DAO vs BG1&2 difficulty

[eremita]

Baldur's Gate isn't hard, and I'd wager that DA: O on nightmare is harder. The only thing is that BG has a GIGANTIC learning curve. When I first played it, I didn't know how to do shit. It was tough as all hell. I even quit the game for about a year until I came back to it. Once you get past the huge learning curve, it's pretty damn easy.

Yep, that's what separates the good from the bad. With scripted battles, I guess it's in the end inevitable to slice through any RPG and I even think it's a good thing - you learn the rules and then you succed, perfect! The foundation is a deep, complex ruleset. Then you need capable designers to create something interesting. Trying to fuck around with different combinations, looking for a good builds/strategy is one of the sweetest thing about RPGs in general. But that requires not only a chance to fail - to suffer the consequences of bad choices (bad builds FTW!) but also some kind of reward for good understanding of the ruleset. Yep, the overpowered stuff is a good thing. So bottom line is: fuck the balance. Anyway, NWN2 OC is a great example of a game with great ruleset but shitty design and bad AI killing it. DAO has shitty mmo rules and shitty encounter design (at least there are immunities and overpowered builds).

 

[eremita]

Bitch, are you even aware were you are posting BG2 tips, tricks and exploits? Thats not the issue here, having classes or builds that make it easier in RPGs is p. much the norm for rpgs. The issue is that game is exceedingly easy with a meatgrinder, you believe the game is actually exceedingly easy. When the fact is you couldnt possibly do all of this on your first playtrough.
Its still fine tho, the fact the game can be played in so many ways, and that each and every decision you make in your character building can vary the experience so greatly is good, the fact that despite all this the game is still winnable by p. much any character is extremely cool as well.

Don't you think it would be even cooler if a game wouldn't be winnable with any character? But I guess as a designer, you don't need to worry about that with good itemization and clever design...

 

[LeStryfe79]

DA:O is easy to solo with a bard on nightmare. I tried to solo BG with a bard and found it impossible. I like bards.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

DA:O is easy to solo with a bard on nightmare. I tried to solo BG with a bard and found it impossible. I like bards.

you mean pure bard in bg1? cause blade kit in bg2 is fucking unstoppable. but still bard in g1 is doable thanks to fuckton of wands/potions,summons,wizadrs spells and big variety of weapons he can use.

 

[LeStryfe79]

bg 1 no kits or faqs. I could probably try harder tho. DA:O was easy tho.

 

[Lhynn]

Don't you think it would be even cooler if a game wouldn't be winnable with any character? But I guess as a designer, you don't need to worry about that with good itemization and clever design...

Well, i dont have a problem with near unwinnable games, provided the content is good enough. One of my favorite games is Tome4.

 

[Snufkin]

I also dig Tome4 a lot, quite addictive.

As far bard in BG1EE goes i would say Blade with Chesley Crusher halberd is good enough for insane solo. It will do 50 dmg per round asuming you have offensive spin and 19 str.

 

[pippin]

didn't read lol but there's no way in hell DA:O could be harder than BG1/2/whatever.
Spells and abilities in DA:O are fucking bland, both yours and your enemies', so if you really think DA:O's fights are hard, even with Nightmare difficulty, you have problems. The only tactic I really needed was programming my spellcasters to use healing spells when my characters reached -75% health. That's it. AoE spells like the lightning shitstorm, the fireball or the cone of cold make every fight kinda boring. By the time you reach Awakening the high level shit makes the game laughably easy.
In BG2 you still had to pay attention, especially with beholders and mind flayers. You had items which were useful against them but that didn't protected your whole party. I think there was this shield which reflected beholder rays, that was fun to use, but you had to make them focus on that particular character and manage to fight them with the rest. The game gets harder again in ToB, which is nice.
The hardest game for me was IWD2, not because of any particular fight, but because you are fighting ALL THE TIME, non stop, without any town or temple in between to rest and prepare yourself. So you had to fight waves after waves of enemies with a limited inventory and without resurrection spells. Plus, if you rest in the wilderness, the loot can disappear. That was an intense game.

 

[Snufkin]

Well I would say that team of monk, cleric and 2 sorcerers just smashes IWD2. Monk can tank cleric can buff and sorcerers are OP when you get Wail of the Banshee. Until then you can just spam AOE's since your monk have evasion he does not care.
In BG1EE you can use shapeshifter human and dual it to fighter at lvl 2 or 3. You can dispel your claws at the temple and end up with werewolf whacking with Drizzt scimitar with benefit of having grand mastery and extra half attack from having 7 lvls of fighter. With haste potion and that 25 str potion Sarevok dies so fast you wont believe it.

 

[Johannes]

There's ways to make BG(2) battles easy when you know exactly what you are doing from reading guides or from completing the game seven times. Even at that point you can try and come up with new ways to break the game, which is fun.

Whereas DAO is easy by default.

 

[Desur]

Baldur's Gate games can be challenging at first, especially if you don't know what you're doing - in part due to your measly HP but also because you are pretty much free to visit most of the areas at level 1 though they are clearly meant for higher level parties. As soon as you get the grip of the basics and learn to put your characters' abilities to great use it will become much easier (save for a few cheesy enemies). Dragon Age is different in that it is more balanced and only ever gets really easy (talking about nightmare here) if you build your team a certain way (as opposed to BG where a 'good' player can probably solo it on insane regardless of what character they play).
Edit: Fix'd typos

 

[Lhynn]

Baldur's Gate games can be challenging at first, especially if you don't know what you're doing - in part due to your measly HP but also because you are pretty much free to visit most of the areas at level 1 though they are clearly meant for higher level parties. As soon as you get the grip of the basics and learn to put you characters abilities to great use it will become much easier (save for a few cheesy enemies). Dragon Age is different in that it is more balanced and only ever gets really easy (talking about nightmare here) if you build your team a certain way (as opposed to BG where a 'good' player can probably solo it on insane regardless of what character they play).

Yup, DAO is a game in which the exact same enemies get stronger as you level up.

 

[the_shadow]

After completing DA: Awakening, I would conclude that Dragon Age is much more difficult game than BG2, if you compare each game on their hardest difficulty levels (Insane for BG2, Nightmare for Dragon Age).

The problem with BG2 is that there are way too many exploits to take advantage of. Hell, I wouldn't even call some of them exploits, just spells that turn what should have been hard battles into a cakewalk. A mage can gain virtual immunity to physical damage with low level spells (mirror image, stoneskin, protection from weapons), and AoE spells that are far superior in damage to Dragon Age (eg. Horrid Wilting). Then you have game breakers like Mislead, Time Stop, Project Image, Harm, and Wish.

I've mentioned this in another thread, but Dragon Age: Origins doesn't really have a 'silver bullet' that guarantees victory in more difficult fights. Mana Clash is an instant win against mages, but they are only 5% of the game's enemies in Origins, and enemy mages in Awakening have so much HP that they can survive a Mana Clash. Some people have argued that you just need to spam Cone of Cold, but that only works for the trash mobs (which, admittedly, is about 75% of the game). Against high ranked enemies, it's only going to disable them for a fraction of a second and deal mediocre damage due to HP bloat. With the high-end damage spells, either the lengthy cooldown limits your ability to spam them (eg. Hand of Winter), or the mana drain means you can only sustain them for a short period of time (eg. Elemental Chaos). What really makes things difficult is that your crowd control/disabling spells have their duration reduced by 80% against elite bosses, making them virtually useless.

If it is Baldur's Gate 1 vs. Dragon Age, then it's no contest. Baldur's Gate 1 is far more difficult. For a large portion of the game you can be slain after only being hit once. Your spell selection sucks. And the random encounters are *brutal*.

 

[eremita]

After completing DA: Awakening, I would conclude that Dragon Age is much more difficult game than BG2, if you compare each game on their hardest difficulty levels (Insane for BG2, Nightmare for Dragon Age).

The problem with BG2 is that there are way too many exploits to take advantage of. Hell, I wouldn't even call some of them exploits, just spells that turn what should have been hard battles into a cakewalk. A mage can gain virtual immunity to physical damage with low level spells (mirror image, stoneskin, protection from weapons), and AoE spells that are far superior in damage to Dragon Age (eg. Horrid Wilting). Then you have game breakers like Mislead, Time Stop, Project Image, Harm, and Wish.

I've mentioned this in another thread, but Dragon Age: Origins doesn't really have a 'silver bullet' that guarantees victory in more difficult fights. Mana Clash is an instant win against mages, but they are only 5% of the game's enemies in Origins, and enemy mages in Awakening have so much HP that they can survive a Mana Clash. Some people have argued that you just need to spam Cone of Cold, but that only works for the trash mobs (which, admittedly, is about 75% of the game). Against high ranked enemies, it's only going to disable them for a fraction of a second and deal mediocre damage due to HP bloat. With the high-end damage spells, either the lengthy cooldown limits your ability to spam them (eg. Hand of Winter), or the mana drain means you can only sustain them for a short period of time (eg. Elemental Chaos). What really makes things difficult is that your crowd control/disabling spells have their duration reduced by 80% against elite bosses, making them virtually useless.

If it is Baldur's Gate 1 vs. Dragon Age, then it's no contest. Baldur's Gate 1 is far more difficult. For a large portion of the game you can be slain after only being hit once. Your spell selection sucks. And the random encounters are *brutal*.

DAO might be difficult but I don't like the reason behind it. There's a gigantic HP bloat and player doesn't have means (just compare the amount of choices with BG) how to deal with it quickly. You're rotating like three or four abilities with each character? And the grandest tacticool moment is complementing abilities across the party... You're doing the same shit the whole encounter, keeping eye for cooldowns, potions and positioning. And this applies to the whole series (DA2 at least sparked the boss fights a bit with phased combat). Not a good approach... The fact that enemies in BG series don't have bazilion of HP is irrelevant, the combat is loved for the sheer amount of possibilities and because it is expected from players to know the rules (hard counters). DA series have none of that.

 

[Desur]

The problem with DA:O is that oftentimes you will be able to breeze though encounters without so much as having a single character fall in combat. Eventually you will face a more powerful or better prepared adversary and get wiped mercilessly, not because you got careless but rather since there are difficulty spikes and the combat system offers rather limited possibilities in terms of overcoming the challenges. So in the end it's more or less binary in DA:O - you're either prepared or not. On the other hand a single encounter in BG can play out in a number of ways, if you go in unprepared you are likely to fail miserably, if you utilise all of your abilities to their fullest potential you'll probably wipe the floor with your enemies instead.
That is partially due to different design ideas - in most of the old school RPGs you are 'expected' to save scum (not necessarily a good thing but a lot of people got used to it), Dragon Age is supposed to be beatable without either reloading or meta gaming (which as a result makes the game feel dumbed down in comparison).

 

[Lhynn]

After completing DA: Awakening, I would conclude that Dragon Age is much more difficult game than BG2, if you compare each game on their hardest difficulty levels (Insane for BG2, Nightmare for Dragon Age).

The problem with BG2 is that there are way too many exploits to take advantage of. Hell, I wouldn't even call some of them exploits, just spells that turn what should have been hard battles into a cakewalk. A mage can gain virtual immunity to physical damage with low level spells (mirror image, stoneskin, protection from weapons), and AoE spells that are far superior in damage to Dragon Age (eg. Horrid Wilting). Then you have game breakers like Mislead, Time Stop, Project Image, Harm, and Wish.

I've mentioned this in another thread, but Dragon Age: Origins doesn't really have a 'silver bullet' that guarantees victory in more difficult fights. Mana Clash is an instant win against mages, but they are only 5% of the game's enemies in Origins, and enemy mages in Awakening have so much HP that they can survive a Mana Clash. Some people have argued that you just need to spam Cone of Cold, but that only works for the trash mobs (which, admittedly, is about 75% of the game). Against high ranked enemies, it's only going to disable them for a fraction of a second and deal mediocre damage due to HP bloat. With the high-end damage spells, either the lengthy cooldown limits your ability to spam them (eg. Hand of Winter), or the mana drain means you can only sustain them for a short period of time (eg. Elemental Chaos). What really makes things difficult is that your crowd control/disabling spells have their duration reduced by 80% against elite bosses, making them virtually useless.

If it is Baldur's Gate 1 vs. Dragon Age, then it's no contest. Baldur's Gate 1 is far more difficult. For a large portion of the game you can be slain after only being hit once. Your spell selection sucks. And the random encounters are *brutal*.

I spent the entirety of dragon age auto attacking and never gave a shit. Got the achievement for never dying on nightmare.

 

[Desur]

I spent the entirety of dragon age auto attacking and never gave a shit. Got the achievement for never dying on nightmare.

Well, you can pretty much achieve the same thing in BG if you want to, heck, you can solo all three of these games on the highest difficulty setting so... I don't see your point.

 

[Lhynn]

Well, you can pretty much achieve the same thing in BG if you want to, heck, you can solo all three of these games on the highest difficulty setting so... I don't see your point.

you cannot win any BG autoattacking.

 

[valcik]

How can anybody consider piss-easy combat against Gaxkan in DA:O to be more difficult than fighting Kangaxx in BG2 is beyond me. Waiting for cooldowns and smashing win-button is difficult only for those young Kwa players holding Big Mac in one of their hands while playing.

 

[Lhynn]

Yup, this whole thread is retarded and anyone even suggesting DAO is challenging is fucking retarded. They should be ashamed to even bring up such a stupid notion.

 

[pippin]

While BG2 is not really a tactic game, you had many ways of approaching "boss" fights, while DA:O is mostly about spamming abilities and shit.

 

[raesha]

Depends on how much you cheese BG2 but in general id say the BG series is harder than DA:O, even if both are extremely easy with an understanding of the games combat.

 

[the_shadow]

How can anybody consider piss-easy combat against Gaxkan in DA:O to be more difficult than fighting Kangaxx in BG2 is beyond me. Waiting for cooldowns and smashing win-button is difficult only for those young Kwa players holding Big Mac in one of their hands while playing.

If you use a 'Protection from Undead' scroll on your character, Kangaxx will not attack you. Whereas Gaxkan was the first boss in the game where mana clash didn't wipe him out in one shot (from memory it took off 20% of his health). So yeah, Gaxkan is a *far* greater challenge than Kangaxx.

 

[pippin]

I think the scroll prevented Kangaxx from hurting you instead of what you say. If I remember that correctly, it's not quite the same.

 

[the_shadow]

I think the scroll prevented Kangaxx from hurting you instead of what you say. If I remember that correctly, it's not quite the same.

In the vanilla version of BG2, Protection from Undead scrolls caused Undead to outright ignore the affected party member, even if they were wailing on them. I'm not sure if this was changed in Tactics. But even if you ignore that 'exploit' (and I wouldn't even call it an 'exploit', since the scroll is just working as intended against an Undead Kangaxx), you have numerous weapons which can kill him in one hit on a failed save, such as Azure-edge. There is no equivalent 'silver bullet' for Gaxkan in Dragon Age. Even if you neuter his spell-casting with Mana Clash or Glyph of Warding, he is still a formidable warrior. Disabling spells such as petrification/paralysis only work for a second or two. Misdirection Hex is probably your best bet, but it only lasts for so long.