Kitrax's 2nd runthrough.... (spoilers hidden)

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I would tend to agree with Scythe, unless you're looking for a significant challenge.

Spoiler

The mage tower is a great first treaty to secure, due to all those attribute bonuses gained in the Fade.

 

Alright, to the Circle Tower & Fade it is. IIRC, the Circle Tower & Fade took the longest of all treaty quests. I love the Burning Man form!

 

My favorite combo in the fade is to start a boss fight in the spirit form. Open with crushing prison and follow up with a cold blast. Then switch to the burning man and drop some fire on the situation. Finally, go into golem mode and pulverize!

I had a lot of fun switching between forms and using their strengths to royally screw up my foes! My foes seemed to have less fun with these tactics, hehe.

 

I wish the mage specialization of Shifter would actually had these forms as the shifting forms. The only form I found useful as a shifter was the swarm after you take the final shifter ability.

 

How did you build your Shapeshifter? The Shapeshifter is a unique take on the warrior-mage archetype because it is basically a mage who can also choose different forms to use in a fight. However, you must raise your strength and dexterity, at least 1 point per level. This might sound odd for a mage to do, but apparently this was the way the specialization was supposed to be played. Barring using it only as a "bag-of-tricks" specialization, of course.
There have been several recent discoveries made that support this. First you get a +10 bonus to armor in Bear Form if your base armor exceeds Bear Form's. which is around 17-20, depending on your spellpower. The only way to do this is by wearing heavy/massive armors.
Second the Flying Swarm's defense and missile deflection depends on your mage's base defense, and it will definitely suck if you didn't raise dex.
Finally the Spider Form is very weak if you didn't raise both your strength and dexterity attributes since Spider Form's default strength progression is very low and the form greatly benefits from a higher dex score (defense and because its skill Poison Spit is dexterity-dependent).
The only attribute that increases rapidly as the forms improve (their default stats are based on your spellpower, which is why you need to raise magic too) is constitution.
Finally there are no shapeshifter-specific items because apparently every item was supposed to be fair game for the shapeshifter, depending on what you want accomplished. You can't make the most out of bear while using the items you would only use for Flying Swarm, for example.

 

I prefer to use my mage as a mage and not as a druid of sort. It would have been nice if DA had one extra class, priestest/brother. This extra class would take care of the healing spells and anything that is natural/druide like.

I didn't mind the blood mage or the AW specializations. I didn't mind the healer though I thought it was more of a priestess/brother than a mage ability. I know my thinking here is probably from my years of playing D&D games and healing is a magical form and in DA all magic, even good, is consider bad.

 

The Shapeshifter has always claimed to be a warrior-mage. It's in the specialization descriptor and is expanded upon by the specialization background info (it was a magic form originally practiced by barbarians). According to Dragon Age lore, "Some mages see it as a form of self-mastery", making it both a mind and body thing, "while others use it as a method of survival, a physical bag of tricks that enable the mage to be unpredictable in battle", which refers to those who take the specialization only as a sort of novelty/situational thing.
I would definitely not want my Blood Mage-nuker/debuffer or Spirit Healer-support/healer to fight, either.

Just took my own character to the fade. I wish I brought Sten with me this time, heh. And I never knew if dog dreamt anything(did he?).

 

Ugh...sorry about the time lapse there. RL sucks sometimes.

Anyway...

I just finished the entire Circle Tower quest, and I noticed some oddities this time around.

Firstly, the Templar Armor set I ended up with was the helmet, breastplate, and gauntlets. I couldn't find any boots that went along with the set, and I could have sworn I had Alistair wearing the entire get up on my last game. An item-set bonus would be nice.

Also, when I killed Uldread(sp), he dropped an entire set of Fade armor. I quickly put it on my AW PC. It must have been added by one of the mods...because it seems quite overpowered to a set of armor this early in the game. I'm almost considering selling it so I can afford the Blood Dragon Armor.


I'm at camp right now, but I think I'm off to Denerim to get the Urn quest going.

 

The game auto levels according to the NPC level. The major challenge in the game is the difficulty level and not where you go after Lothering.

 

There are exceptions you know. Dragons (even the little one in the Elven treaty quest) never let you off easy, and some monsters have minimum levels so they're always either more powerful than you, or just as powerful as you.

I've honestly never seen the templar gloves and boots. Not in the mage Circle Quest anyway, unless I missed a mini-quest. I've also never seen a fade armor, so I'm guessing it's a very rare drop or you got it from a DLC/mod.

 

I did Shale quest right after Lothering and my first encounter I had to fight the dragon. Yeppie. A dragon right after Lothering. I didn't even move that far. It pissed me off. I didn't die but it was very close. So yes, you can kill a dragon even at low levels, though it is a bit tougher.

 

I don't recall a random encounter with a dragon. Was this in the Brecilian Forest? What level were you when you left Lothering?

 

I consider the large Drakes dragons and that was my first encounter right after Lothering. The one with the Wild Beast and Wolves and on the other side of the fallen tree is a Drake. Well, the Drake joined the fight really early and it was very hard; very very hard.

 

Interesting. That fight's gotta be worth a lot of XP then, guess I'm gonna save it for when my party has higher levels. Does it also drop drakeskins?

 

Huh, I don't think I've seen that encounter yet. Evidently need to play some more.

 

There are some pretty rare random encounters. Has anyone run into the Axameter? I had it once and luckily it was with my Dwarven Warrior so I was really thrilled about it.

 

Is that the one where the meteor rock or something? If so yes.

As for the encounter I had above; I always get that when going to Shale.

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Not really. The thing is the game also modifies the XP of monsters based on the PC level; this means you earn x% of your XP regardless of your level. It is very disappointing but at the same time it would be an extremely hard fight if the game was setup like BG2.

 

Nope. Check the link I've posted it's a different encounter with many references to the Monty Python's Holy Grail. I've run into this encounter only once so in my experience it's rare (and that is something that the Wiki confirmed).

I haven't run into the encounter you mention though. I may try travelling idlessly to see if I can trigger some of these rare encounters. I may be wasting time though.

 

I've never had either of those random encounters. If I were to say...go from town to town for two hours straight...would I have a better chance of such encounters? Or are there other variables involved?

 

I'm pretty sure that some of them are only available after completing at least one major quest. I'm going to test that when I'll have some time to do so and see how it works. Some mods make rare encounters more frequent so it might help as well.