Dragon Age 2 1st Playthrough

(Spoilers!)

Finished with the 1st playthrough of DA2. ~73 hours XD

Nightmare, no deaths, all possible quests

Setup
Hawke - Rogue, Assassin, Shadow
Aveline - Tank, Full strength/constitution
Anders - Healer, Panacea, Heroic Aura, Arcane Shield, Barrier
Merrill - Tempest, Debilitator, Barrier

My usual strategy
Charge Aveline to a big chunk of hostiles
Hawke to cast decoy and summon Mabari in Aveline's area
Merrill to cast tempest in Aveline's area
Pick off stray archers/mages with Hawke
Micro Anders for healing
Anders and Merril to cast barrier as needed. Especially when there are blood mages/assassins
Retreat as needed

Sharing screens from the playthrough

Strike A Pose
Character posing in this game is okay. Unlike FFXIII where the in game camera angles were just begging the player to take screen shots.

Deep Roads

Get some Darkspawn

The Deep Roads Dragon

Illuminate

Merrill chugging a health potion

The Wounded Coast

The Spider in Sundermount

During Barthrand's frenzy

Lyrium

One Damage

Kirkwall Docks

Sunsets

The Generic Hideout

Enter

Another Wounded Coast sunset

Null

In the Hanged Man

Stretching

Duelist

The Gallows

Some book

Indoor Graffiti

Bonfire in the generic cave

Flying objects

The Ethereal Golem

Sundermount Cave

The aspect dude

Hybris

The Bugged Bandit Leader

Docks nightfall

Mr Orsino

Champion of Kirkwall

The three Rage Demons, dead

Sandal The Badass

Striptease

Aveline does not care if everyone else is stunned

Underexposed cave

The Brutalities

Assassins kill my assassin easy

The Captain

Melee Archers

Qunari Spears

Undead archers

The Decimus Fight
This is one of the battles that I had to reload a lot. The reason to this is that

1. This is a relatively early part of the game where my characters did not have access to abilities that will have protected allies/decimated hostiles. I had bad builds XD
2. Decimus will one shot any of my characters in the first couple of moves
3. There are more hostile archers/mages than I could imagine. A single hit from one of them removes around 15% of a characters health.
4. You start at a disadvantage. The moment the fight starts, you are already surrounded.

It was a big challenge, and here is the strategy that I used to win.

Focus fire on Decimus first to ensure that he is unable to cast any spells

Go up the terrace to get rid of the advantage of the long ranged attackers

Reaper. Eliminate each of them one at a time

Once your numbers are favorable, charge and win

Ancient Rock Wraith
The tough golem from the deep roads

The best strategy is to stay away from it and use ranged weapons

Ancient Rock Wraith

Anders, so calm; Hawke, so dead

Rangers

Waiting for the right chance to strike

Melee? No Thanks

Varric

Major

Smite

And Hawke gets rich

Arishok
The Arishok is bugged.
I started the fight with a dual dagger Rogue. I wasn't timing his attacks correctly. Losing health and potions, I decided to switch to a bow. After that, he stayed still while my arrows rained on him.

Pre-fight trash-talk

Arrow, arrow, arrow...

...arrow, arrow...

The Arishok falls; The Champion is proclaimed

Crawlers
For some reason, crawlers are very popular and strong in the Dragon Age series.

(From Alfred) In, DA2 however, most of them are terrain challenged. Unable to go up or down stairs. They get stuck very easily and cannot retaliate to ranged attacks. Free XP

The deeps roads free XP

Not free XP

Spider boy

Free XP

...

Varterreal

The Varterreal is one tough crawler

With Zevran

Dragons

Mature Dragon

Hawke

Merrill

Stonewall Fenris

Anders

 The High Dragon

Hi

The High Dragon's IMBA fireball shooting, invulnerable state

Tossing Aveline like there's no tomorrow

Aveline is supposed to be being chewed

The quick and temporary vulnerability

Almost done

Bonding with the High Dragon

Should have looted and equipped the Champion Armor first

Emoticons

Best on the fly rendering emotions from Merrill

Sad and Sorry

The eyes tell the story

 

Merrill realizing she caused the death of Keeper Marethari

Others

The Champion seeing the death of the Viscount's son

Mourning Viscount

Disappointed. Blood? No worries.

The Chantry Divine looks like Linda Hamilton from Chuck

Sebastian is sucking up to the Champion

The most relaxed face ever. "I don't mind the blood at all."

Bloody and composed

Isabela on taking a ship

Sexy Time!
Merrill's sexy time

Isabela's sexy time in Hawke's estate

In the Hanged Man

Before the Final Act

Romantic Achievement

GG!

On Jokes and Hobbies

Two cool things that I stumbled upon during the weekend.

One
I was watching Conan the other night and he featured a comedian at the end of the show. His name is Pete Holmes and he is one hell of a funny dude. He mostly talks about his personal experiences, and generally steers away from the common racist and dirty humor. What I like about him is the intonation of his voice during his delivery. It changes so drastically during punch lines that the change in itself makes that act work. Big time!

One of his acts that I like is about the common jokes that he thinks people should stop making. It is called Really? The last part, I'm sure, will hit a lot of the people I know, myself included :D

Two
I want to retire early. So I've been reading and, fortunately, getting great insights from the internets. One of my favorite sites to read is a blog by a dude named Jacob Fisker. Guess what, it is about retiring early. It makes a lot of sense. Why? Simple. What he is doing, if I understood correctly :D, is living a frugal lifestyle, investing earnings for the retirement, and, last but not the least, maintaining a vegetable garden XD

Anyway, there is a post regarding hobbies that I personally got hit with. It is Find A Free Hobby. Since I am basically living the life that he described when he was in my current years. The gist about expensive hobbies is that "In the end we all have the same to show for it: Nothing". It does make sense to avoid them.

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I cleared the cache.

It worked.

Apparently, the encoding of my previous web server was different from the encoding set on my new server so some of the javascript code broke. The code with a different encoding was still on the cache.

Dragon Age 2

Fast paced. Hooking. Awesome.

Play it on Nightmare.

The Ancient Rock Wraith is imba. -- Apparently, I just didn't do it right the first time. Hacking and slashing is ineffective for this guy. The tactic that worked for me was ranged attacks :D

This game forces the player to visit several areas of the game, over and over and over (around 3 times :D). Every visit (per 2 years, or so, in the game time) to an area respawns different creatures and items across the same map. Like a refresh of everything but in the same map. Also, it may be to make up for the fact that a lot of the areas in the game are reused and just called differently within the game itself.

The first play-through.

7-mar-2011

Nakakain na rin ako ng legendary na sinigang na corned beef. Ang sarap nung karne! Medyo sumobra nga lang sa alat :D Nasobrahan sa patis yung timpla nung sabaw.

Umuwi kasi si Gerry kasama yung pamilya niya. Nagyaya sila maghapunan, kaya ayun.

Panagbenga 2011 weekend

For the first time in many months, my fingers had a decent rest from the computer keyboard for 2 straight days!

Parade

Manang Pats

Oatmeal cookies

Lengua de gato

Fresh strawberries

Session Road

Classic!

How To Be A Billionaire

Bruno Mars says he wants to be a billionaire. But he doesn't layout any plans on how to accomplish any of that stuff :D

So I looked around and found this article.

It's a good read. Be sure to check it out.

Back to tennis

I haven't been able to perform a lot of physical activities, except walking and swimming, due to my lower back problem.

I will try to play tennis but if my back starts acting up, I will go back to my doctor.

-----

My back did not hurt at all. In fact, I feel better. Apparently, physical activities are my cure.