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felassan · 2 days ago

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard - unofficial BioWare forums post - 'Gameplay Hot Tips from Dev'

Post under cut for length.

Luke Barrett: "So I've been watching a lot of streams and YT channels and many people are playing on the highest difficulty, not reading tutorials, and then just trying to buttonmash/dodge their way through the combat since if you're good at dodge/block you can muscle your way, painfully, through the beginning hours of the game. Anyway, here are a bunch of random tips from me. Also worth noting almost all of this except things I denote with an * are tutorialized in the game when you encounter them. I'll spoiler wrap it all just in case anyway wants to try to learn this stuff naturally (or not be overwhelmed)"

"BASICS - Light attack base damage is the highest dps (but you can itemize the others to be higher) however it deals reduced damage to Armor (yellow bar) and Barrier (blue bar) - Heavy attacks deal bonus damage to Armor (yellow bar) - Ranged attacks deal bonus to Barrier (blue bar). Super important note: when the text says "RANGED ATTACK" it's specifically the core attack type, not anything that attacks from range. So this is Rogue bow, Warrior shield toss, Mage beam. - Charged attacks deal bonus damage and stagger as well as break Block and certain channeled abilities - [MAGE SPECIFIC] The orb light attacks build charges (Arcane Marks) on enemies, on the 3rd one it converts into an Arcane Bomb which can be popped for bonus damage with the dagger heavy attack"

"ADVANCED - *during Ability, Ultimate, and Potion usage you have iFrames (immune to damage) for the entire duration getting new copies of items automatically upgrades them, unlocking the next item mod (stat property) - items can only rank up as high as your Caretaker shop level - new items you find are automatically ranked up to the Caretaker shop level, this includes things you buy - potion effects are controlled by your equipped belt and can add a wide variety of things later (something something bees ) - *Each ability has 2 ability tags associated with it, this denotes which upgrades and items will modify them. No 2 abilities have the same 2 tags but each tag type has 4 or 5 abilities for it - Staggering enemies allows you to immediately branch into a Takedown which will instakill normal enemies at <30% (some items modify this) - *Staggered enemies are stunned, you have until the bar goes down to use your Takedown which means you can just smash them for free and then use Takedown at the end (the duration of this is modified by difficulty) - *The debuff from Primers are VERY strong and scale well, as above don't feel like you need to detonate immediately if they have lots of health still, it's more optimal to leave it on for awhile and then detonate at the end"

"MATHY - Every ability you unlock grants additional ability damage and stagger (which also applies to ultimates) Every trait you unlock grants additional weapon damage and stagger - *All stat damage is sum'd together, the things that are multiplicative after that are: Crit, Weakpoint, Sunder (primer), Enhanced Damage (buff). This means the buff/debuff/crit are ALWAYS going to be a benefit whereas eventually somethingg like +20% fire damage will actually increase your total damage by less. (I can go further into this if anyone loves damage calc theory) - [ROGUE] *Short bows fire slightly faster and regenerate more but cant be charged as much (and have slightly lower weakpoint base damage) - [WARRIOR] *Round shields deal more damage and can charge up higher, Kite shields deal much more stagger (and usually have defensive properties) I'll add more as I see people struggle with them."

[source]

Extra comments and Q&As:

"Once you get further enemies all get unblockable attacks, and theyll be more likely to use them when you're turtling like that. The 'intro' enemies are stripped down to make it simpler." [source]

User: "Parrying: I'm playing on nightmare and one thing that is difficult to get used to is the parry window. When the UI goes from white to yellow, I'll press the parry button, but it will still be too soon. Is that by design? Am I supposed to hold the parry button?" Luke Barrett: "Depends on the class as they're all slightly different for this but yes the yellow just flashes a specific time before the attack comes down so you'll have to offset a bit on Nightmare. Iirc, you can disable those warning telegraphs in the options somewhere if you want, as its a UI setting not a difficulty setting." [source]

"stats and appearance are disconnected. There is a button in the character sheet that will also hide any overrides you have so you can flip back and forth between default and your selection. (It's a little box beside the larger item equip box)" [source]

User: "For the specialization trees, do you have to unlock the abilities next to them in order to activate the specialization once you reach the level requirement?" Luke Barrett: "Yes, they still require you to connect into them with adjacent skill purchases if that's what you mean. Keep in mind full respec is free so typically what I would recommend is just make a build up until you hit 20 and then respec and redo it for the specialization." [source]

User: "I have a question about a rune that makes your weapons deal cold damage. Is it only true for warrior and rogue weapons? Because it doesn't seem to work with staff and orb/dagger. Also, and i understand that you likely won't be able to answer that, but are there any plans to add presets that let you to save abilities/gear? Enemies' resistances being important means that you need to swap abilities and weapons and it's a bit annoying to do it manually every time." Luke Barrett: "It should be working for Mage too it just doesnt override the actual visuals. As for loadouts, tbh it's something we wanted to provide but it kept getting out of scope so I'm hoping there will be time post-launch for it but no announced plans as of yet, unfortunately." [source] User: "Yeah, i noticed that it applied Chilled status on enemies, but because visuals are the same, i got confused. Another question that i probably should've asked in my original comment is about Elemental Catalyst passive. It gives you bonus damage based on the damage type of your Staff and Orb weapons. Let's say i used rune that makes my weapons deal cold damage. Does it mean that my abilities that deal cold damage will also gain bonus?" Luke Barrett: "Nope, it'll still work. The way the rune actually works on the backend is we intercept the damagetype and just switch it in the calculation so anything relying on the damagetype for checks would still pass. Basically for all purposes except the enemies resistances, the damage is the original type. (Those runes were designed entirely for getting around resists fwiw)" [source]

User: "what's the gameplay design reason behind global cooldowns? Is it to emphasize the player needing to use light and heavy attacks, or to dissuade constant detonator spams?" Luke Barrett: "As a tl;dr it would have required a resource for each follower as well. When I do my stream ask me again and I'll go into greater detail. There are a lot of things I've seen suggested that are better ideas in isolation but a lot of times something is the way it is to support some other goal." [source]

User: "Are there any traits or perks that make charging either ranged or basic attacks go a bit faster? I'm doing a warrior and would love charging up the shield to go a bit faster." Luke Barrett: "For Mage yes (staff heavy specifically) for the other ones no, it's mostly because of interrupt spamming enemies. I would recommend using Time Slow, Taunt, or Invulnerable from companions to make it very easy to get off." [source]

User: "What's the difference between an agile attack and a light attack?" Luke Barrett: "Light attack is simply pressing that button (square on PS or X on Xbox controller). Agile attacks are ones coming from sprint, jump, or roll (regardless of which input you use to attack). So an attack can be both a Light attack and an Agile attack. " [source]

"And yes, all bolded terms should appear in the additional details section. There is also a section in the glossary that lists them all, along with what each of the enemy Enhancements do." [source]

User: "Noticed something possibly weird. I forgot to respec the skills on Neve and took an ability that wasn't upgraded, while removing the upgraded one (Glacial Pace) from the bar. And suddenly she still fires her unslotted ability (Glacial Pace) during combat. It has the upgrade for auto-fire randomly without cooldown. It happens regularly now. Is that a glitch or expected behavior?" Luke Barrett: "This is intentional, yes. Soon as you buy the autofire passive (each companion has one of them) they'll fire it regardless of what they have mapped." [source]

User: "Luke, the Warrior has a trait at the lower left section of the skill tree that allows you to follow-up a fully-powered Charged Attack with a Powerful Finisher attack. However, I can't seem to get the timing down on WHEN I'm supposed to hit X or Y (I'm on xbox) after the Charged Attack. Is it as soon as the final Charged attack hit lands, or soon after? I'm playing 2H warrior btw" Luke Barrett: "I believe I saw a bug fixed for the next patch where it was picking a normal light branch instead of the charged. Try it with the heavy attack but the timing is pretty tight for all those perfect timing ones." [source]

User: "Luke, I had two questions for you: 1) A couple weeks back, I believe before launch, I had asked about what went into the decision regarding global cooldowns. You mentioned that you had another system in mind, but couldn't answer at the time due to the game not having launched. Since we're nearly a year removed now, do you feel open to discussing what you had in mind with cooldowns? 2) A lot of people who like having the ability to use a large number of active abilities weren't too thrilled about Veilguard. At the same time, I've found that most people who fall into this group tend to be mostly concerned about what fewer active abilities means for mages. Since we now have two types of mage-based weapons, could one possible solution be to have the 3 active skills for the Orb & Dagger combo, but the Staff allows you 6+ abilities by sacrificing block or the ranged attack option? Maybe I should be more general here. Is it feasible for one class of weapon to allow for more active abilities than other weapons?" Luke Barrett: "Hey, sorry been on vacation. This will be long but I'll try to be as succinct as possible. To the first one, we actually tried a bunch of different options but ones that felt better for gameplay ended up being even more overhead on the HUD as far as bars and things (which we were already bloated on). I actually did a bunch of gameplay analysis stuff back at the start of Joplin, basically just modding DAI (internally) and assessing feedback. And this will sound obvious when it's spelled out but basically for any ability system it's good to use both a resource and a time based gating system. When you only have cooldowns you typically just spam abilities off cooldown (which is why followers went Global specifically) and when you have resource only you basically just spray your most effective ability over and over. Now, you can design your abilities around these problems, for example if you make all of them situational and only having a "correct" time to use them it will mitigate the issues. But, that assumes your game is complex enough to have that many different scenarios to help the abilities have unique identities. Additionally, and we ran into this early, having a correct way to use things also means there is an incorrect way so a lot of players who didn't quite get it just felt the abilities were flat and useless (I see this constantly about the uniques when people don't understand the synergy intent).As for abilities, yes one could probably mod that in - the hardest part would be the UI for mapping them but still doable with a mod. One big concern about us officially doing it, which we did talk about, is that all those abilities are loaded into memory when you have both sets. So for our minspec systems it would have been too costly on performance. We also had a gameplay guideline that we intentionally never wanted to promote weapon swapping mid combat and that went against it. When I was in charge of that kind of stuff on Joplin waaaay back we had 6 abilities mapped (2 were controlled by your equipped items) and I preferred that but it was a different game and different target markets." [source]

User: "If staff could have 8+ abilities, they could also take my runes. Edit: Also for staff it is very important not to limit mana so much at the beginning of the game. I disliked this decision even more than only having 3 spells because it was often like having no spells and made the game very frustrating at the start." Luke Barrett: "Yes, this was unfortunately a tradeoff for not having to make the Mage abilities do much lower damage and be spammy, especially when we added iFrames to ability use - the goal for abilities is for them all to feel powerful to activate so there was some limiting factors. We actually had the mana start at 0 and build up for awhile to help with that problem but people haaaaated it from an immersion perspective. I agree though, it doesn't feel great at the start from an ability power fantasy perspective, however the entire combat system ramp up hinges on Players learning light, heavy, charged, block attacks. As above, you could theoretically mod in 8 abilities by taking the Rune input over, unhooking block or radial maybe, and making another set of modifier buttons (or make it just KBM only mod)." [source]

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