Dragon Age 2, still not riftFollow

If you're warrior is a tank, 42 strength is all you need to wear any armor in the game, so stop there. Put the rest mostly into dexterity. Think of it in terms of how tanks in WoW have been gearing up in Cata. Back in Wrath, you geared mostly for stamina, but now you gear for avoidance. Same thing applies here. Constitution only increases your HP by 5 for each point. That's kind of wimpy. Not only that, it doesn't matter how much HP you have, eventually your healer will run out of mana and your tank will go down. Dex is far better investment because it helps you avoid attacks altogether. I also make sure to stick the physical resist and magic resist enchants in my tank's weapon.

For Leliana, it really depends on what you're using her for. If she's an archer, you have two options. You can either balance dex and cunning, to take advantage of her song buffs, or you can just stack dex (after hitting the 30 cunning mark) to do really good damage. Whether or not you put her in heavy armor is up to you. If you have the Master Archer talent (I think that's the one), your fatigue no longer matters for wearing heavy armor. If you have the battle dress from Leliana's Song though, it really shouldn't make much of a difference unless you find some good gloves, boots or a helm that are heavy. For the most part, you aren't going to find heavy armor that boosts dex or cunning though. And ranger is indeed an awesome second spec for an archer. Duelist and Assassin are geared more towards the melee rogues.

For mages, it depends on what you're having them do. If you have a dps mage that has the blood mage spec, I'd suggest getting your con up to 20 or so, and then putting everything else into magic. Try to keep in mind, that the higher your magic, the more oomph your spells have. My elf mage's magic is in the 60's right now, and she just hit level 18. If your mage is healing, you do want to invest in willpower. Especially if you find yourself running out of mana a lot. I'd suggest putting 2 points in Willpower and 1 point in magic each level, until you notice that you're having to use pots a lot less. Then switch it around.

Also, make sure to get each character's cunning to 16 for tactic slots. Except for your tank maybe. They really only need 2 of the tactic skills, since they don't use many abilities. Your healer in particular, will need all 4. Wouldn't hurt for Leliana either. Oh, and from what I've read, Scattering Shot is beast. I think that's the AoE one. It's the last talent on the third line. It has one of the highest DPS potentials in the game, and it has great CC potential as well.

Don't forget running away screaming. That's worked for me once or twice.

That's...

more work than I put into it.

I'm okay with that. We both get to see the end credits

I was bitter when I learned my AoE heal/injury fixin' power didn't actually fix my own personal injuries and my PC still had to eat injury kits.

And if you are playing at the highest difficulty, you can just make a Blood Mage Arcane Warrior and let all your companions do whatever the **** they want and still win. Of course, your companions will probably get themselves killed, but really you can solo the hardest difficulty.

That's what difficulty increasing mods are for.

It's about the same. Couple semi-tough fights but you should be more than prepared for them by that point.

Gets "worse" in Awakenings... "Oh, you're an orange con boss type? Let me solo you."

Pigtails, remember that you may have mods that are making things easier. Combat Tweaks and Advanced Tactics would do that. Plus, Mages are super OP. And don't forget that there's a good chance you are using items from mods with stat levels that would otherwise be unavailable at your current place in the game.



TL;DR: It's because the mobs don't get harder.

That's because it doesn't affect mobs much at all. The biggest change is Friendly Fire (Casual = 0, Normal = 50%, the other two = 100%).

Casual adds a flat bonus to defense, attack, and damage. But the other 3 don't.

Healing does 150% on Casual, 100% on normal, then 85% on the other two.

Damage Threshold is another big one. On Nightmare, your damage will be reduced by 16 per attack, where it's only 3 on Casual (7 and 9 for the other two).

Enemies have a 10% lower chance to resist on Casual, and a 5% higher chance on Nightmare (1.5, 2.5).

You get a 10% higher chance to resist on Casual, everything else has no bonus.

You'll loot potions and poultices far more frequently on Casual difficulty than on others. You'll never loot them from random drops on Nightmare (if I'm understanding the wiki page correctly).

Traps do 50% more damage to you on Nightmare (and only do 50% to you on casual).

Finally, and what is probably the biggest change, is that enemies have full AI on the higher two difficulties, meaning they'll use more complex tactics and all of their abilities. But the actual enemies aren't really doing much more damage, they're just organizing more, and you're doing more damage to your own team. End result is you pay more attention to your team overall, to counteract the enemy's increased tactical ability. You also have to monitor healing more closely.

Biggest change to mobs is really in your ability to damage them, since they'll resist 5% more often and take 15 less damage per hit than on casual.

A hundred thanks for you.

Yeah, the DLC items sell for, at most, nine gold or so.

There's a bit of bad programming that allows you to make infinite money via the top tier lyrium potions but you wouldn't do that by accident and not know how you wound up with over a thousand gold. I finished the game with something like 200 gold and my maximum at any one time was around 300. I only had that much because I never bought anything until close to the end when I figured I may as well spend it and bought one of the 100+ gold items and some GM runes.

They'll influence how many NPC fighters you can call to your aid during the final battles. Mages are easy to cap out (12) by dumping your novice & journeyman runes. Elves are real easy since you can buy Elfroot from the Dalish camp and just drop a stack or two into the box. Redcliff fighters take cold hard cash so you can give them a few gold and they're set. Dwarves take mid-range gems. If you don't have any, I wouldn't sweat it.

I only use the armies a few times anyway and only when I remember to. I wouldn't call it a "big deal".

Got Sigrun (or whatever) in Awakenings and she's the best NPC so far in terms of being a companion. She's also pretty capable fighting. Justice isn't bad but he's a pretty one-note character. He also dies a lot for me.

Grey Warden recruitment has seemingly been reduced to me trawling the streets and splashing Darkspawn blood on whatever I dredge up

Yeah, but you must have something upping their values if you're getting 300 gold just for the DLC items (that normally sell for less than 10). I loot and sell damn near everything and, as I said, wind up with ~300 by the end of the game. This would help explain why everything's Easy Mode for you.