[SPOILERS] Save The Wardens Quandary

without spoilering too much, you cannot kill all the wardens, but you can kill a fair amount. it's quite a long mission with several choices during the mission, but the choice at the end of the mission is the same. you do get to kill wardens before that though 


PS: only wardens can stop the blights, though that doesn't mean they can do whatever they please

If you're wondering, yes the wardens literally are the only thing to stop a blight. Play origins as you are a warden and get a bit more insight into wardens in that game

Yep. I get blight is bad. But does anyone sit down and think why we stop a blight? We stop it to save people. So if we are killing people spreading red lyrium what is the difference between red lyrium and blight? You are still devastating the landscape and killing everyone. Blight and red lyrium are the same thing. Bah!

Yeah, thing that has to be remembered is that the Grey Wardens are quite literally the ONLY people in the whole of Thedas that can kill an Archdemon-the source of a Blight.

Short version is Blights happen when Archdemons are discovered in their underground prisons by tunneling Darkspawn. They then take command of all the Darkspawn and lead them to invade the surface world of Thedas. This is what a Blight is. To end it and send all the masses of Darkspawn back underground is to kill their leader, the Archdemon. (The sheer numbers of Darkspawn are said to match or exceed the surface population of humans, elves, dwarves and qunari.)

So yeah, if the Inquisitor banishes the Wardens then say the Darkspawn awaken an Archdemon potentially sleeping under Orlais, with no Grey Wardens to kill it, its game over Orlais, game over. Probably game over to the surrounding countries too.

As far as anyone in-universe knows when the choice is made, Corypheus may well have awaken and taken control of the sixth Archdemon. Leaving aside the knowledge I gained by virtue of being outside the fourth wall, I would rather not gamble on the Inquisition's ability to keep Blackwall alive until he can land a killing blow on that thing.

I found it hard to make a judgement on this in game, because I felt the whole storyline was so ridiculous. From the panto villain Eremon, the utterly contrived storytelling device of the fake calling affecting *all* wardens, the apparent lack of knowledge about Corypheus being alive despite it being in the newspaper, and the absurdity of them thinking they could create and control a demonic army large enough to search all the Deep Roads and find the Old Gods before the darkspawn (who live down there and are always searching). The sheer geographical size of the area to cover (Bianca points out that the Deep Roads cover all of Thedas), means that this mission is just the height of unworkable idiocy. And that's before we even get to the idea of it never being a good idea to beat one evil by summoning another with a ritual you barely understand.

Don't the wardens ever stop to wonder why Tevinter in its heyday wasn't able to defeat all its enemies through the use of demons alone, if they really were that powerful and easy to control? Haven't they learned the lessons that pretty much every single attempt at mass demon summoning ever attempted has ended in complete disaster? Or that by sacrificing their already low numbers, they will need to summon many, many times more demons than the people they are losing?

Its such a stupid plan from top to bottom, that I couldn't engage with it at all. And basically every charater who talks about this plan in the game agrees - they all think its a fantastically idiotic idea, and one so utterly foolish that they can't even begin to understand how the Wardens could possibly have gone along with it. Its the same with the silly Mages questline and their 'Let's sell ourselves into Tevinter slavery - that's the way!' in that it was just so daft that I could't make an informed judgement. Because there is just no way any of this would actually happen. The whole premise was simply too silly to take seriously.

So in the end, I let them live. Because the game seemed to have hit the reset button on this anyway. Stroud's sacrfice and Eremon being arrested seemed to be the game saying 'The Wardens are good guys again now - tune in for next week's thrilling episode 'Mother Giselle becomes a Cannibalistic lesbian werewolf - for the good of the world! Will our hero agree with her well meaning actions?!'

If they're going to pull stupid storytelling stunts like this, I reserve my right not to care one way or the other.

I nearly always recruit them. The political and military benefits seem to outweigh the risks. Then you get to send them on suicide missions, further limiting the risks and saving your own troops from the task. Although on a recent playthrough I did manage to stop them getting wiped out on their war-table missions,didn't know you could do that.

When you have the time and money, you should definitely look into grabbing the DAO/Awakening bundle. It comes pretty cheap, these days, and includes all of the DLC. DA2, likewise, is a great experience. People didn't like the immutable ending and repetitive assets, but the story and characters were amazing. (It may not be 100% dead-on, but I really enjoy seeing Hawke in DAI. It feels right that he is part of this fight.)

DAI is a good game, but it has so much more weight and meaning if you know the peoples, places and organizations of Thedas from those past experiences. The skill with which the world has been progressive revealed is one of the most impressive things about the series.

If Cory had that much sway over them then why was it necessary to bind them with demons? It seemed to me that the mage wardens were being controlled until they did the blood ritual. Also, at Adamant you can convince a group of wardens to stand down. It seems to me that Cory has to be near them for them to be controlled. These wardens were just following a stupid plan set up by their scared leader, which is one of the reasons why in one of my play throughs I kept them. That and the possibility that Cory would attack with some Darkspawn army. 

But anyway, back to OP original question. You can only kill Cory's wardens on another mission, but you get to pass judgment on a warden and I think one of the options is to kill her, or force her to work in the mines.