Dragula said:
Care to mention any of those so called bad design decisions? Because I really enjoyed combat throughout the game.
Some of them are purely technical issues, like horrible pathfinding. Characters get stuck b/w objects, in doorways, sometimes in the ground. In battle when you give an order, they always take the longest possible route. Positioning in combat is pretty bad too, sometimes characters "overlap", get stuck in each other and just stand around while the enemy is pounding even though you gave orders. Near-death characters favour auto-attack over retreat orders, but NEVER auto-attack after knockdown/stun. This bad party AI gets pretty annoying in hard battles. Also, characters take a lot longer than enemies to process orders. In battles against mages, they usually get a spell in even before your characters draw weapons. There's no way to cancel a spell or ability that's on auto-cast, you still lose mana/stamina etc etc.
In terms of design decisions, I'd say lack of reach is quite a problem, given how crowded the fights can get. Two-handers def. should have reach. A lack of spears appalls as well.
Someone mentioned this, but most (if not all) important battles start with dialogue, so you're forced to have characters in a most disadvantageous position. Traps are also pretty useless since you can't set them up beforehand.
Some battles aren't set up very well. They seem to favour quantity over quality. Boss monsters (orange) are basically high-level lots of HP versions of plain enemies a lot of the time, but not all that special or different in terms of what they do. Also, fights of 4-on-30 and up in completely open space isn't that great of an idea, especially if half of those are archers with scattershot. I appreciate challenging, don't get me wrong, but there have to be reasonable ways of resolving those conflicts. The balance is pretty bad and illogical - it takes far less effort to down an orange Revenant than it does a band of thugs.
Also, I'm in general a bit disappointed over the small number of race and class choices, as well as weapon choices. I don't like how the special classes are set up either - to get them you have to do silly quests rather than develop your characters a certain way. That also makes little sense logically.
That said, I still derive some enjoyment from battles and I like the game in general, but the aforementioned things tend to be horribly frustrating at times. Bioware presumably having put so much effort and resources in the game, and the game being combat-centered, there's really little excuse for them not paying attention to little things like this. The game just feels clunky at times.
Or become a special class without fitting its ideology? (You can be bee's knees the whole game, then do a single quest in an "evil way" and still be able to use an evil spec. - take Blood mage, the quest doesn't even affect the ending or party members' reaction.) Oh, not to mention, it still only takes a few minutes and an ability point, that's it; there's not actual "training" involved.
