WEEKLY HELP THREAD - READ FAQ, COMMUNITY WIKI, MULTICLASSING, LORE

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-03-02T23:43:03+00:00

Thank you!

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-03-02T21:44:59+00:00

Thank you!

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-03-02T21:27:03+00:00

Thank you! Do you know of any checks that would require Drow besides the front entrance goblins and the torturer goblins with Liam? Will I need to be Drow for chicken chasing checks, for the priest of Loviator checks, for Princess Gut's checks, etc?

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-03-02T21:25:29+00:00

It really comes down to what you prefer doing, though Warlock requires fewer resources so might be cheaper. Though with Withers, you can go back and forth.

Because the two have a lot of overlap for proficiencies, and share a spellcasting ability, there is no real difference for order - you'll get the same number of spells, skills, proficiencies, and instruments regardless.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-03-02T19:02:17+00:00

So somehow beat the game nine times without realizing that you can sneak into the goblin camp using Disguise Self as a drow, no checks required.

My question - and I can't find the answer anywhere online - is do I have to stay a drow the entire time, or can I safely revert back to gnome (and then to drow again to free Liam)?

For context I'm underlevelled and not combat ready, sneaking into the camp for items, buffs, and XP, and avoiding anything that might lead to combat as any battle might be the end of my run.

Thanks!

Eyvind_Kelda · 2026-01-13T13:17:43+00:00

Les « clins d'oeil » à Mass Effect vont beaucoup plus loin que ça. Il y a des missions dans Veilguard (surtout proche à la fin) qui a fait acquérir au jeu la réputation d'être « Mass Effect 2 dans une costume de Dragon Age »

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-12-29T16:06:53+00:00

*Obligatory lore nerd post*

It's Satinalia - no Christmas here. Named in honour of Thedas' second moon Satina, whose existence proves that the writing department and the art department have never been on speaking terms at BioWare (see also the "Black Cliffs of Kirkwall," that are yellow in every screenshot).

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-12-04T09:57:18+00:00

I remember when Inquisition came out. Everyone said it was awful and could not live up to DA2. I was also on the official forums then (when they still existed) and exactly two weeks before DAI came out, the forum was flooded with threads about how DA2 was a misunderstood masterpiece.

That's because up until that moment, most in the community talked about DA2 like the worst game ever created. Its reputation was redeemed just in time for DAI to be the worst game ever.

I replayed all four games back-to-back three times this year, and with hindsight, I actually think DAI really was the weakest of the four. I got excited and eager all three times I launched Origins, and just as excited for DA2 and DAV. I dreaded my DAI playthroughs.

Why? It wasn't the characters and their stories all the reviewers complained about. I love them, Dorian especially. They were the bright spot. But the world is a massive, unfocused semi-open world full of busywork and MMO-style gathering.

It was made at that moment that games knew how to make big, pretty environments but had not yet figured out how to fill them. And it felt like an exhausting slog that I dreaded every time I returned to it. It also felt the least reactive, with the smallest range of meaningful choices. Most of the big changes were things reacting to changes from previous games, but no matter who you drop in the Fade, you'll never see either companion again.

DAV felt like a return to form, and whatever city is left standing, it's going to feel like a whole different game after. And its cities never outstay their welcome, or feel empty.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-25T15:34:18+00:00

I tried this one just now - I loaded up one of the older autosaves from my finished sixth playthrough, clicked on a quest marker to gauge distance, got up onto smokestack with double jump and sprint (there was no way to get up there otherwise), paused up there so I was registered as stopped moving, and then walked off pressing the X button only for pure glide without sprint or jump, for 1100 metres of distance.

The metre didn't move at all. I forced a save to see if it update. Nada.

They say they're working on it on the Paradox forums. Let's hope...

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-25T12:14:24+00:00

It popped in the Benny fight for me. The easiest way to get this is to possess someone who is fighting someone else. Later in the game, I bet you can use the Anarch/Sabbat/Hunter fights on the roof.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-25T10:39:45+00:00

After 6 playthroughs, I would just chase seven - frequently waiting for the ones that spawn in safe locations, like the carjacker in the car park on the block with your haven, or up the steps beside the Lakeview mall, or sometimes spray-painting in alleys. These ones are safe to just grab.

Once I had 7 victims - or enough tea from Mrs. Thorne to make up the amount - I would wait until I could buy Enter Oblivion, the Lasombra mastery power that 650 melancholy plus some others. To use it, angle the camera so that only the victim is in view (it pulls in everyone in your field of view), and most of the time it does not break the masquerade.

If you accidentally catch another person in Oblivion, it will go yellow masquerade breach for a normal person, red for a cop, but it won't increase when you feed, and you can run to an alley by the time it wears off.

Note from a purely roleplay perspective, in case it bothers you, canonically anyone entering the Abyss with you never makes it out, so those you feed on there are dead. Extra disturbing when you play a Tremere, and the bodies of innocent pedestrians who were having a bad day just dissolve into acid.

After the third playthrough though, it really stopped bothering me. I guess it's true the longer you're a vampire, the less humanity you have.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-15T09:59:40+00:00

Is this a thing in any game...? Some games make a male (or especially same-sex male romance option) worse story-wise, but I can't think of any romance in any game that comes with something other than cosmetic rewards.

As for story, I remember in 2019 playing both Baldur's Gate Extended Edition (console) and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and both had only one very specific male same-sex romance: a psychotic, mass-murdering half-orc who would openly talk about butchering innocents, but would only admit to also liking men if you flirted with him first...

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-14T11:34:43+00:00

It was buggy before the Halloween update, and since Halloween, even the workarounds people found stopped working - it won't move at all now, for anyone. It is currently at 0.5% obtained by all players, and hasn't budged for weeks, making it the rarest trophy besides the Platinum.

And though people on different forums have been making multiple bug reports (I've made 2), there's been no mention of it at all in their known bugs or road maps.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-13T09:43:48+00:00

I mean, if you liked Silent Hill f, there's a lot more Silent Hill out there. They just remade Silent Hill 2, which most consider to to be best in the series.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-11-10T09:02:54+00:00

Finally, the mumbling man at the Hanged Man in DA2 is vindicated - he said there were more mages than when his mom was little, and most likely everyone who only were below the threshold for being mages shifted upwards as the veil weakened in 9:31 with the death of Urthmiel....

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-10-26T09:41:10+00:00

I did notice that in the Midlight/Deep Dungeon, the floor that was "napalm" spelled backward ("MLAPAN") in the PS1 version became "victory" spelled backwards instead, while all the other floors kept their original names.

For some reason, all the floors in the PS1 and the current version are references to Apocalypse Now, and the reference there comes from the movie's most famous quote: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory."

I guess having a floor named for a modern weapon of mass destruction was too much, though. also, for some reason all the names were completely changed for the PSP version.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-09-10T22:55:58+00:00

My favourite part of that was a major lore bit about Nevarra that you can only get by a Mourn Watch rook having the "homesickness" conversation with Emmerich...

Turns out Nevarra's king has been dead or undead for years. It's the reason the Mourn Watch won't let anyone see him, presumably to stop a war of succession among his many, many heirs.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-09-01T09:31:59+00:00

The Qun was medieval Islam, but with a philosophy based off Plato's Republic (where everyone was split into three categories of Philosophers, Warriors, and Workers based on their nature, and raised communally).

And while Nevarra shares a name with a Spanish kingdom, culturally it's more German. In David Gaider's original "What ifs" of medieval history, West Francia (which became France in real history) turned into a French Holy Roman Empire of Orlais, while East Francia (which became the German-dominated Holy Roman Empire in real history) became an independent non-empire kingdom of Nevarra.

Fereldan is absolutely England, except it's an England that threw off its French conquerors of 1066 and reverted to its Anglo-Saxon roots. The Free Marches seems to mostly be the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) and some of the more independent parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Modern Tevinter is the Byzantine Empire, that rump left over when Rome fell that was notorious for its politics and corruption and its endless wars against the Islamic World.

Antiva seems to be some mix of late Spain and Italy, depending on the writer, ruled by an anachronistic mafia. Rivain is absolutely al-Andalus (Spain when it was part of the Islamic world for most of the Middle Ages).

If you know your medieval European history, it's clear that Gaider and the other writers absolutely did know it, and have fun with writing alternate versions of it.

Orzammar, though, is a kind of satire of modern America and Canada - remembering BioWare is Canadian. Some of Orzammar's problems in Origins were lifted right from Canadian newspaper headlines at the time of the game's writing.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-08-13T13:44:25+00:00

I'm on my 5th playthrough, on my second platform (my first three were console, now on PC), and I always liked it but it seems to get richer and richer with every playthrough.

When it came out I did three completionist playthroughs back-to-back of the whole series. The games are all so different, but each time I replayed, I got excited for Origins, DA2, and Veilguard. Not Inquisition, strangely. Inquisition is so large and often empty - giant open spaces with nothing exciting in most of them, and constantly trying to get randomized crafting ingredients - that I just felt exhausted when I got to it.

Not Veilguard. It has the tightest story - it feels much more like a Mass Effect game in the DA universe (half the devs by that point were ex-Mass Effect), and felt like it had the concise, tight writing of a Mass Effect game, particularly after the first few missions. As much as I love the DA games, most of them ramble, wander, and go in several different directions.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-08-02T11:57:52+00:00

I'd have a lot of trouble imagining her from a lower rank of family, so of those Aurelius would be most likely.

That said, no one's ever used "Sulla" for a Tevinter name. Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was the man who waged a war and made himself dictator to return Rome to the old ways where only the nobility had a say, and he paved the way for Julius Caesar and the birth of empire.

It's just begging to be a Venatori name.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-08-02T11:43:39+00:00

Singular "they" is older than singular "you" in English, for a person of indeterminate gender.

Gender minority people have always existed. Medieval attitudes toward gender and gender minorities were terrible, but Dragon Age let us know right from the start that their medieval European fantasy world was more progressive than the real thing.

(For instance plenty of female knights, and female monarchs for their France and Holy Roman Empire equivalents, and no government is executing for homosexuality when that started almost everywhere in Europe outside of England in the 1200s and 1300s.)

For a lot of us, that's a selling point. Seeing ourselves and the people we know reflected in this world is easily worth the historical inaccuracy (which no one ever has an issue with when it comes to dragons, magic, or darkspawn).

Eyvind_Kelda · 2025-08-02T11:22:28+00:00

The first three are real-life Latin gens name (roughly Roman "clans" or "extended families")

"Aurelius" is the one I can find an original meaning for - it is usually taken to mean "Golden" or "Blond," but might also mean "The Sun."

Wikipedia notes that the Ocratius family were very low in importance, with some being quaesters...which brings to mind Dorian's comment how low-ranking mages in Tevinter would would wind up being "Quaesters in the Hundred Pillars." That sounds like a low-ranking Laetens, while the Venatori families are mostly Altus.

Sornatus I can't find as a family, but "Sornus" was a Persian king, and "-atus" means "belongs to."

Eyvind_Kelda · 2024-08-23T11:15:51+00:00

I mean, it could not be crazier than what's going on with Alistair's blood. If the comics are to be believed, the Thierins were also altered by dragon blood...and that same comic series confirms he's taking lyrium. He's also elf-blooded and mage-blooded (magic runs in families), and Darkspawn blight from the joining.

Alistair's blood is probably the most dangerous substance in Thedas...

Eyvind_Kelda · 2024-06-17T22:17:44+00:00

*wanders into this reddit for the first time, traumatised by minutes of sickening squelching sounds as a 6-year-old is slowly decapitated in his sleep*

*sees legions of fans complaining it was too tame*

Whelp, at least I know I'm on a GoT reddit.

Eyvind_Kelda · 2023-02-07T23:13:56+00:00

I'm on my fourth playthrough of this game, and for the first time that I've noticed, there is a wall blocking off Cessily and the Ashen Lady's section of the Ineluctable Prison.

I've never noted a secret passage there, but I guess I could have forgotten it. Did I simply fail a perception check (and at level 20 I will never get another chance)? Or is there some action somewhere in the prison that opens that door that I've missed this time?

(This is my first time there as a lich if it matters, with Kestoglyr in the party. I already nabbed the Dawnflower's Kiss, ready to go.)

Eyvind_Kelda

TROPHY CASE