Future of magic in da universe

With the story as it was in DAI, I kept hoping that the veil would be completely sundered at the end of the game (or in Trespasser), thus allowing future games to use a classless system where anyone could conceivably use magic.

I think with the Veil set to be attacked by Solas; they've left the door open to do this kind of thing, for sure.  Whether or not they go down that path - either partially or fully - I guess we'll find out in due course, but it's definitely within the scope of what's "believable" given the nature of the Veil as we currently understand it.

I hope they don't throw out EVERYTHING.  But DAI gave us a 'taste' of the Fade and the real world colliding.  It's reasonable to assume that Solas will be able to exert a non-trivial amount of control over how 'crazy' things get as he attempts to pull down the Veil.

I could see a scenario where that happens - but the then we're traipsing into jedi territory - ala KOTOR classes - i.e. they all have magic (the force) but some focus on weapons (warrior/jedi guardian), others on "skills" (rogue/jedi sentinel) and the rest "double down" on the magic (mage/jedi consular).  And I'm just not sure how that would sell (in the sense of bringing the player base on board with the idea, not the actual sales of the game).

Given the success of the Witcher 3, it's conceivable that it would be a pretty easy sell.  But that succeeded for more reasons than the different things Geralt was good at.

Here's my totally off the wall thought. DA is the precursor to ME. When magic is destroyed, the mages become biotics. Thedas is just some long lost Earth colony, or maybe humans who were captured by the Protheans and settled on some random world.

This will take place in the DA/ME mashup I just totally made up in my mind.

It’s not quite dex tanking, but if it improves your experience at all, many DA2 fights can be damage-free by melting the enemies. One good mix is a debuffing mage, two dagger rogues, and a glassy 2H DPS warrior. No tanks — they’ll actually make the overall party less effective, because enemies won’t die fast enough. No healers either.

This party comp will collapse if played in realtime, but it’s majestic in pause-and-play. Merrill’s soft control filters the enemies down to a manageable clip. Fully glass dagger!Hawke and Isabela carefully line up their multipliers to vaporize the ones who come through. Fenris mops up bigger crowds, if necessary, and provides a little extra control/combos.

How do I know so many fights were damage-free? Well, the entire party was glass, so if anyone took any damage, it went down shit creek real fast. Luckily, the ridiculous damage output is enough to remove the enemies before they can even act.

From one tank-hating micromanager to another, I promise DA2 combat can be fun.

If the veil does come down there should be more of an emphasis in spirit magic? Maybe we are more attuned to spirits like the hero in asunder. What are the odds that the ancient elven artifacts such as the ones in hinterlands do the opposite and weaken the veil
Also will we see new schools of magic based on tevinter magic

I’m trying to remember who I usually swapped in for Fenris when I wanted to change things up.

I think it might have been Sebastian? He’s got some control abilities IIRC, so he’d be helping Merrill slow the enemies’ approach even further, to the point where melee AoE is less necessary.

Varric would probably be my second-choice sub, specced for DPS. His crossbow is special, so he isn’t quite as far behind daggers when it comes to single-target damage.

If Aveline must come along, it’s doable, but the fights get uglier and people die. Not recommended.

The first time I did this comp, it was because I sent Anders away in Act II. In later playthroughs, I tried subbing him in under his Vengeance spec, but his damage still felt kind of piddly and underwhelming. AND he’s so glassy the wind might as well kill him. There’s probably some buffing/haste type build that amps everyone else up, but I haven’t found it. I was better off with more direct DPS.

Another possible Fenris sub might be a force mage Hawke. You’d want to make up the single target DPS somewhere, because dagger Hawke is a true beast, but in theory force magic applies the same kind of CC as a warrior, except at range. The fights would last a bit longer, but Merrill and Hawke would be locking up huge groups of enemies, so the rogues would be free to single-target blast the few stragglers.

Coincidentally, dagger Hawke and force mage Hawke are the best matchups against the Arishok, so there’s a nice side benefit there.

In Hushed Whispers opened a can of worms with time travel magic, and I suspect we'll either see it play a major role (Solas...) or it'll never be brought up again.

If puncturing the Veil allowed for real time travel, I doubt the elven empire would have lasted very long. If time travel exists, it literally only takes one lucky idiot, in any part of the timeline, to destroy the world in some way or another. Destruction is irreversible; preventing destruction isn’t. If your world is open to a whole timeline’s worth of heroes and villains, the destruction’s going to win.

The Fade contains almost everyone’s dreams. If anything can create a convincing fake future, the Fade can do it for sure. Why does it contain accurate information about Corypheus’ plans? Well, Corypheus’ mind has a presence in the Fade, so the Fade knows all of that. Someone like Varric doesn’t have quite as strong a presence in the Fade, but he has little dialogue, and is quickly killed off. And fortunately, he’s very sociable, so lots of other people have memories of him to draw on. So the Fade has enough to simulate him to a reasonable degree of accuracy. In fact, all the party members share near-identical information and act basically the same, so there’s not much personality that the Fade needs to color in.

Now, the real question is: if our enemy had been a dwarf instead of a human mage, how much of his plan would we have gotten from the “future”?

This is a very good reason why time travel should never have been allowed. They tried to explain it being possible because of the Breach, so it could never happen without it. However, according to Solas, there was a time when the Veil did not exist, so theoretically time travel was well within the capabilities of the Evanuris. Considering Tevinter apparently inherited most of what they know from scavenging elven ruins, it would make sense that Alexius got his ideas from ancient writings of the elves but if the elves had time magic it opens a whole can of worms. In fact why didn't Solas just turn back time to before Mythal was murdered rather than raise the Veil? Mind you, a latter-day elven mage, Ameridan, was able to perform time stasis magic, albeit over a limited area, and of course we know that Tevinter mages had done the same in the past in the Western Approach, so apparently it is possible to manipulate time even without a hole in the Veil.

I think there is no telling what they may do with magic in the future. They have already changed things drastically from DAO. There magic had limitations, now it seems anything is possible if the writers want it to be that way. However, in DAO there was more variety of what I would call standard magic that any mage can perform with enough training and knowledge. We had more extensive schools of magic and greater variety of specialisations. In DAO you could have two specialisms out of four and with DAA this became three out of a possible six. In DA2 we still had the possibility of two specialism but the choice was limited to three, then in DAI it became a choice of one out of three. In DAO Arcane warrior allowed a mage to be a fighter and equip armour they could not normally wear. In DAI, its modern equivalent, Knight Enchanter, simply turned you into a Thedas Jedi with a light-sabre.

So the direction they seem to be taking is to have magic that is more grandiose but the system as a whole is greatly simplified.

Yeah...time travel as a whole seems to be a really sketchy area in any media. It's so hard to include it and not inadvertently create plot holes, lore contradictions, etc. Better to just leave it out entirely imo unless you really dedicate time toward explaining it and its limitations.

Though in Dragon Age's case they may be able to salvage the idea. Maybe. Depends on what the nature of time, or rather the idea of time, was like before the veil. We know that spirits, and the fade in general, perceive time differently than Thedosians. They can perceive the past as the future (a spirit "predicted" a murder that already occurred), and the future as the present (A book Varric had yet to write appeared in the Vir Dirthara). 'Time' in the fade is more like a set of twists and tangles, with the flow of one time possibly flowing into the other. And of course, we are naturally lead to believe that 'time' in Thedas is like a straight line, with a cohesive chronological order that cannot be manipulated or travelled in under normal circumstances.

But how are we so sure that the 'time' before the veil was like either of these two circumstances?
 
Even if time was perceived as straight line with cause-and-effect, past-to-the-present-to-the-future, does that neccesarily mean that time is a straight line, and thus able to manipulated or traveled through? What if in fact, the world's time was so 'fade like' and so ephemeral despite the obvious chronological movement, that there was no way to grasp onto a previous time without inadvertently 'grasping' onto an essence of the future or present. Essentially making time travel impossible, because no single time was ever in one chronological 'place' so to speak.  I don't know if that makes any sense now that I'm writing it, but its....something. I guess.

Have I mentioned how much I hate time-travel?