The Glade 4.0

I've never had any issues like that myself, though maybe it's different depending on the plaform, are you on a console or the pc? I've found that once I set the tactics up right I rarely have to manually control my other party members directly.

Well, I've discovered she stopped doing it if I put her on "Passive." But that's the only way I could get her to stop.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I never ran into that problem so I don't have much to say. I am playing on the PC for what it's worth. My only AI problems are an insistence to change to melee weapons for my archers and mages. I gather they do that when enemies engage closely? But there isn't much option when you're going through a castle or equally tiny area. Not much of a problem compared to Morrigan running off halfway through dungeons though. I can't even fathom what sort of AI would do that.

I guess I'd turn off all AI things for her current setting, then turn them on one by one and see if you can pinpoint what's doing it.

You can prevent them from switching by not giving them melee weapons at all.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yeah I ended up doing that for my mage (who only had them for inventory space reasons at the time anyway) but I found it handy at times to have my archer have a melee option (generally for shattering purposes.) Perhaps it if bugs me enough I'll just go that route in time.

The kinda odd part is that they have a switch of weapon sets as one of the Tactics options, so I'd have assumed weapon sets would never switch unless you instruct it to as part of the Tactics. Ah well.

Noggel -- are they set to ranged behavior, and do they have any instructions (such as one triggered by an "attacked by melee" trigger) that set them to perform a melee only attack?

That was the culprit for me with Leliana; one of her attacks in her default script is melee only.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Hrm. I can play around with it to find out, but I run pretty limited Tactics. For Leliana it's 2 Self: Any to ensure certain persistent abilities are on, followed by an Enemy: Target Using Melee or Ranged Attack set to Crippling Shot, and lastly an Enemy: Lowest Health set to normal ol Attack.

My assumption has been that since Attack doesn't specify ranged vs melee, if an enemy gets right up close she'll switch to melee weapons. There are even cases where this probably works out ok, since her daggers aren't horrible and I've got her Lethality (plus apparently according to this thread the Longbow she gets from a story side quest thing in Denerim isn't all that good, since it's a longbow?) but more often than not I'd prefer her safely out of the melee.

I tried many different things to make them not switch to melee. I put in the tactics to switch to a ranged weapon whenever the character got attacked in melee...so they would pull out their melee weapon, then switch to the ranged weapon right after...only to put it away and pull out their melee weapons and put those away to pull out the ranged weapon and so on. But, with melee archer talent, there's no reason to ever use melee weapons if you are building an archer. All of the active rogue talents can be used with a bow equipped, same with the duelist talents. All of the warrior talents can be used with bows as well...but I'm not sure about some of the specialization skills(from the berserker, at least. They have the one talent that uses up all stamina for one big attack and I'm not sure that works with bows).

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

un-equiping the melee weapons is definitly the way to go, if you go with an archery build and have melee archer I don't really see any reason you would want to switch to melee so just drop them completely and problem solved, that's what I did.

Switching Leliana to "Archer" preset (on the top left of the Tactics screen) and "Ranged" behavior (on the top right) completely solved the switching to melee weapons, for me. Not sure why everyone is having so much trouble. I never had to unequip her daggers at all. Make sure there are no "abilities" set in your tactics screen that require a melee weapons. Most of the rogue talents are fine, though.

Having Leliana set up this way, and using the Dex Hotfix, caused her to be a VERY formidable archer. Unfortunately, my main was also a rogue archer, so it was a bit overkill to have 2 in the group. It's a shame, too, because I really like Leliana.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Meh. My first playthrough, I was a rogue archer and I used Leliana. It let me focus my talents in other areas, allowing Leliana to be my lockpicker and pick pocket. Besides, those bard songs are unbelievably amazing.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I haven't played a ton yet, but I set Leliana's behavior to Ranged and so far it seems to have fixed the issue. I didn't even notice you could set behaviors. :p

Two things...

1) Is this Knight Commander's Plate I got some 1/3 through the game really so friggin awesome? I've "upgraded" to the Juggernaut set but I'm pretty sure it's actually worse... which is sad, cause I kinda like the idea of armor sets. But man. 40% spell resist! Nevermind the other stats, that alone is crazy. Seems weird to get armor so good so early in the game, so maybe I'm seeing something wrong here. Or maybe later armor is also OP so that I still will actually want to upgrade it sometime.

2) Is Shapeshifter specialization worthless? I'll admit I haven't tried it out. I can't imagine giving up the ability to cast stuff, and the Mage class is the one class that doesn't have extra skill points lying around besides.

1.) Yes, the Knight Commander's Plate is very good when facing casters. In a melee heavy fight, though, you may want to switch to something with more AC and defense. Stamina and HP regen is good, too.

There are 2 types of magic resistance. Elemental resistance, which reduces damage from that particular element by a certain percentage. And Spell Resistance, which is a percentage chance to resist a spell completely. It is possible to get 100% spell resistance, and be completely immune to spells, but it is requires specific and expensive equipment. And it causes many of your other stats to suffer. But the benefits are very much worth it.

2.) Yes, shapeshifting is essentially worthless.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Shapeshifting would be far less worthless if the forms were as powerful as the ones you get to use in the Fade. :p

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Or if, you know, they were instant cast and all of your buffs you had on before carried over into your shape shifted form. But, as any persistent mage buffs you have on go away when you take the time to change forms, the form is pretty weak.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

There is a mod that makes the shapeshift happen instantly. I don't know if it allows you to keep your buffs or not, though.

There's also one that adds another line of talents to shapeshifting, all dealing with dragonlings and drake forms. There's even a summon ability, I think.

Might be worth checking out.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

This game is pretty challenging. Not used to so much micromanaging.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

The more you micromanage, the easier the game will be. Really, I stopped using AI scripts half way through the game and just took control of each person individually. It takes a lot longer, but at least you won't have characters doing retarded things when they shouldn't be. Probably a lot more annoying to do that on a console version, though.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I have died more in this game than any RPG i have ever played. It's pretty and fun, but a little frustrating. They rush you with 8 zombies, but you don't have much in the way of crowd control, and damned if they could start you out with a cleric of some kind.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Healers actually worked very well using an AI script. I played most of the game with two archers (myself and Leliana), Alistair "tanking," and Wynne healing. For the most part, the only fights that required me to pay attention by that point were the bosses.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

For those of you interested, there is some new DLC coming!

http://kotaku.com/5436752/return-to-ostagar-with-this-trailer

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"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes."
- George Soros

That looks sexy.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

What is this dex hotfix you speak of?

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The Dude abides.

Well, the game shipped with some screwy things. For example, daggers were supposed to use str and dex to get damage(.5 points of damage per str and .5 points of damage per dex). But, they **** something up along the way and made daggers use 100% str for damage, totally **** over dex based rogues. Most people got around this by getting Lethality(which replaces str for damage with cunning for damage) and pumping up their cunning scores(something worth doing anyway since rogue skills like lockpicking use cunning).

People were also seeing some problems with archery. Basically, archery had about a 6% less hit rate for various reasons and the damage for bows was a little on the low side(compared to other forms of DPS combat[dual wielding and two handed fighting, apparently]), so one of the devs released an unofficial hotfix(PC only) for the game that fixed daggers to split the damage between dex and str instead of straight str and it also tweaked bow damage(10% increase across the board), made short bows use 100% dex for damage(instead of the split) gave all bows 5 attack(which fixed the hit rate descrepency) and increased the range of all ranged weapons, making archery much more attractive and competitive, as it was intended.

One of the downsides to this unofficial patch is that it also affected enemies, making archer based enemies more deadly. They are currently working on a way to implement the archery changes without them affecting the enemies as well(though, I haven't been paying attention to patches for the game, they may have already done this), but the dagger part of the unofficial hot fix has already been made official in an actual patch.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I killed the final boss entirely at range, using Morrigan, Wynne, myself, and Alistair. The first few times I tried to play to my party's strengths, the Dragon just mulched me, eventually. Instead, I moved them all together as a unit with ranged weapons equipped. Every time the dragon launched into the air, I had them run away, turn, and fire. When the dragon landed in the remote areas, we just continued to burn it down.

Saving the mage army for this fight was a *huge* help.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show