Neve Gallus - Official Companion Thread [Spoilers]

Icy what you guys did there

Do you suppose Varric's nickname for her would be Frosty?

I would like Icy more. Would remember me at the winx club .

That was only really emphasised in her introduction to us at the party we were invited to. She wasn't an Ice Mage or any sort of elemental mage by specialism but a Knight Enchanter, who were said to be mages committed to guarding the Divine (don't know why she wasn't at the Conclave then). She was also Court Enchanter to the Empress Celene and a loyalist to the Circle system controlled by the Divine and the Chantry. Vivienne was a snob and determined social climber, thoroughly at home in the Game.

As I understand it, Neve is principally an elemental mage who specialises in ice magic. Whilst she is willing to work with the authorities as necessary, she isn't a committed loyalist to the regime, either secular or spiritual, as Vivienne was. On the contrary her closest allegiance is to a faction committed to altering the status quo. She feels ill at ease in the mansion of one of the Altus and chooses to live among the ordinary folk of the docks. Whilst members of her family are in the Templars, she has no real connection to the Magisterium, Archon or Black Divine. So no danger of Neve being a repeat Vivienne.

 In a banter with Bull (or was it with Dorian), she says that her favorite type of magic is ice though

I believe you are referring to this conversation:
Iron Bull: So, ma'am, with the magic, do you prefer fire, or lightning, or cold, or what?
Vivienne: The proper tool for the proper task. Fire reminds an enemy that you can destroy everything around. Lightning puts the fear of the Maker into her. Cold makes her think you implacable, while spirit energy conjures fears of demons.
Iron Bull: I like cold, cause it freezes them, and then they break into little bits when I chop them in half.
Vivienne: That's fine too, dear.

As you can see, it is Bull that likes cold magic for the reason I gave, that if you hit frozen targets hard enough they shatter. However, Vivienne doesn't express a preference but very sensibly says the right magic for the right job and what you think is most likely to scare the shit out of the enemy.

If you had a mage in your party, take control of that character to take down the barrier. I know I did a few times.

Or always carry a spare staff with you. Usually I ran with two mages in a party so at least one of them would have the appropriate staff for the job.

You could be right about this since they keep linking ice magic with female mages. When they first introduced Anders in DAA he was using fire, even though it didn't feature in his actual spells once recruited. Then Dorian starts with fire magic in his spells. So, it is as though they equate fire with male mages, at least the human ones. Solas started with Winter's grasp but he's an ancient elf who ends up with the Medusa gaze so he doesn't really count.

It may be deliberate so that you have to take a particular mage with you if you know in advance the sort of elemental magic that is going to be most effective on the mission. However, I would assume that more often you just have to be prepared for anything. That is why I often ran with two mages in my party in previous games, particularly in DAI when they started limiting mages to just one specialism, and deliberately set up each mage to offset the others. In my case, I focused on fire magic for Dorian, ice magic for Solas and electricity for Vivienne. When I was a mage I generally stood in for Vivienne as I took the Knight Enchanter specialism, so I focused on electrical magic myself. As I've said above, I made a point of taking different elemental staffs along with us just in case they were needed.

I do wonder how it is going to work in DAV. Since they made a point of the fact that Neve is an Ice Mage, I would assume that this is going to be factored into the game play, particularly in quests involving the Shadow Dragons. By contrast, presumably quests in the Arlathan Forest and involving the Veil Jumpers may require the electrical skills of Bellara. Not sure where that leaves us on fire magic. Emmrich will surely be focused on spirit magic but I suppose he can dabble in fire magic as a secondary focus. I suppose if Rook is a Spell Blade then they can vary the type of magic they use to infuse their melee attacks to take account of who is with them and thus what elemental magic is available.

I wish we could have more information on the spell trees and magic available to us. Hopefully that is something we may learn at the same time as they reveal the CC. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how much they revealed before DAI was released. I seem to recall I was rather disappointed when I started playing and realised how limited the scope and choice of spells was compared with previous games and particularly DAO, so may be I just assumed it was going to be similar to DA2 but they never actually told us any differently prior to release.

The restriction to just one specialism no matter how far you advanced in levels was particularly disappointing to me. Didn't they say that DAV had a level cap of 50? Or am I remembering that wrong? Don't know many optional quests are required to reach that level or whether it is fairly closely tied to the main narrative but I would imagine you would fill up pretty much every slot on the skill tree/web by that stage.

I carried tree identical staves (Staff of the Dragon), one for each element. Definitely doing that again in DAV!

Yeah, the level cap is 50, with 1 ability point per level. The did mention you could also gain an AP through story advancement, though they didn't say how many. I imagine you might have a few points to spend at 1st level as well.

That said, there are something like ~122 core abilities on the tree, plus another 15 per specialization. So unless they're handing APs out like candy in the game, we may not even fill half the tree by the endgame. Assuming we can even hit level 50 in the game.  

That does present some opportunities for a NG+ though, if they want to add additional levels and gear tier(s) to the game.