The key to getting the most out of your time in the world of Thedas could well lie in properly utilizing the new combat talents feature implemented in Dragon Age: Origins.
These combat tactics allow you to script the behaviour of all your party members during combat, and even swap between several different behavioural profiles. Not using this will default your party members to default combat tactics, which will have them resort to most of their skills, but likely not in optimal condition. Leliana will not use her close-range weaponry when you use her as a regular rogue, Alistair will ignore a horde of enemies bashing in your mage’s head and none of your characters will use health poultices by default.
Indeed, it should come as no surprise that using customized combat tactics will dramatically improve your efficiency. You will not need to pause as much to give orders, your characters will not die so easily and you can control when they use their abilities. It will require some knowledge of the abilities of each of your characters, but that’s where I come in to help. This guide will provide you with a quick overview of some of the basic important combat tactics you should use and some general tips regarding setting up combat tactics.
Setting up the combat tactics for your party can be done by pressing the \ button and selecting the appropriate character to customize. This includes your main character in case you’re controlling another party member. You wouldn’t want him (or her) standing around doing nothing while you’re positioning your rogue for some good old fashioned backstabs, would you?
The very first thing you’ll notice is that there are three default combat tactics schemes for each character, which depend on their skillsets and classes. In general it’s a good idea to use one of these profiles as the base for your customized group. Many of the standard tactics are quite useful, so for example you might want to set Alistair to Defender, and then customize some of the rules for this profile. When you save that profile it will be stored as a custom profile, but because you’ve based it on the Defender profile it will be easy to update when Alistair levels up.
But that’s for later down the road, first there’s something important you need to do for all of your characters: health (and mana) poultice rules. Warriors take the brunt of the damage and have more health, so they’ll need this tactic: target: self, condition: health less than 50%, action: health poultice – most powerful. Set the same rule, but with least powerful health poultices, for your rogues and mages. Similarly you’ll want to add a rule for lyrium potions for your mages, preferably at less than 25% mana left so that they don’t burn through your supply too quickly.
Here's where you set up the combat tactics for your party
After these most basic of rules are set up, there are some more advanced tactics to consider. You’ve set Alistair to Defender and customized it with a health poultice tactic. But if Alistair has the taunt ability, then surely you want him to lure away any melee attackers on your mage? The rule to set this up is fairly straightforward: target: Morrigan, condition: being attacked by type of attack – melee, action: use ability – taunt.
You might have a character in your party that has mixed skillsets, for example Leliana with ranged and melee combat skills. You’ll want to set up two different profiles for her, so that when she’s forced to draw her melee weapons, you can pause, switch her profile, and have her use her melee instead of ranged abilities. This is easily done by swapping her combat tactics profile to another preset.
Perhaps most important are buffs: these should be ignored in your combat tactics profiles. Buffs do not consume any additional mana or stamina after activation, so they can be manually activated prior to combat and left on throughout a dungeon crawl. You can better use your combat tactics slots for one-off abilities like Dirty Fighting, Shield Pummel or Frost Bolt. The exception is if you use Wynne and want her to buff your party members during combat, I find it works well to let the AI use these buffs on its own with proper combat tactics rules (which are implemented by default).
After setting up proper combat tactics your party will tear through most combat encounters
By now you may be wondering what to do when a character levels up and gains new skills. Surely there is an easy method for adding these skills to your combat tactics?
In fact, the default combat tactic profiles automatically update after new skills (suitable to said profile) are learned. You can simply switch back to one of these default profiles, see if a new tactic has been added, and then manually import it to your own custom profile. Not all skills are automatically granted combat tactics, so some you might want to figure out on your own, or simply activate these skills manually when you need them.
There is one major drawback to this handy tactics sytem and that is that the amount of tactic slots for each character is limited by their combat tactics skill. You have to give a character more points in this skill in order for them to gain more slots, although every few levels they do gain an additional combat tactic slot regardless of this skill. There is no real way to avoid this other than only binding the most crucial combat tactics to your slots and doing the rest manually. Even so, customized combat tactic profiles will help make every battle just that little bit easier.
Have any other combat tactics tips to share? Leave a comment below!
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Very useful
Nice post. I just start playing this a few days ago and it seems to have nice balance of straight forward ‘point and click’ game play fun and the benefits and strategical advantages of a more complex RPG/Strategy system. It’s also fun to come up with strategies for different situations and see what works for you.
I’m on a different story line than here and so far only had a group of 2, but I immediately saw the benefits of using Combat Tactics, even when i wasn’t clear on how they worked. I found this post to see if the tactics can trigger on the character you’re controlling, since I invested in an extra Tactics slot on mine without really knowing what it was and I’m playing as a Warrior, so taking the most damage. It makes since that they don’t trigger while controlling the character, but auto-heal on a tank would just be so nice. =)
This feature is one of those types of things that people might skip or ignore to just ‘play the way they are used to’ b/c you don’t really see the benefit until you try it. But invest a few minutes trying it out and your mind starts racing with the possibilities. Back when I used to have time to game a lot (my college years, over 10 years back), I used to play a lot of online MUDs (text based MMORPG games) and this feature reminds me a lot of triggers and actions that those games would have. Once you use them, you can’t live without them.
I think BioWare did a great job adding this feature (don’t know if it’s any other of thier games) which adds intelligence to your party members. This not only makes your play more efficient as you mentioned, but also more fun for gamers not used to playing RPGs (how tedious would it be to switch to each character to cast heals all the time?) and adds a new layer of strategy for RPG vets (I want my archer to switch to a shield and sword when he’s getting pounded on by 2 or more foes. I used this one in my case).
Thanks for your introduction and suggestions!
Nice article. It was very imformitive, but I wanted more. It ended to quickly.
Emm….
Have a party of 4 – mage (mc), rogue, tank and another mage/ranger (currently all are ~L11 with reasonable equip).
In easier fights tactics work ok, save for AoE spells which my ppl seem to run into whenever they please, and switching from ranged to melee weapons. But when it comes to a more serious predicament, i.e. 2 yellows and 1 brown and few whites, I get obliterated, especially with the mage present in the enemy party.
I’ll keep on trying to juggle the tactics (sustained buffs b4 the fight is a gr8 idea, thanx) but maybe some1 has a profile similar to mine and worked out a nice system already?
I just want to add that there is a mod which makes 25 tactics slots available from scratch. You can find it on fileplanet.
Besides that I would appreciate some more suggestions for every NPC and for every PC Class.