Barrier and Guard

Barrier and Guard are essentially just like Temporary HP in dnd, lasting for a duration or until used respectively.

I get the desire to spread out HP management beyond magic healing and potion spammming and give the other classes something else. In the Dragon Age ttrpg your Defense is increased by Dexterity not armour and if an attack does hit you then you minus your Armour Rating from the Damage (unless its Penetrating Damage, in which case you take all of it). So Rogues avoid losing HP by avoiding being hit and Warriors avoid losing HP by their armour absorbing impact/blocking some or all of the blow.

I get the sense the later is kinda what they were going for with guard in DAI, with it being meant to represent the warrior parrying blows with their sword or shield and absorbing them with their armour rather then taking the damage. I'm just not sure Temporary Hit Points was the best way to go for this. They also had it so that special abilities did bonus dmg to the guard rather than bypassing it to dmg your Health like Penetrating dmg.

While rolling to see if you hit a targets defense and minusing AR from dmg is fairly active in a ttrpg, since you do it yourself and see/make the increases yourself, in a crpg those things would tend to be handled by the computer and not be particurly visible so I imagine they want to add something more visual/engaging in a video game setting.

Guard could become a %* minus from on incoming damage, unless the damage is Special DMG that ignores Guard. With you increasing that percentage as you level. It could either be something thats triggered when you use certain abilities, a sustained mode/stance, or passive that's just always on, depending on balanceing issues and on how "active" they're intent on things being. Could still be represented by a bar above the Health bar, increasing in length as the buff gets more powerful, or with some other visual representation.

Then Rogues could have a Dodge giving them an increase to Defense, or decrease to incoming Attacks, something to avoid being hit is the point. I haven't touched the DAIMP very much but it sounds like that Isabela ability is something like this, though I would hope any da4 ability isn't exclusive to a specialisation or to dual wielders.

When it comes to mages I hope they bring back all the spell schools and by preference that includes having the Creation trees Healing and Regeneration spells back. And I wouldn't mind seeing Barrier back, but differently. A defense Barrier to to decrease chance to hit, a Barrier that grants physical damage resistance, a Barrier that grants magical damage resistance - but a limitation on it, like maybe a mage can only do one at a time. Or maybe they're sustained like in origins, so sure, you could do more than one, but the amount that it decreases your max mana to sustain multiple Barriers is prohibitive. Or a mage can cast more than one at a time but an individual can only benefit from one.

If they still limit potions to prevent spamming, and don't bring back Temporary HP pools then with Guard, Dodge and Barrier dmg prevention in place I don't think bringing back healings going to entirely dominate the resource management scene. Particurlarly not if its just base healing and not the spirit healer spec.

So yes to bring back Guard and Barrier but not as Temporary Hit point pools - what is that on the poll?

*it might be better to have a set number rather than a percentage, thats a detail an actual game dev would know better than me. 

Okay - if you say so. I don't remember much about DAI, as I completed but one playthrough (skipped a lot of the optional content and never did any of the DLCs). I found the combat to be a mind-numbing slog, and despite my general interest in DA's lore, story, and characters - I just couldn't bring myself to put myself through that again. I do remember that my Qunari warrior/tank was often obscured by fx to the point where I could barely see her.

I've no interest in any sort of co-op or MP, and am really disappointed that the SP combat was gutted to support it.

While DAO remains my favorite game of all time (and DA2 is in the top 10), DAI may well have marked my exit from the franchise. Unless they correct course and bring back more of the features I loved from the first 2 games, I don't actually expect I'll be playing DA4.

Shrug.

I understand that they all serve the same goal (make toons harder to kill), yet there are specific abilities and item bonuses designed to do greater damage to different segments of that total pool - and players are limited in the number of abilities available and are not allowed to swap weapons during battle.



I would suggest that being able to swap weapons and try different tactics set-ups can go a long way toward making the experience less grueling. At least, it worked for me in DAO & DA2.

I also found that there were significant differences in the challenge presented in different battles in those games.



That problem never existed in DAO & DA2, given the full restoration post-battle.

I really appreciate your participation and explanations here, yet I feel like this was a classic case of trying to fix something that wasn't broken. DA2's combat was mostly a refinement to DAO's, while DAI took an entirely different path. My pet theories for the impetus behind the complete re-conceptualization of how to do combat in DA include frostbite and MP.

If you can knock down my pet theories or offer any other insight here, I'd appreciate it.

I rarely used it in the previous games, so I didn't miss it. If I need health, I would use grenades or potions. The other thing is adding Fade-Touched Snoufleur Skin (Heal) to a weapon to gain health. For me, I used fade touched that adds guard on hit, if not playing as a warrior.

Never want to speak for someone else, but I would assume one reason might be that they want you to be able to OWN your successes (and mistakes) when engaging in combat. If you do horribly at taking down the enemy strategically, then your punishment is a more long winded fight thats likely to exhaust more of your consumables, as well as leaving you with less total health at the fights conclusion. Again, that's just one reason only I can think of.

Outside of this point, I appreciate the feedback on this Luke. I wonder if opening up options for playstyles would help in alleviating some of the issues that comes with the current iteration of Dragon Age; especially with the classes. Not having classes be so strictly forced into '1h + Shield/2h' for Warriors, or only Staffs for Mages, could allow for more variation in how encounters are tackled and what's allowable for health regen/sustain.

Progression, whether narrative or via gameplay, is a troubling thing to balance sometimes. Even more so when you have games with campaigns that take 30+hrs minimum to finish.

Key question there. DA fully restored health (unless injured) and mana/stam after every battle until DAI. Many modern games do that to avoid the tedium and progress disruption of having to travel back to a camp or rent a room at the inn or somesuch.

In DAI each class did have their own abilities which could activate to 'dodge'.

Rogues had...evasion? I forget the name of it but it was there.

Warrios combat role.

Mages/ Knight Enchanter-Fade Step.

If the intention was for "degrees of success" to impact the narrative, I guess I would be interested to see how such a system worked in practice. Otherwise, I'm really, *really* not interested in the 'Dark Souls' style of making things difficult for their own sake.

Of course, in the event of combat results affecting story, I would have simply reloaded and reloaded until I got the result I wanted. Just like I already do for things like speech checks or making a dialogue choice that results in an outcome that I don't like.

Thanks for the DAI background info!

Are you sure this is an optimal playstyle? Depending on the dev, this could cause you to miss a lot of content.