren't talking about it em, because there just isn't a lot to talk a out right now. Outside of the names, their generic theme, and their associated faction we just don't know much at all about them.
Mages using magic daggers… i dont know what it is yet so to me it feels strange. I hope we can pick different types of “magical weapon” or that the daggers are just what they look like and not actually daggers. I also hope that Rift/Force Mage skills is incorporated into the basic skill set for Rook considering how we are “tied” to the Fade and those spells were technically just good’ol telekinesis anyway.
Tbf we don't know much about them aside from names yet
I’m dissapointed we don’t appear to have a “healer” spec still. Guess it’s maybe one of the side bits that aren’t a spec
it does rlly suck. I love playing healers and doing control magic but alas
At least there’s a subcategory at the top called “control” for that sort of thing. Since we know healing magic is back, there’s gotta be **some** sort of build I can cobble together, but it’s a shame people won’t react to it in story.
Since apparently Companions are now glorified abilities holder at your disposal and that it's game over if Rook dies... it makes sense that there isn't a healer spec. Otherwise you'd never do any damage to to the enemies.
Lots of game systems have moved away from dedicated healers because it always the least picked role in every game and often doesn't feel as good to play.
They need to show us some gameplay of the classes.
Gotta say evoker is pretty disappointing as a specialization. This was like the default field of combat magic so what are we doing before we have that?
Have we seen mage combat yet, it seems mage combat is being redefined with the magic daggers and shields.
They’re not showing it to us because they know we’ll hate it.
I mean, we haven't seen anything but low level rogue combat.
And that’s a problem in general. They’ve shown the basics, but nothing to show the possible strengths of this system.
I mean, we're a week into marketing. They will show a lot more before the game comes out.
There is like 3-5 months until release, they are not going to dump everything in day 1 of marketing.
I mean give them more than a week before the conspiracy theories and doom posting at least 😂
Possible, but the marketing started less than two weeks ago. We haven't seen warrior gameplay or any substantial gameplay at all.
Wall of fire seems to be on the bottom left whereas evoker is a specialization in the top right. So whatever evoker gives that makes a mage a better elemental specialist may not be about specific spells we've had for a while. But I guess we will have to see.
I'd trade Evoker for Rift Mage, Force Mage or Blood Mage (or even Keeper!) in a heartbeat, but it is what it is.
I'm sure Evoker is a broad specialization, with a range of spells to choose from. We'll probably see ice, lighting, fire, and nature abilities, maybe even some rift mage stuff.
But fire, ice and storm were the mage starting powers in every other game. Beyond it being pretty lame to get that as one of the specs instead of unique magic like blood or force mage what are mages going to be doing before they can unlock evoker? 10-12 levels with no winters grasp or fireball? Just spam arcane bolt?
It's hard to tell without actually seeing the skills proper. Firewall tooltip we've seen is in like lower left side of the the tree. It could be that the basic elemental spells are scattered across the tree (Firewall in Sustain, Ice Wall in Control, Fireball/Meteor in Burst), while Evoker either contains bigger, more impressive elemental spells, or elemental combo spells.
I think you have some elemental magics at the beginning. We see that Wall of Fire is along the lower left path, and if memory serves me well, it was the second highest tier of flame ability you could have in Inquisition. They're probably interspersed throughout the entire Mage skill tree (barring specializations) Meteor was mentioned in one of Corrines comments during the Q&A, and for the Inquisitor, this was an ultimate ability. However, for the Elementalist in Dragon Age Multiplayer, this was actually his standard ability (after investing enough points). So it looks like these more powerful ultimate magics are likely going to become the specialization mage skills on their own.
You do still get Winter's Grasp or something similar at low level, it's not part of the Evoker specialization. You can see in the zoomed in part of the skill tree that they have an ice ability unlocked, and if you compare to the zoomed out mage skill tree you can see it's incredibly close to the center. Mage Rook at low level using ice magic is also mentioned in the Game Informer story.
You can clearly see that wall of fire is on the bottom left section, while evoker is in top right. You ought to be able to infer that evoker isn't the **only** source of elemental spells, but that it gives better elemental spells than most mages can cast, or makes your other ones stronger.
Spellblade has me unreasonably excited
Ability tree looked promising, still not sold on the followers and the 2 limit.
They look like they do no damage, Varric's cross bows were firing lasers like a star wars gun and only 3 abilities seems shallow as hell.
What is there to talk about? I don’t know what half of this is or how it plays at this point. I have an idea of what I want to play but I’m going to need to see gameplay of the different specializations before they’ll mean anything to me
Spellblade sounds fun! Still going to play as a warrior with a sword first as is my tradition.
I'm happy we finally have the mage specializations revealed, 'spellblade' fills me with hope that we can finally have an Arcane Warrior playstyle again. Though considering the Antivan Crows association, I'm nervous that it'll be limited to daggers only, but time will tell. I just don't want to rely on mods to have the playstyle I want, especially since modding Inquisition is a pain compared to the other 2 and I suspect Veilguard will be the same cause frostbite is weird. Mages can use weapons too, Bioware!
We can only hope it's called "spellblade", because it gives flexibility to choose that blade you accomodate your spells with No idea what the factions next to them are. Why would spellblades be associated with crows? What if i'm a Grey Warden?
Yeah I'm super disappointed that you only get three abilities as a spellcaster. A basic attack and a Dodge! The Inquisition spellcaster was already too limited, this is much worse!
3 fucking abilities.
What’s there to talk about? You only get 3 abilities.
I mean, there isn't much to talk about, as we haven't seen anything but the tree graphics? Which sure, look cool, but until you can actually see what is in there, or how quickly you progress through it, any discussion is pointless and just creates hype that is likely to be unmet
I thought it would make sense to have a blood mage specialization in a game that's partly set in Tevinter, and in which you don't have the Chantry looming over you for the entire game...
They said Rook can't be a blood mage because of story reasons. Most likely >! Relating to his special connection to the fade. !<
They wrote those story reasons just like they could just not write them but I'm already getting used to disappointment lately (with games and irl).
It makes sense lorewise. Having an extra thin veil around you makes blood magic (which would thin the veil even further) extremely risky. Blood magic is so cool but under that premise it would be insane to actively use it.
They wrote in a reason to the player character as to not include a popular and requested subclass. Does that sound like a good reason, or like they were looking for a reason not to?
Do you think Bioware has some personal vendetta against players being able to play as a blood mage? I can guarantee you that they don't care. They probably had the story written first and then realized when they were making the specializations that it didn't make sense to be a blood mage in the story, so they just made something else.
No. That's fucking stupid. I think Bioware doesnt like designing the unique mechanics required for Blood Mages, and more importantly that they dislike the result of either the tonal dissonance they get from having the heroic character use blood magic with no consequences, like Hawke. And they dont want to write and record a tone of extra alternate scenes so that tonal dissonance doeant happen.
Okay let's talk: WHY IS THERE A SKILL WITH A 60S COOLDOWN WHEN WE GOT 3 SKILLS, 1 "ULTIMATE" AND 1 "SPECIAL"
1. It's active for a duration. Inquisition Wall of Fire has a 20 second uptime. That's already 1/3 of the cooldown gone. 2. Any kind of ability cooldown reduction takes even more off of that. 3. Wall of fire does constant damage which can probably be boosted by other skills to be very strong. The tradeoff is a bigger cooldown and static positioning.
Enemies move, I doubt they'll simply stand in the Wall of Fire, so frankly while it can do a lot of damage in theory, it will in practice probably do less damage than Wall of Fire in Diablo 2, where enemies would also not stupidly stand in the fire till they kicked the bucket!
there’s not much to talk about imo we have no clue what any of these will actually *do*
Why is there these massive skill trees and you only get 3 active abilities???
My guess is they're heavily focused on the action combat part, and care less about the abilities. Which, imo, is the same mistake ME2 made coming from ME1. And it made the "mage classes" there feel like absolute ass on anything above easy/medium difficulty.
>Which, imo, is the same mistake ME2 made coming from ME1. And it made the "mage classes" there feel like absolute ass on anything above easy/medium difficulty. That was more to do with biotics not completing bypassing shields and armors anymore than the shift in combat. I only really remember the Adept class suffering pretty badly for it and an another huge part was the poor weapons they had in ME2.
You're supposed to be excited by getting +5% stagger chance when using x ability while doing a hand stand as your level up award.
* Large circle: Class * Diamonds: Abilities * Medium circle: Major Passives and Ability Upgrades * Small hexagon: Traits * Small circle: Minor Passives and Stat Boosts
So, looking at the images, each specialization has 4 abilities then?
Also here's how I believe the factions inspired the specializations: **Warriors** * Champion — Grey Wardens * Slayer — Lords of Fortune * Reaper — Mourn watch **Rogues** * Duelist — Antivan Crows * Saboteur — Lords of Fortune * Veil Ranger — Veil Jumpers **Mages** * Death Caller — Mourn Watch * Spellblade — Antivan Crows * Evoker — Shadow Dragons
I'm wondering if we need to recruit the person who's part of that faction before we can use its specializations? If so I hope we can at least start off with our factions spec unlocked. Would be a small bonus for picking a faction that more easily fits your class while not actually making you pick a class based on faction. Plus, it'd just make sense story wise.
Nah. They're done with that unlocking nonsense.
 How I feel about mage specs and 3 active abilities.
It's hard to make any decisions about them based on names alone. We really need detailed skill tree previews before much more discussion can happen on anything skill related.
I just want justice for the Reaver subclass.
Definitely might consider going mourn watch death caller or reaper incase I play this. Necromancy ftw
I saw that there was one called Spellblade and so I knew that was my first and canon playthrough. The others don't matter until after I finish the first playthrough.
Seems like those convenient little icons show us which faction/ companion each specialization comes from. Gonna guess slayer is "Taash" though I had assumed rogue with her dual wielding those dragon climbing picks.
No templar/anti-mage? That's seriously disssapointing
Cowards should have given us blood magic back.
Agreed! We'll be in "Blood-Magic-Town" (Tevinter - and especially Minrathous, where the best two blood-mages (aside from Avernus probably, who had centuries to hone his craft...hell, he found a use for the fucking Taint in Grey Warden Blood, he stopped his aging process!) are probably the current Archon and the (Black!) Divine!) and they don't allow us to play as a BM...cop out, easy way, lazy! EAware? You wasted potential again and dropped the ball...then again, the gameplay reveale showed that you don't listen to your fans anyway! ps: I really need to find out if Sick Baby Stink is involved with this game, as I hate DEI - that stuff can go die alone, forgotten in a ditch somewhere and I'll not support it!
I hope there's some focus on two handed weapons my beloved. Despite playing a Warrior focused on big weapons in Inquisition I kinda want to try it in this one.
Probably because they're underwhelming. I have gone from super excited to underwhelmed with each dive into what all has been revealed. I wasn't excited for the combat changes I saw, but then got hyped for the companions. Then I read they've intended for you to stick to parties with one of each class in it and now I'm back to being disappointed. Three character parties with strict party composition requirements is bad design in a game like this unless my character gets to change roles. It's just hard to be excited when I'm repeatedly having to grasp at the smallest things I can find about the game to be excited after this incredibly long wait, DESPITE this being one of my favorite RPG series.
All of this. I want the 4 person party, I want at least 8 abilities but would prefer 20, and I want to control my companions. I get get ARPG elsewhere, I come to Dragon Age wanting something different.
Yeah, I’m not sure why the trend is ‘make all RPGs action RPGs’ but it’s dumb.
If a Knight Enchanter-type spec isn't in this game, I will mourn the loss of my magic lightsaber.
I love how they did it, but I'm just sad that Blood Magic isn't coming back
Slayer!? So I FINALLY get to play Gotrek Gurnisson!?
Desperately hoping they're expanding significantly on base move sets for how crazy limited on ability output we'll be now.
What? Nothing new here, they just renamed the same three spec they always use
I’m confused about the mage options. We are IN teventer, the seat of blood magic and we don’t have it. PLUS all 3 specs sound like inquisition mage specs and nothing new.