Excellent guide. Human Noble is in fact the best equipment wise for 2H as Yellow Howe Knight can drop Heavy Maul (which jas attriute of +2 dmg) and he also has +25 stamina helm in his loot table for those not patient enough in reloading until Mauls drops. I would only dispute perfect striking - at this point of the game I don't find it particulary useful as I don't recall not being able to hit something with Precise Striking on while pumping +3 Atk every level. Also those light chest armors look kinda iffy armor wise given that you already are skippin on some set values. Did Nightmare 2H Human Noble Woman as Templar run few months ago and it was really nice. Being able to one shot regular enemies with autoattacks is such a convenience. Haste+Power of Blood+Swift Salve also speeds us up considerably and having the insane survivability is really nice. Microing animation cancelling feels good. Warrior discount on fatigue and Death Blow give wiggle room for stamina and modes (which I only activated if I was short of killing enemies in single hit past lvl 10).
Really happy to see this. Only confirmed to me how fun 2H unga bunga looks and taught me a lot for whenever I get around to doing that 2H human noble run I've been thinking. Thanks for uploading this and I hope we'll see more when things are less crazy. Until then just stay safe out there
Recently started my first DAO playthrough and decided from the start that I wanted to be a 2H berserker style dwarf warrior. Around lvl 8 (lothering, Redcliffe/castleish) I cautiously sought out a spoiler free guide since I knew I was misunderstanding something about making 2H shine, and I wanted to know what that was before progressing much further. Long story short, this guide helped immensely. I'm mostly ignoring the gear section - since I'm going for a slow, immersive first playthrough and not just a loot grab - but the buff and skill animation cancels alone make this guide an insane quality of life upgrade for my playthrough. Thank you.
I"d say berserk isn't very good for 2H. It gives you a flat +8 damage per attack for the entire game. Since 2H attacks are slow, the bonus damage isn't very noticeable, being better suitted for fast attacks (dual wielding). I'd recommend templar for the powerful anti mage skills and armor and Champion for extra CC. Also, the Chasind Great Maul is regarded to be better than Starfang. The higher str modifier, armor penetration, stamina and regen make the CGM much better.
Both Templar and Champion (Reaver as well, but to a lesser extent) are almost useless in the early game (Templar can at least regen some energy from the demons/mages, but that's it) for a PC since they're more of a support/utility specs. Berserk, on the other hand, still gives around 25-20% damage boost flat at pre-Starfang lvls (esp. without the Cleaver, thus locking us into T6 weapons w/o any good bonuses), 2 Str for both damage and CC and 10 health as a cherry on top, while both Templar and Champion provide very niche stats for us. It's definitely the strongest earlygame warrior spec, and it's by far the weakest point of a two-handed build, which we should try to offset - especially for a guide aimed at less experienced players, right? Yes, its damage contribution at lvl 25 falls to around 7-8%, but it's free and some HP regen on top - still better than Champion that provides almost nothing (the knockback + debuffs are nice, but at this point you have your mages doing insane CC chains it's barely there to compete) as the static stats can't contribute much. I'd say that Champion for a PC can't compete with the other 3 in any situation (just take it on Alistair/Loghain/Oghren), but it's not terrible on its own. Templar/Reaver can work, sure, but we'll be tanking our early quite hard in exchange for an additional strong CC tool and healing/utility - this can be a stronger late-game dream build in some cases (multiple strong mages/mage boss), but, ironically, these cases also provide us enemies with low armor and medium-high health, which, again, is beneficial for raw damage - you don't have to CC the enemy twice if they die during the first one :) As for the GCM - it's exactly how it was stated in the guide - technically BiS, but the damage gain over the other 2 is barely noticeable (esp. if Berserk with its 20% isn't noticeable as well, as we're talking around 3-5% gains here overall). Still, if you've got the money - sure, go for it!
First time I came across your videos, it definetly broadened my horizons on a playstyle I've already played a lot in the game, definetly gonna watch more, I wanted to add a simple tip in case people are starved for talents/spells at early levels, you can get an extra one with the manual bodhan sells, for some reason his store "resets" after the first time you are at camp and every item you buy from this "first camp" restock afterwards, if you manage your finances carefully you can get one of the tomes (or you know, just sell the "Reaper's Cudgel" and buy them all, if you don't care about it), beware tough, the items sold are gonna dissapear in this reset, you'll never be able to buy it back.
Even if you're pro mage, remember to hate enemy mages. I think the problem with two-handers is that the game doesnt sell it well. Sten can only get 1 specialization and you'll do Orzammar last, giving you little control over Oghren's talents. Add to the issue that two-handed stuff requires more Str and you wont have much to invest on Dex/Con so you need a 2nd warrior to be the aggro-drawing tank. Still, appreciate your content :D and hopefully all ends well. Stay safe out there
Yep, the companion two-handers are two of the most underwhelming ones (in terms of gameplay), both in their AI (as it requires lots of energy management to be effective, which is not possible for scripts to handle at all, only Morrigan is more attention-drawing for this matter) and their progression (as you've already mentioned). To be fair, they can act as tanks quite easily if equipped properly, and one-stat dependency works wonders on their CC capabilities and phys. resistances (Indomitable is great as well, though). The PC warrior - even more so. I'd say that the 2H gameplay is the most satisfying out of the 4 warrior styles (those big swings and numbers) and in terms of efficiency it only lags behind the dual-wielder. Reminds me of Fury and Arms warriors of classic/BC era :) Anyway, thanks for the kind words, I have little to no impact on the situation atm, but we'll see. Hopefully there will still be a way to keep in touch with you all and upload more, otherwise I'll probably just upload them if/when the situation resolves. Take care!
Being dependent on Str is not a con - it is a pro. You don't want Con because it doesn't scale well enough in DAO and you are still getting more hp/stamina passively upon leveling up. More STR is better cause it allows you to wear massive armors earlier and 2H have one of the best attribute modifiers in the game. Additionally by just going 3 STR every level you are achieving one kill per autoattack on regular enemies quite quickly on nightmare. In my current Tempest Mage run on Nightmare (Tempest by Kolcari Wild and Chain Lighting in Tower of Ishal - on my way to getting Storm of Century by level 10 cause Morrigan is lagging behind on Spellpower) my Sten at level 9 is sporting full plate armor (Dragon Blood DLC armor but it is even possible to buy different parts of massive armors by this point of the game) which is 32 armor meaning enemies hit in range of 2-7 dmg... That is without consumables which can lower if further by 5. Also with so much STR already and threaten (I have mod fixes) he generates the most aggro consistently. If you really want tanky 2H you can also go 2 Str / 1 Dex and then with Champions Rally and Warcry/Incense of Awarness you still should have enough to dodge most but not being resistant to flanking kinda hurts. 2 Str / 1 Willpower is like the 3rd best option in theory because of how much animation cancelling with skills you will be doing but in practice game isn't hard enough for you to need so much stamina (+125 stamina by level 25). 2H is also really great with Templar as both Righteous Strike and one of Warrior Class skill allows for basically refunding stamina cost of skills while hitting mages.
Oh, I'm so glad to see you upload ^^. I hope you can be well friend, most of luck out there. Saw the video pop on my subscription page when I've to go to class though oof. I will see it when I come back!
On PC the money making glitch is thus so. Left click then right click (holding both down) on an expensive item in your inventory and drag it to sell and then unclick right then left mouse buttons. Doubles your gold. Buy it back and repeat.
Dweomer and paralysis runes are by far the strongest of the bunch, I'd say. The latter perform noticeably worse on a two-hander (lack of speed and normal attacks), so I'd recommend put Grandmaster and master dweomers first (esp. for the lategame) and fill the rest with either the best of paralysis ones or just expert dweomers. For dual builds paralysis value much higher, so it's common to fill the main hand with 3 of their different grades (they stack) and the off-hand with dweomers. For Awakening it's pretty simple - Intensify all the way is a rule of thumb. There are exceptions that will be covered in the guides, though, stay in touch :)
Finally Content Addendum: everyday I fall to my knees in worship, resting my unworthy gaze upon the floor as I face my soul towards Mecca. I beg my great lord, whose name I dare not speak in vain, to send unto me the words of his prophet. I must be truthful to myself and make the admission of my Greater Jihaad in staying true to this righteous path, fraught with temptation to stray when faced with the long silence punctuating every month. But lo! Thusly arrives the answer to my prayers not in a man or word. Rather it is a vision etched into my mind like the lord's word upon stone; ever prevailing. Mortals like me are not meant to understand the ways of our prophet Memeficient Approach (peace be unto his soul), but I believe he gives us sight of Jannah itself in a way we lessers may understand. Allahu akbar
0:47 , 22:18 this is best :D yeah.. but I muset use sooner unfortunately 40 cunning for IV. stealing in fight and IV. level pressure/speech.. I'll put what's left into strength, about 40 or 60 points and the rest into willpower and I'll choose specializations: Champion and berserker or champion and templar, I don't know if I'll be able to give 250 damage for the heavy hitter award. This will probably only work with berserker and "final blow", I won't be a looter and I have to put 29 attributes into cunning...
IIRC, you have to download and install it (via DAUpdated) manually if you have the Steam version, which is Ultimate Edition. But it's still possible to claim most of promo items there are just by installing them as EA has removed authorization from the smaller packages some time ago. Either that or you can claim them in the Keep even w/ your Steam version
I wish I had found your content sooner because its really high quality. I know that you play more of a vanilla experience, but lets say you had the bird/crow respec mod for DA:O so can respec the companions and yourself whenever you want. Would there be a specific class/build that you would want to play as the PC to complete DA:O and then import into the DLC?
Appreciate the kind words, thanks! As for the question - well, I've played with the crow before and can even consider it semi-vanilla, because Bioware just put it into the base Awakening anyway (even the animation is the same, IIRC). If we plan our build from the character generation, there is only one particular approach that can benefit a lot from a respec - arcane warrior. We can start as a regular mage, work our way up to lvl 7, then swap all the damaging spells for buffs and bump our Willpower for some extra mana if needed. Other approaches don't suffer as much at the earlygame or don't have to pay the price to offset it. Hope that answers your question!
Any plans for a nightmare solo run? I started one a while ago and destroyed all the DLC items and now I am stuck on the first floor of the Tower of Ishal.
Sorry to hear about your situation, were you playing a warrior? The solo nightmare mage runs can be done quite easily (Elem. mage is basically soloing everything by lvl5 w/ anyway), rogue will require some setup changes (ranger FTW), warrior is just bad for this stuff, sadly - can't scale with your face constantly being broken :( For the DA:O, I'm going to expand the basic 4 guides to the Awakening+, first, probably with an insertion of doing the hardest parts w/o any of the DLC items. There have been some requests for the right-clicker builds (archer and arc. warrior mage) as well - so they're on the table too. . But I'll consider covering the first n lvls of this, yes, beats the archer and AW for me, If I'll be able to produce any content at all that is. Difficult times...
It will be covered in the playthrough, yes For now, you can try following this, from the DW warrior guide: czcams.com/video/1-yT9Z2w-2I/video.html It's not that in-depth, but it's something to start with at least
Sure, in this case there are 0 BiS promo-items (except maybe the chest, but there are alternatives). The only problem will be going through quite a rough earlygame, which will be covered in the playthrough. Once we've got past lvl 7-8 and got Wynne, promo content stops playing any major role in our damage/tankyness whatsoever. For pure vanilla (without DLCs) it's gonna be quite rough, but I assume the question was purely about promo-items that you get at the start of a new game.
Many people suggest mauls as the better option for a 2H Warrior. I'm not sure about that. I know about the greater Str modifier and armor penetration rating, and I know that everybody shits on battleaxes and why, but hear me out. Two of the 2H warrior's passives (Stunnung Blows and Destroyer) depend on crits for stuns and -armor. If you play with Morrigan in the party, there's a good chance that she will often freeze the enemies, and here comes the shattering which is only possible on a crit (for a non-mage). Besides, the autoattack is slow and relatively ineffective even on the greatsword, so why don't account for that with a higher critical chance (damage spikes all the way, right? else we would've played DW). Finally, the greataxes look badass, especially on a dwarf. What do you think? You're using an axe in the video, after all.
CGM is the best option there is, sure, barring some DLC items. Maybe even then the best overall. But you don't get it up until very late in the game, I believe, so at least until then you have to survive somehow. On my current playthrough (Nightmare, ban on the use of DLC items except for the +exp ring and two books), after Lothering I went to Denerim, and after that I am going to Redcliffe. Pretty much all of my 45+ gold will go towards buying two talent books for myself and Morrigan (who will be the only mage in my party; I did not take money from Lord Dace, neither did I sell any of the DLC stuff, it's just clogging up the inventory). That means that I am screwed for a good two-hander for a long, long time. Around my level 9 the Chasind Flatblade becomes somewhat obsolete, and the Chasind Crusher was never good to begin with because of the -5 to attack (it suffers enough as it is). I have all tier 3 options in my inventory and I'm not sure which one to pick. I think I will just stick to a greatsword for now (not great, not terrible), but I can honestly see a point in using a battleaxe. To be honest, I am prepared for my ass to be handed over to me. However, if I managed to kill the Blood Mage Leader in Denerim on lvl 8 with strictly vanilla gear, maybe things are not so bad after all.
Two main things working in favor of (mostly) swords and mauls against axes: 1) Lack of good mid-tier and endgame items. For swords there are Yusaris and Ageless (quite easy to get right after Lothering) and there are a couple of budget mauls (Heavy's the most common) plus the Nug Crusher. Barring DBC, there is only Faith's Edge, which comes very late into the game and is quite underwhelming in terms of stats 2) 2 of our skills have a built-in auto-crit (great for shattering) plus there are quite a few ways to get additional critchance - flanking, Precise Strikes, Song of Valor, Bloodthirst, thus diminishing the base critchance effect. Swords have higher basedamage (not by much, but Starfang is also "tier 8" with great bonuses. IIRC, Swipe also maximizes our damage rolls, thus scaling a bit better as well), mauls have better Str scaling, which isn't diminished by that number of things All in all, it basically comes down to DBC vs Starfang vs CGM, which I've covered - they're all pretty close and it comes to personal preference and playstyle (elfroot boosting makes CGM that much better, for instance). Axes can absolutely hold their own against other types, people just generally tend to prefer the path of least resistance (in this case - Starfang, optionally into CGM), which is to be expected, I guess :)
I wouldn't say so, no. It's great for the Arcane Horror fight in elven ruins and... no, that's it, the rest we can easily do w/o ever changing to a ranged weapon :)
![[WR] Dragon Age: Origins any% - 23m05s](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hWqzHJMAVaA/mqdefault.jpg)
Excellent guide. Human Noble is in fact the best equipment wise for 2H as Yellow Howe Knight can drop Heavy Maul (which jas attriute of +2 dmg) and he also has +25 stamina helm in his loot table for those not patient enough in reloading until Mauls drops. I would only dispute perfect striking - at this point of the game I don't find it particulary useful as I don't recall not being able to hit something with Precise Striking on while pumping +3 Atk every level. Also those light chest armors look kinda iffy armor wise given that you already are skippin on some set values.
Did Nightmare 2H Human Noble Woman as Templar run few months ago and it was really nice. Being able to one shot regular enemies with autoattacks is such a convenience. Haste+Power of Blood+Swift Salve also speeds us up considerably and having the insane survivability is really nice. Microing animation cancelling feels good. Warrior discount on fatigue and Death Blow give wiggle room for stamina and modes (which I only activated if I was short of killing enemies in single hit past lvl 10).
Really happy to see this. Only confirmed to me how fun 2H unga bunga looks and taught me a lot for whenever I get around to doing that 2H human noble run I've been thinking. Thanks for uploading this and I hope we'll see more when things are less crazy. Until then just stay safe out there
Two-handed supremacy 😤
Recently started my first DAO playthrough and decided from the start that I wanted to be a 2H berserker style dwarf warrior. Around lvl 8 (lothering, Redcliffe/castleish) I cautiously sought out a spoiler free guide since I knew I was misunderstanding something about making 2H shine, and I wanted to know what that was before progressing much further. Long story short, this guide helped immensely. I'm mostly ignoring the gear section - since I'm going for a slow, immersive first playthrough and not just a loot grab - but the buff and skill animation cancels alone make this guide an insane quality of life upgrade for my playthrough. Thank you.
I"d say berserk isn't very good for 2H. It gives you a flat +8 damage per attack for the entire game. Since 2H attacks are slow, the bonus damage isn't very noticeable, being better suitted for fast attacks (dual wielding).
I'd recommend templar for the powerful anti mage skills and armor and Champion for extra CC.
Also, the Chasind Great Maul is regarded to be better than Starfang. The higher str modifier, armor penetration, stamina and regen make the CGM much better.
Both Templar and Champion (Reaver as well, but to a lesser extent) are almost useless in the early game (Templar can at least regen some energy from the demons/mages, but that's it) for a PC since they're more of a support/utility specs. Berserk, on the other hand, still gives around 25-20% damage boost flat at pre-Starfang lvls (esp. without the Cleaver, thus locking us into T6 weapons w/o any good bonuses), 2 Str for both damage and CC and 10 health as a cherry on top, while both Templar and Champion provide very niche stats for us. It's definitely the strongest earlygame warrior spec, and it's by far the weakest point of a two-handed build, which we should try to offset - especially for a guide aimed at less experienced players, right? Yes, its damage contribution at lvl 25 falls to around 7-8%, but it's free and some HP regen on top - still better than Champion that provides almost nothing (the knockback + debuffs are nice, but at this point you have your mages doing insane CC chains it's barely there to compete) as the static stats can't contribute much. I'd say that Champion for a PC can't compete with the other 3 in any situation (just take it on Alistair/Loghain/Oghren), but it's not terrible on its own.
Templar/Reaver can work, sure, but we'll be tanking our early quite hard in exchange for an additional strong CC tool and healing/utility - this can be a stronger late-game dream build in some cases (multiple strong mages/mage boss), but, ironically, these cases also provide us enemies with low armor and medium-high health, which, again, is beneficial for raw damage - you don't have to CC the enemy twice if they die during the first one :)
As for the GCM - it's exactly how it was stated in the guide - technically BiS, but the damage gain over the other 2 is barely noticeable (esp. if Berserk with its 20% isn't noticeable as well, as we're talking around 3-5% gains here overall). Still, if you've got the money - sure, go for it!
First time I came across your videos, it definetly broadened my horizons on a playstyle I've already played a lot in the game, definetly gonna watch more, I wanted to add a simple tip in case people are starved for talents/spells at early levels, you can get an extra one with the manual bodhan sells, for some reason his store "resets" after the first time you are at camp and every item you buy from this "first camp" restock afterwards, if you manage your finances carefully you can get one of the tomes (or you know, just sell the "Reaper's Cudgel" and buy them all, if you don't care about it), beware tough, the items sold are gonna dissapear in this reset, you'll never be able to buy it back.
the legend has returned
Even if you're pro mage, remember to hate enemy mages. I think the problem with two-handers is that the game doesnt sell it well. Sten can only get 1 specialization and you'll do Orzammar last, giving you little control over Oghren's talents. Add to the issue that two-handed stuff requires more Str and you wont have much to invest on Dex/Con so you need a 2nd warrior to be the aggro-drawing tank.
Still, appreciate your content :D and hopefully all ends well. Stay safe out there
Yep, the companion two-handers are two of the most underwhelming ones (in terms of gameplay), both in their AI (as it requires lots of energy management to be effective, which is not possible for scripts to handle at all, only Morrigan is more attention-drawing for this matter) and their progression (as you've already mentioned). To be fair, they can act as tanks quite easily if equipped properly, and one-stat dependency works wonders on their CC capabilities and phys. resistances (Indomitable is great as well, though). The PC warrior - even more so. I'd say that the 2H gameplay is the most satisfying out of the 4 warrior styles (those big swings and numbers) and in terms of efficiency it only lags behind the dual-wielder. Reminds me of Fury and Arms warriors of classic/BC era :)
Anyway, thanks for the kind words, I have little to no impact on the situation atm, but we'll see. Hopefully there will still be a way to keep in touch with you all and upload more, otherwise I'll probably just upload them if/when the situation resolves. Take care!
Being dependent on Str is not a con - it is a pro. You don't want Con because it doesn't scale well enough in DAO and you are still getting more hp/stamina passively upon leveling up. More STR is better cause it allows you to wear massive armors earlier and 2H have one of the best attribute modifiers in the game. Additionally by just going 3 STR every level you are achieving one kill per autoattack on regular enemies quite quickly on nightmare. In my current Tempest Mage run on Nightmare (Tempest by Kolcari Wild and Chain Lighting in Tower of Ishal - on my way to getting Storm of Century by level 10 cause Morrigan is lagging behind on Spellpower) my Sten at level 9 is sporting full plate armor (Dragon Blood DLC armor but it is even possible to buy different parts of massive armors by this point of the game) which is 32 armor meaning enemies hit in range of 2-7 dmg... That is without consumables which can lower if further by 5. Also with so much STR already and threaten (I have mod fixes) he generates the most aggro consistently.
If you really want tanky 2H you can also go 2 Str / 1 Dex and then with Champions Rally and Warcry/Incense of Awarness you still should have enough to dodge most but not being resistant to flanking kinda hurts. 2 Str / 1 Willpower is like the 3rd best option in theory because of how much animation cancelling with skills you will be doing but in practice game isn't hard enough for you to need so much stamina (+125 stamina by level 25). 2H is also really great with Templar as both Righteous Strike and one of Warrior Class skill allows for basically refunding stamina cost of skills while hitting mages.
Oh, I'm so glad to see you upload ^^. I hope you can be well friend, most of luck out there. Saw the video pop on my subscription page when I've to go to class though oof. I will see it when I come back!
Please stay safe my friend
Glad u still upload, amazing
On PC the money making glitch is thus so. Left click then right click (holding both down) on an expensive item in your inventory and drag it to sell and then unclick right then left mouse buttons. Doubles your gold. Buy it back and repeat.
The returns
Nice! Another awesome video!
W guide. pass the elfroot da'len
Ohh shii how's goin man, glad you uploaded more awesome vid!
what runes would you recommend for the 2H Starfang ( and in general ) ?
Dweomer and paralysis runes are by far the strongest of the bunch, I'd say. The latter perform noticeably worse on a two-hander (lack of speed and normal attacks), so I'd recommend put Grandmaster and master dweomers first (esp. for the lategame) and fill the rest with either the best of paralysis ones or just expert dweomers. For dual builds paralysis value much higher, so it's common to fill the main hand with 3 of their different grades (they stack) and the off-hand with dweomers.
For Awakening it's pretty simple - Intensify all the way is a rule of thumb. There are exceptions that will be covered in the guides, though, stay in touch :)
Finally
Content
Addendum: everyday I fall to my knees in worship, resting my unworthy gaze upon the floor as I face my soul towards Mecca. I beg my great lord, whose name I dare not speak in vain, to send unto me the words of his prophet. I must be truthful to myself and make the admission of my Greater Jihaad in staying true to this righteous path, fraught with temptation to stray when faced with the long silence punctuating every month. But lo! Thusly arrives the answer to my prayers not in a man or word. Rather it is a vision etched into my mind like the lord's word upon stone; ever prevailing. Mortals like me are not meant to understand the ways of our prophet Memeficient Approach (peace be unto his soul), but I believe he gives us sight of Jannah itself in a way we lessers may understand.
Allahu akbar
I love those guides, cool chanel
10|10 video
0:47 , 22:18 this is best :D yeah.. but I muset use sooner unfortunately 40 cunning for IV. stealing in fight and IV. level pressure/speech..
I'll put what's left into strength, about 40 or 60 points and the rest into willpower and I'll choose specializations: Champion and berserker or champion and templar, I don't know if I'll be able to give 250 damage for the heavy hitter award. This will probably only work with berserker and "final blow", I won't be a looter and I have to put 29 attributes into cunning...
Completely off topic but did you get final reason through the collector's edition?
IIRC, you have to download and install it (via DAUpdated) manually if you have the Steam version, which is Ultimate Edition. But it's still possible to claim most of promo items there are just by installing them as EA has removed authorization from the smaller packages some time ago. Either that or you can claim them in the Keep even w/ your Steam version
I wish I had found your content sooner because its really high quality. I know that you play more of a vanilla experience, but lets say you had the bird/crow respec mod for DA:O so can respec the companions and yourself whenever you want. Would there be a specific class/build that you would want to play as the PC to complete DA:O and then import into the DLC?
Appreciate the kind words, thanks!
As for the question - well, I've played with the crow before and can even consider it semi-vanilla, because Bioware just put it into the base Awakening anyway (even the animation is the same, IIRC). If we plan our build from the character generation, there is only one particular approach that can benefit a lot from a respec - arcane warrior. We can start as a regular mage, work our way up to lvl 7, then swap all the damaging spells for buffs and bump our Willpower for some extra mana if needed. Other approaches don't suffer as much at the earlygame or don't have to pay the price to offset it.
Hope that answers your question!
Nice!
Any plans for a nightmare solo run?
I started one a while ago and destroyed all the DLC items and now I am stuck on the first floor of the Tower of Ishal.
Sorry to hear about your situation, were you playing a warrior? The solo nightmare mage runs can be done quite easily (Elem. mage is basically soloing everything by lvl5 w/ anyway), rogue will require some setup changes (ranger FTW), warrior is just bad for this stuff, sadly - can't scale with your face constantly being broken :(
For the DA:O, I'm going to expand the basic 4 guides to the Awakening+, first, probably with an insertion of doing the hardest parts w/o any of the DLC items. There have been some requests for the right-clicker builds (archer and arc. warrior mage) as well - so they're on the table too. . But I'll consider covering the first n lvls of this, yes, beats the archer and AW for me, If I'll be able to produce any content at all that is. Difficult times...
can you make a fade guide to get through it as fast as possible while getting all of the stat boosts?
It will be covered in the playthrough, yes
For now, you can try following this, from the DW warrior guide:
czcams.com/video/1-yT9Z2w-2I/video.html
It's not that in-depth, but it's something to start with at least
Is there a way to achieve this without promotion content?
Sure, in this case there are 0 BiS promo-items (except maybe the chest, but there are alternatives). The only problem will be going through quite a rough earlygame, which will be covered in the playthrough. Once we've got past lvl 7-8 and got Wynne, promo content stops playing any major role in our damage/tankyness whatsoever. For pure vanilla (without DLCs) it's gonna be quite rough, but I assume the question was purely about promo-items that you get at the start of a new game.
Many people suggest mauls as the better option for a 2H Warrior. I'm not sure about that. I know about the greater Str modifier and armor penetration rating, and I know that everybody shits on battleaxes and why, but hear me out. Two of the 2H warrior's passives (Stunnung Blows and Destroyer) depend on crits for stuns and -armor. If you play with Morrigan in the party, there's a good chance that she will often freeze the enemies, and here comes the shattering which is only possible on a crit (for a non-mage). Besides, the autoattack is slow and relatively ineffective even on the greatsword, so why don't account for that with a higher critical chance (damage spikes all the way, right? else we would've played DW). Finally, the greataxes look badass, especially on a dwarf.
What do you think? You're using an axe in the video, after all.
CGM is the best option there is, sure, barring some DLC items. Maybe even then the best overall. But you don't get it up until very late in the game, I believe, so at least until then you have to survive somehow.
On my current playthrough (Nightmare, ban on the use of DLC items except for the +exp ring and two books), after Lothering I went to Denerim, and after that I am going to Redcliffe. Pretty much all of my 45+ gold will go towards buying two talent books for myself and Morrigan (who will be the only mage in my party; I did not take money from Lord Dace, neither did I sell any of the DLC stuff, it's just clogging up the inventory). That means that I am screwed for a good two-hander for a long, long time. Around my level 9 the Chasind Flatblade becomes somewhat obsolete, and the Chasind Crusher was never good to begin with because of the -5 to attack (it suffers enough as it is). I have all tier 3 options in my inventory and I'm not sure which one to pick. I think I will just stick to a greatsword for now (not great, not terrible), but I can honestly see a point in using a battleaxe.
To be honest, I am prepared for my ass to be handed over to me. However, if I managed to kill the Blood Mage Leader in Denerim on lvl 8 with strictly vanilla gear, maybe things are not so bad after all.
Two main things working in favor of (mostly) swords and mauls against axes:
1) Lack of good mid-tier and endgame items. For swords there are Yusaris and Ageless (quite easy to get right after Lothering) and there are a couple of budget mauls (Heavy's the most common) plus the Nug Crusher. Barring DBC, there is only Faith's Edge, which comes very late into the game and is quite underwhelming in terms of stats
2) 2 of our skills have a built-in auto-crit (great for shattering) plus there are quite a few ways to get additional critchance - flanking, Precise Strikes, Song of Valor, Bloodthirst, thus diminishing the base critchance effect. Swords have higher basedamage (not by much, but Starfang is also "tier 8" with great bonuses. IIRC, Swipe also maximizes our damage rolls, thus scaling a bit better as well), mauls have better Str scaling, which isn't diminished by that number of things
All in all, it basically comes down to DBC vs Starfang vs CGM, which I've covered - they're all pretty close and it comes to personal preference and playstyle (elfroot boosting makes CGM that much better, for instance). Axes can absolutely hold their own against other types, people just generally tend to prefer the path of least resistance (in this case - Starfang, optionally into CGM), which is to be expected, I guess :)
Is getting a ranged weapon really necessary?
I wouldn't say so, no. It's great for the Arcane Horror fight in elven ruins and... no, that's it, the rest we can easily do w/o ever changing to a ranged weapon :)
Get your mage to Mana Clash asap to literally one shot magic users.