I usually dump as much as I can into Varric's cunning stat. It means he is quite quishy and not as effective as he could be but you need someone for those complex locks. Isabela betrayed and left me so I was stuck with Varric or Sebastian as a rogue and Sebastian has bugger all Cunning to begin with.

It is indeed crazy. I had to leave and rebuild my party because of the big room with them Golem store. Absolutely insane fight. I can't tell if all the rooms are cut off normally so that we can only explore two big rooms but I finally beat it with a party of Fenris, Aveline and Merrill.

As for lockpicking, so far my Hawke is doing a good job of opening all locks. I think even complex ones. I mainly put stats in her dexterity and cunning, so far so good.

I didn't have to play the demo because people told me it's much worse than Dragon Age which i found is already overhyped (compared to BG 2). I have seen the youtube videos of it that was already enough for me. Rather looks like a really bad H&S than a serious game. Obviously a crap consolized game shame on bioware which was one of the shining stars in RPG's on PC and now becomes pure shit which their console pieces of crap.....

POTENTIAL END OF CHAPTER 2 SPOILERS





Holy shit. The one-on-one duel with the Arishok is absolutely ridiculous! I have no idea how I'll do it with rogue Hawke. :S I was working up a strategy but it was very time consuming (running around the room til my pots cooled off, drinking, attacking repeat). I have a feeling I might have to bump this down to easy but damn, do I really want to say I beat it on normal (that might not sound very neat to those playing on Nightmare but I'll be proud of myself). I have the SE so I tried bringing Dog in to have him help but he didn't do any good. I really have to get to bed cause it's 01:00(am) and I have to get up for work at 06:45 but am I ever amped up. :P

Chapter 2 started off mostly meh in my humble opinion, but the main story for this chapter is fantastic and definitely turned my opinion around.

First two times I died, the second Anders slapped a forcefield on the Arishok which kept him quiet long enough for me to polish off everyone else. With my warrior Hawke, Varric, Fenris and Anders as heal-bitch it wasn't that hard.

"Heal-bitch" I like that. :P I've heard if you decline the one-on-one duel you can do it with the actual party. I'll try it solo maybe a few more times (even though it's time consuming, I would like to say I managed it) and then decline the duel and have my party help me...

I didn't even get the option of a one on one duel. I guess it's because that Rivaini skank ran off -_-

XP! Yup, that'll do it. From what I've heard it's only an option if 1) Isabela comes back or 2) Fenris is in the party if Isabela takes off and he talks the Arishok into dueling Hawke (heeeey thanks pal. I totally want you to convince the massive qunari into handing me my ass alone. :D)

The one-on-one duel isn't hard once you've gotten the hang of it.
Run in circles around the boss, and when he strikes, attack from the back.
One of his attacks requires you to keep some distance: use it to heal.

I'll give that a shot! I was mainly running around and trying to avoid him, then using backstab and twin fang but he usually recovers by the time I do twin fang and gets a few good shots in on me. Instead of just running around the whole room I'll try doing it in smaller circles around him so that he gets his attacks out of the way and I can counter. Thanks much. :3

This will hopefully not merge. :P

I ended up declining the duel and just doing it with my whole party (I tried for about 45 minutes of running around him solo, using assassination, healing when need be but he still got me in the end with a few repeated impaling moves. No thank you.)

On chapter 3 now. I'm hellbent on getting all the Champion armor before I finish the game so I can look awesome, but the chestpiece requires killing a high dragon and *that* is a daunting task (I started it last night and realized it was going to be a really long fight so I opted to go to bed instead). I'll give it a good shot though, just have to plan my party accordingly (I started off using Fenris, Aveline and Anders as heal-bitch as Delixe says :P)

Theres a Dragon Age facebook game now:
http://ebm.em.ea.com/c/tag/hBNgQw6B7uauvB8ZrP2NtZgmS6L/doc.html?&t_params=EMAIL%3Djchinyet42%2540gmail.com

The first real facebook game

So, this game has annoyed me now.

End of chapter two... I will try to be vague but there might be minor spoilers. Anyway one of my party members was a bad, bad girl and no matter what I said or did I had no choice but to let her get away with it, because the game forbid any other outcome. Then the Qunari go apeshit and despite siding with them numerous times before and being nice to them there is no option other than fighting them and killing everything.

Basically what I am saying is that while Bioware games have always been more linear than other Western RPGs to fit their cinematic storytelling paradigm I have never felt as railroaded in a Bioware game as I felt at the end of chapter two in Dragon Age 2.

I wonder if it's not the same kind of issue than the ME2 ones where is you didn't go nearly exclusively renegate or paragon you end up losing conversation options. Maybe if you had gone exclusively with one conversation "icon" (peaceful, aggressive, sarcastic or whatever they are called) you would have ended up with an extra conversation option.

It's lame but it wouldn't surprise me.

Surely the worst RPG since Oblivion but Oblivion was even more a pile of crap. Oblivion was the worst RPG of the past 20 years no doubt. But Dragon Age 2 is challenging Oblivion as the worst ever^^.