What did you do today in DA? [Spoilers]

The Frostback Basin is a mean place. Full of mean things. Like spiders. When the hell did they develop the ability to two-hit-kill level 27 characters???

Also, Hakkonite Spys are apparently invincible. Apparently.

Just a lovely area, though. I'm avoiding the Occularum. Ellaria has all the shards she's ever going to need.

I do think to get the most out of Sten, you really need to take him with you pretty much everywhere. A lot of his camp conversations are locked behind comments he makes while traveling with you out in the world.

The Adventure of Lycurgus Aeducan

Aeducan torn through the deep roads with help of Alistair, Morrigan and Shale, until the group encountered the poor tainted Hespith in the Deep Roads. Aeducan felt... Kind of disbursed by her, as well as kind of sad - he could've had a horrible fate too (if the GW didn't find him, of course) but listening to Hespith's chilling story was chilling ... And the way she talked about Branka, well to Ly it felt like Branka was beyond redemption and had fully lost her mind, as she left those people to there deaths.

After killing things, he finally made It to the Dwarven Broodmother, and his feelings were immediately I am glad I'm not a woman. He killed the broodmother, which wasn't that hard to him (hey, he's wearing Blood Armor afterall), and felt relieved once Hespith died - he thought it was a mercy for her to die, actually. He was well aware that they were getting close to the anvil of the void and therefore Branka.

Once they got there, Branka decided she had an sword up her arse immediately as him and Oghren spoke to her. He was fairly certain he didn't like Branka, but considered keeping the Anvil though, for Ozammar (but Shale convinced him otherwise).

So after siding reluctantly with Caridin, he made Bhelen King (because Harrowmont was weak, old, and stuck in the past, but than again... Bhelen was a psychopath who threw him out to the Deep Roads, where he was expected to die so...) And than went off on his way. He talked to Danga, and liked her enough that he went back to the circle to ask for her to join them, lol.

Well, that's pretty much what I did so far, and yeah,

Sten is secretly a cookie munching chatterbox. Bet him and Dog sometimes sneak off to have secret tea parties when no one is looking. 
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Did Hushed Whispers with Lavellan today. Had planned to take Sera and Blackwall with Lavellan and had armed them properly with good armor, bees and regeneration potions. "Borrowed" Solas armor and Vivi's staff to give Dorian, since I was too lazy to craft gear for him.
Entered the mission, selected the party and the cutscene started. Behind Lavellan is Sera and...Solas. It would have been more amusing if they had kept the trend of unarmored characters wearing their undies, but it was still enjoyable to drag Solas in his under armor for a very serious meeting. He took it in stride.
Still, the mission went well (except Sera refused to be revived for a while during the combat with Alexius). Lavellan pulled through and now I have a shiny "Trials of the Magician" in my achievement log. Yay. Now I'm only missing hermit, alchemy and botanist. Maybe I can ask Ines Arancia for some tips on those.
Anyways thinking such good effort deserves to be continued. And maybe I can finish the game with out relying on the healing potion restock crutch. But mostly I just like her face and want to see it more.

A drunken Cassandra finally realizing what a monster she's raised up to lead the Inquisition, but now, it's too late.

Let's see. A couple nights ago I killed Corypheus in DAI. It wasn't quite the lengthy, hard battle I thought it was going to be.

That being said, I've spent the last couple days exploring Frostback Basin and learning more about what I have to accomplish there. The worst part about it is that its got a lot of hills and deep gullies in it which makes travel a bit of a pain.

Emma is attempting to unravel the mysteries of the shattered library (and failing miserably). She failed to get veilfire because I completely forgot about how to do the puzzle to obtain it, and I also forgot that the anchor discharge ability granted a few seconds immunity to the purple flames, so the group was down to 3 health potions. While returning to the courtyard to replenish health potions, the game BSODed. Not my night for Dragon Age, apparently.

I finally beat Witcher yesterday, and I was still in the mood for some fantasy rpg-ing, but didn't exactly feel like continuing with Witcher on new game +. So I hopped on DA:I today with my Lady Trev and worked on clearing out the beginning quests in the Hinterlands. I missed Dragon Age.

More DAO... err actually DAA

After I finished that solo archer I had started a solo 2H in DAO and ended up taking it into Awakening. 2H is my favorite class in DAO, and it was more fun than archer of course. Also it was the last major style I had left to do for a solo (for the whole game anyway, I had done parts of it as 2H before).

This was actually just my second run through Awakening, and that expansion is sort of an odd duck to me, but for some reason I wanted to see what soloing it would be like. Mostly if you can do a run through Origins you shouldn't have a problem doing Awakening, but there are some annoying fights solo...

I wanted Vigilance asap, so that determined my quest order - Wending Wood and then Blackmarsh. Incidentally both were where the annoying solo fights for me were. And also I didn't end up using Vigilance at all...

Silverite Mines Dragons - The main annoyance for me was that since you are stuck with Velanna, it was common for a dragon to peel off and just attack her when I was hit with Frightening Appearance and couldn't consistently generate threat. I couldn't figure out a way to do this section without Velanna taking any damage (and squad "tanking" isn't allowed)... at least not in a normal sense. After getting annoyed I ended up just using console to give her Master Stealth so that I could stealth her at the beginning and it would be like she wasn't actually there. On a related note, this is an annoyance I have with the Branka fight as well in a solo since you are stuck with Oghren but I figured out ways to keep him from getting hit more or less (it gets hard if she is allowed to hit the lyrium node to split into multiple copies as one always seems to go straight for him).

Baroness - I think Blackmarsh is actually supposed to be the third place you go (scaling) but really the only problem here is the second phase of the fight where she can use her massively lame Drain. It is more than possible to survive this grab, but the issue is her healing will make the fight go on practically forever. It is possible to avoid it if you move far enough away, and actually if she freezes you with the frost burst talent she can't actually pick you up. In any case, I did this without health pots but had to use swift salve.

Queen of the Blackmarsh - this is the worst since I didn't know a good way to do this fight with 2H that didn't involve chugging stamina potions. Level 31 right after Blackmarsh. This was also the only place I used stamina potions until the last sequence. Stormchaser armor was wholly inadequate... the armor rating is sort of bad, and the damage was worse in it than my old DAO outfit (HoH, Evon's, Diligence). I used Sentinel set. I probably should have crafted immunity or armor rating (forgot its name) runes for the armor.

Other than that mostly smooth sailing. My preferred gear setup actually ended up looking like this:

HoH
Stormchaser Gauntlets
Evon the Great's Mail (Evasion Rune x 3)
Fleet Feet
CGM (Intensifying Rune x 3)
Spellward
Cinch of Skillful Maneuvering
Lifegiver
KttC

Sentinel set actually did more damage per swing since it is + eleventy billion strength, but I have a texture mod for dragonbone armors and Evon's that makes it look cool, and the above has a lot of dodge and stamina regen. The runes were installed after I maxed Spirit Warrior so that I could drop dweomers and still be spell immune (when Beyond the Veil is active anyway). Since 2H has forced crits (add on Peon's and Massacre as well) it made sense to me to try and get as much crit damage bonus as possible, and that made Massacre really amusing.

Other stuff of note:

Inferno Golem and whatever elite mage guy - Both can be knocked down, ha

Last Amaranthine General and Armored Ogre Alpha (or whatever they are called) - actually this was somewhat tricky... ogre takes more damage from regular attacks than spirit, so had to split him from the mage general guy so I could kill the ogre fast enough to not need a heal. After that it was just activate Beyond the Veil to win against the mage boss.

Architect - so the amusing thing here is that if you animation cancel the maul swings it is just fast enough to continually interrupt his spellcasting attempts, even with precise striking up and no speed runes. At least if you don't botch one... I wanted to try to beat him without any consummables except resist balms, but that didn't work. But it basically just costs one swift salve to beat him without any health pots (don't need poison, don't need stamina). Again annoyance due to forced companions (unless I missed the option), Utha likes to b-line for them.

Mother - yeah I don't know if it is possible to keep the squad from getting damaged here but I didn't care at that point. The tentacles will go pretty much everywhere. Greater Nature Balm, no pots. I used the tevinter stuff though so that is one heal. Didn't kill any tentacles (so as to keep the little bugs from showing up). It is harder to avoid her sweeps than with the broodmother in DAO, partly because I wasn't killing the tentacles, and partly because the area around her is smaller.

Thank you.  I will definitely do that next time.

Yeah I still wanted to recruit people so as to talk to them.  Velanna did cause a problem though since I had to travel back and forth from the forest to the keep a million times to get her personal quest encounter.

I did solo the endgame, although had a party.  They were just on hold with no tactics (sort of like how you have to do the origin, and Ostagar anyway).  I didn't consider them assisting with "tanking" in the mother fight since I don't think the tentacles would have contributed to damage to me as no extra ones appeared near me when the party was killed.

If I was really concerned I could have also used the console to drop the party.  Although this messes with plot stuff, but I suppose that wouldn't have mattered just for the epilogue.