New mod ideas (take a look!)

[macepalframan]

I have a few ideas for mods that I have thought of, and found in prior games and such. There are many terrific modders out there who maybe would be interested in taking a shot at helping some of these ideas come to fruition. I'd appreciate comments and ideas, see if any of these spark interests in some players or modders. :)

 

Rifts - Faster rift closure. A system where the more rifts you close, the shorter, and eventually instant, (perhaps annulling the cutscene of the typical 7 second rift closure every single time) perhaps milestones at 5 10 20 30 40 50. A veteran and master of the rift, once you are able to close the breach, one would imagine tiny rifts would no longer be an issue for the inquisitor, especially after the main storyline is finished. This is just something that I found annoying, especially after level 20 on some tough characters, when you could literally wipe both waves of demons in quicker time than the cutscene to close these rifts.

 

Skills - All the dragon age prequels have a way to obtain so many more talents/skill points, either via the console added skill points or adding the ability codes manually. This sometimes gets out of hand, but there are always so many goodies, and you can never get half as many as you'd like to make a wrecking squad. It would be a nice option is perhaps every second level, you received double the amount of skill points. Or maybe every third/fourth/fifth, seeing as there is a complete lack of amulet's of power for your main character the inquisitor. I've always liked this system so you could have an even greater reason to push for maximum amount of experience, and level up. It would also be great if along the same lines, the inquisitor could gain 2 specializations instead of 1, its very limiting to what sort of character you can become, and in all the prior games you could have a minimum of 2 advanced specializations that allowed for some deadly combinations.

 

Party - Coming from a line of RPG's, sometimes its fun to get diverse, and there is only so much you can do with the limited four party members. I always preferred 6, just like in many massive multiplayers online games where that is the limit for parties or groups. Breaking this limit would be a welcome function, allowing you to create a more diverse group, employ more of your characters and bond with more at one time. In original dragon age there is a console command for this, and I believe in DA2 as well. This would be a great mod.

 

Tactics - Okay, I have no idea what bio-ware was thinking with the development of Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition. They had a REMARKABLE tactics system in Dragon Age Origins / Awakening, and then it turned to utter crap upon hitting the two sequels. This whole (allow the unintelligent AI to prefer and choose its own abilities at will) is terrible. More often then not, they break crowd-control, exploit the wrong cross class combinations, area of effect when not allowed, and hit the wrong targets constantly. Sure it increases the need to run the tactical camera mode, but not all of us want to run the game in slow motion dictating what every single character must do and when. In my opinion, DAO was incredibly superior in this fashion, when you could mold your party members to play the way YOU WOULD if you were playing them solo. These current tactics systems need to go, and be replaced with the old way, where you can set target types for each party member, set stimuli to certain events, cross-class combinations, who to defend or protect and which priority targets for each character. Even the settings that we would often take for granted, tanks hit the biggest baddest mobs, and archers knock off the distant and/or weakened targets so everyone doesn't run around in confusion. I mean, the Inquisition should be far more organized and efficient than it is watching the Inquisitor's personal handpicked group.

 

Heal - Removing the majority of heal spells was an annoying turn, I got accustomed to the limit on potions, that part was fine; But to remove healing magic from MAGES, which was traced back even to the lore of the prior games, and even NPC's are able to heal at certain points in the game, makes absolutely no sense. The power of the rift at your fingertips, an Inquisitor mage at the very least should get a single-target medium duration cooldown heal, or heal over time ability that doesn't require knight-enchanter specialization. This needs to be rectified, leave potion cap to keep the game challenging, but please oh please, lets get some sub-par mage heals, otherwise these mages are blemishes to their own kind.

 

Speed/movement - Haste was great, it changed attack speed, and movement speed. Running across the MASSIVE maps of DAI is very frustrating at times, especially because the mounts are so incredibly slow as well, and prevent you from grabbing resources and loot on the fly. Mages should be able to cast a speed spell perhaps in a spell-line similar to the "creation" line from DA2, or something from DAO/DAA. At the very least, it would be awesome if you could sprint on foot like in every single game imaginable, at the cost of stamina/(mana for mages), I hope I wasn't the only one hammering that button down from the key-mapping only to find out later all it does is speed up your putting away of your weapon, and sprint while on a mount (at a very pitiful rate even though wind is clearly whooshing by you).

 

Gameplay - Theres several mods that increase difficulty for enemies by giving them larger health pools or heavier damage, but thats all predictable stuff. The amount of time some modders dedicated to teaching monsters on skyrim, tactics, was inspirational. I have no doubts something similar could be applied to DAI, make the game more difficult by allowing enemies to attack in a more efficient manner, focusing certain targets, backing away from area of effect attacks, fleeing when clearly overwhelmed. The "mad darkspawn engage unto death" tactic, can only work so many times, and by the time you fight an intelligent and organzied force such as the venatori, it would be great if they fought with the same finesse they apply in all their little schemes.

 

- It was unfortunate to give the dual-wielding line away to rogues only, and to limit their weaponry to simply daggers and such. I would like to see fighters be able to brawl with dual-wield again, and not be limited to daggers. There are so many beautifully designed one-handed weapons, some of which would not be much heavier than daggers, that would be a great alternative to dual-wield, for rogues and fighters alike. I can imagine with a little tinkering it wouldnt be that difficult to modify the rogue dual-wield line to be available for fighters, while removing the backstab and other perks that are clearly stealth related.

 

- Along the topic of specialization, there are many old ones that were forgotten that would make for awesome mods, or perhaps DLC later on, to expand on the limitations set in DAI's class system. A return of fighters (spirit warriors, berserkers, guardians) rogues (hunters, duelist, bard, maybe a heavy archer like Sebastien from DA2, or something archer friendly) or mages (blood mage{i mean come on, they are constantly accused of such and yet a master of the fade the inquisitor doesn't even have a sliver of blood magic at his disposal} keeper, for those wonderful elves who like they're nature magic, battle-mage {like the knight-enchant but more elemental heavy than melee/fade} and good old spirit healer {very support heavy, moreso than knight-enchanter possibly without any damage in the line})

[mumblyum]

I would love to see even just a few of these ideas put into play... the current AI for dai is TERRIBLE.

 

There absolutely needs to be a hotbar mod out there that will allow the use of at least 1-2 more skills... really thats all you need. (especially with focus skills)