Ranking Dragon Age by Gameplay (Combat Only)

[Winter]

Just for fun.

I'm going to be a little weird here and rank Inquisition as the best but only if you play as a mage with the following settings.

Fade Step, Lightning Cage, Lightning Chain, Fade Shield (replaced by Reflective Shield Later), Energy Barrage, Mark of the Rift, Spirit Blade and Dispel.

I find this is the overall best setup to play the game as it makes fights fast paced, the abilities have a reasonable cool down period, do enough damage to avoid making fights tedious but aren't game-breakers either.

But other setups often make fights lackluster, I find the other classes to be boring and lacking a new game plus the early levels can be very tedious at first even if you use the Golden Nug and exploits. However, I don't find the grinding that bad in this game and once you get to Skyhold and can use to Copy exploit in your storage unit the game is a lot easier/more fun.

With that said I would say that Veilguard has the overall best gameplay. While the classes all suffer from feeling like the same class just with different animation the fact remains I HAD FUN PLAYING THIS GAME! I enjoyed myself in this game and while I dislike that we can't play as our companions their abilities were also fun to use. I know sometimes I seem to dislike Veilguard I still find it to be a lot of fun and enjoyed myself more then other DA games when it came to just playing the game. And while there's still a bit of grinding it wasn't that bad and I often sought out enemies just to fight them.

Dragon Age 2 I think is... okay. It's not the worst in the series and the animations are really flashy but fights are drawn out way to much with just wave after wave of enemies that it makes me dread playing the game. As a result it's also the worst in terms of grinding as the drawn out fights (and the fact there are so many of them) makes replaying this game a chore that I have no interest in doing again.

Origins for me is the worst because it's so BORING and like Inquisition the game favors playing as a mage but your powers are honestly broken. As soon as you unlock fire storm most enemy groups can be cleared in about minute if not less.

And your early abilities are also pretty busted, most of your attacks have a long range, can work in short range, cover every element and even then can still cause a lot of damage.

And the lack of more flashy animations make it dull to watch which is not helped by how little you can move and the other classes are, frankly, weak and really annoying to work with in the early game IMO.

So my overall ranking in terms of combat is

Veilguard
Inquisition
DA2
Origins

But I'd like to know how you all rank the combat of these games.

[stryke]

I'd rank DA2 below Origins.

Origins is very functional. It does the job, and you can do some neat things with the party control system with what are basically a set of programming commands.

DA2 is just broken. It was entirely possible to build your party in a specific way that would make the boss at the end of the first act entirely impossible. Even turning down the difficulty couldn't sort it due to the way the element system worked, and there was no way to know without using a guide before going down below that the boss might be practically immune to a specific damage type. I had to go back to a save several hours back to respec and then the impossible fight was piss easy on hard difficulty. Also man I hated the wave system, legit awful. I get the idea was to prevent Origins' nuke everyone before they got a chance to respond but it made every fight the same, and a boring drawnout slog that made me dread the combad encounters. I also remember a fight against the leader of the Qunari that basically turned into something out of Benny Hill which made it rather hard to take seriously.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I love the character creation in Veilguard, and I'm only starting out, but I HATE the combat system. I hate hate hate it. I prefer being able to coordinate my attacks from a paused screen, let loose, then coordinate them again. I hate going from standard RPG stuff to timing-based and aim-based mechanics. I miss having a bunch of spells or special abilities to choose from.

[Winter]

I love the character creation in Veilguard, and I'm only starting out, but I HATE the combat system. I hate hate hate it. I prefer being able to coordinate my attacks from a paused screen, let loose, then coordinate them again. I hate going from standard RPG stuff to timing-based and aim-based mechanics. I miss having a bunch of spells or special abilities to choose from.

I get that and I will admit that I miss the more tactical elements from the other games. Would you have preferred it if the combat was more like what we got in Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth? I felt that game had a pretty solid balance between the hack & slash from Kingdom Hearts but a pretty solid tactical system that also allowed us to plan things out.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I don't know because I've never played a Final Fantasy game. 8F

[Winter]

I don't know because I've never played a Final Fantasy game. 8F

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2avXbTFsXBc

[hammerofglass]

I think the most fun I had in combat in this series was playing Assassin in DA2. Just an absolute blender of a glass cannon. Ooh another wave, knife time!

Playing Spellblade in Veilguard is close but so many of the enemies are just damage sponges that it takes some of the fun out of it.

Inquisition was a bit too MMO-grind for my taste, and Origins I would have liked better if they'd gone all the way and just had it be turn based.

Expanding outside of DA I think the best combat Bioware ever did was Jade Empire.

[stryke]

Expanding outside of DA I think the best combat Bioware ever did was Jade Empire.

Oh easily, and it's not even close.

For a much hotter take I prefer the combat in ME1 to ME2 or ME3. Now don't get me wrong the combat in ME1 is incredibly, incredibly flawed. It genuinely wasn't until I was starting my second playthrough that it finally clicked for me. That is obviously really bad, but from there I completed the game five times including twice on Insanity, and a lot of that was just was due to how much I felt rewarded by my mastery over the combat mecahnics.

ME2 technically may have better mechanics, sure, and the Vanguard charge I will concede was fun/satisfying to pull off but the use of totally not ammo, and how every different guns are straight linear upgrades compared to the fun things you could do with ME1 where you can effectively turn a shotgun into a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle into a railgun means that I do genuinely prefer ME1. Also the Mako is amazing, the Mako is love, and if liking a battlecannon with a scope is wrong then I don't want to be right. Sure it'd be nice if they'd actually mentioned it had a scope and I know many players finished the game without ever knowing about it, but if you used it, oh man, it was sweet.

[Winter]

Expanding outside of DA I think the best combat Bioware ever did was Jade Empire.

Oh easily, and it's not even close.

For a much hotter take I prefer the combat in ME1 to ME2 or ME3. Now don't get me wrong the combat in ME1 is incredibly, incredibly flawed. It genuinely wasn't until I was starting my second playthrough that it finally clicked for me. That is obviously really bad, but from there I completed the game five times including twice on Insanity, and a lot of that was just was due to how much I felt rewarded by my mastery over the combat mecahnics.

ME2 technically may have better mechanics, sure, and the Vanguard charge I will concede was fun/satisfying to pull off but the use of totally not ammo, and how every different guns are straight linear upgrades compared to the fun things you could do with ME1 where you can effectively turn a shotgun into a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle into a railgun means that I do genuinely prefer ME1. Also the Mako is amazing, the Mako is love, and if liking a battlecannon with a scope is wrong then I don't want to be right. Sure it'd be nice if they'd actually mentioned it had a scope and I know many players finished the game without ever knowing about it, but if you used it, oh man, it was sweet.

I think Mass Effect: Andromeda's combat is fantastic. The Vanguard Charge is at it's best here as instead of just using it to cause damage it's great for getting out of tight spots or, a personal favorite use, using it on a sniper and then turning around and sniping other enemies only to then V Charge back to the ground and deal with other enemies.

If/When ME5 comes out I hope the gameplay of MEA is retained but with a few improvements. But on the whole really fun, best in Mass Effect IMO.

[Madner Kami]

I think Mass Effect: Andromeda's combat is fantastic. The Vanguard Charge is at it's best here as instead of just using it to cause damage it's great for getting out of tight spots or, a personal favorite use, using it on a sniper and then turning around and sniping other enemies only to then V Charge back to the ground and deal with other enemies.

If/When ME5 comes out I hope the gameplay of MEA is retained but with a few improvements. But on the whole really fun, best in Mass Effect IMO.

Wiser words were never written in this thread. Beyond that, the combatplay and everything surrounding it from Mass Effect 1. Stryke pointed out exactly why. ME2 and ME3 are flat out boring, because you get locked into doing one thing for the entirety of the game, just like in Veilguard, as far as I can see and this is just the worst: Theoretically having a metric arseload of potential, but not realizing or even utilizing it, even in the slightest. DAI was alright, DA2 suffered from fights being just flat out too long and samey. DAO was the best of the DA-series, by a long shot.