Barrier and Guard

I say bring both back, cause they were really useful. I hate using potions (when you only get a handful for the whole group ), so just losing guard/barrier instead was nice(r).

You realize the reason why the potions were so limited is because they gave you guard and barrier to prevent damage instead, right? The guard/barrier implementation is also the justification for removing healing magic from mages.

There are materials that give you Heal on Kill, so you still have "Healing", just no healing others, only yourself.
The positive thing about that, you're not forced to bring a mage, if you want to do something with a full Rogue, or full Warrior party.

I think I was pretty clear in my comments. What is it you don't understand?

On multiple occasions, I'd whittle the dragon down to only a sliver of health just before it re-generated full guard.

And the size and terrain of the battlefields made it really difficult for me to find fallen companions to resuscitate them. So I did spend a fair amount of those battles with a less than full crew.

I’m saying that only happens with specific party comps, ones that are heavily, heavily focused on defense rather than offense.

Game designers know that we’re afraid of dying, so they can get away with making defensive abilities/potions/armors absolute garbage and we’ll still take them. Knowing our natural response to dying is to play even more defensively, even as it continues to make combat harder instead of easier.

Non-tanky parties do not run into that situation, where the fights last for ages and they constantly need revival. The dragon is already dead. The party doesn’t even need to do twice as much damage to halve the length of fights, because shaving off one or two guards dramatically reduces the dragon’s overall HP — and dramatically reduces the damage the party takes.

It was. But the reason they felt they had to change something was that under the system as it existed in DA:O, the party having as much access to healing as it did meant that Bioware couldn't adequately plan for how many HP the bosses needed to be able to deplete. The only way they could think of to put party members in actual danger of going down no matter how much access to healing they had (without making it impossible to play the game if you had less than that) was to give the enemies completely ridiculous moves that instantly take a huge amount of health, while paralyzing the target to prevent them from using a potion. Like the Overwhelm move from Origins that enemies in Awakening loved spamming.

I read Bioware's explanation of that while I was in the middle of my third or fourth (or somethingth?) playthrough of Awakening. And I gotta say, it struck a cord with me. Maybe there's a third option, but unless there is, I'll take dragons that can generate guard over dragons that can use Overwhelm.

Uh-huh. *nods* And... ?

My first (and only complete) PT was a Qunari warrior, a tank. When my followers fell, I spent way too much time looking for them to revive them as they tended to blend into the terrain... but of course whether or not I took the time to locate and revive them, the dragon would re-gen FULL FUCKING GUARD, even when it had but a sliver of health left. An enemy should not be able to re-generate FULL FUCKING GUARD when it is that close to death. And it should not be that damned difficult to find fallen companions.

I spent most of my last DAI dragon battle frequently pausing to move Varric out from under the dragon's belly. I've no idea how or why he kept ending up there - in DAO and DA2, I had only to set combat behavior to ranged, and the companions would keep themselves at range.

As a previous poster mentioned, guard and barrier are similar to MET's shields and armor, but there's a huge distinction: MET gave us the ability to swap weapons and ammo types to optimally strip those layers; DAI failed to provide any such capability. Also, MET's armour doesn't regenerate.

If you like the guard and/or barrier mechanics, you are free to vote for their retention. I prefer they die in a fire.

I can see Rogues having a means to Parry/Dodge attacks at the cost of stamina. DA multiplayer had Isabella in it, and she had this interesting intrinsic ability where using certain abilities gave her stacks of "Elusive". Each Elusive stack allowed you to bypass damage from a single attack. This was balanced by the fact that she couldn't use evasive abilities. There wasnt really an animation for it though, so there wasnt any feedback.

Maybe Warriors could do well with having a higher chance to stagger opponents, or not being staggered themselves? Maybe even have passives that give them a chance to regenerate a portion of the health they loss (but never the full amount). Kind of like a second wind or preserving through the pain.

I have played her couple weeks ago, and there is feedback, but it is a bit ... shady. I think it uses the same effect of blue something around you as one would use the Fallback Plan ability. So when enemy hits, coin is used and that flashes really fast. 

I vote to bring both back. Better than being more or less forced to have a healing mage in your party. At least DAI have us a choice between warrior or mage damage absorbers. But if all three are in the same game that may pose a balance problem. Heck, some OP barrier and guard builds are possible in DAI (especially for knight enchanters and champions).

That being said, I won't mind at all if healing spells, potions, guards and barriers are available in the next game. But if they chose to replace guard with armor passives and add in some sort of rogue 'parry' skill at the expense of stamina, I would be ok with that too.

Given that I think active blocking should be in there, what guard was supposed to ape, I think only barrier should return.