Isabela and Varric have some hilarious dialogues, and I love Varric ripping on Carver. Isabela and Varric are easily the two best characters, and they're both awesome in combat too, provided you pump Isabela with some willpower so she can actually last through a decent fight without guzzling stamina draughts.
Did anyone find playing a mage boring? I absolutely adored playing my Archer on Hard, even the Arishok fight solo wasn't very difficult, just time consuming and involving lots of running away when my decoy ability and stealth skills were cooling down. With the awesome longbow you get pretty much right at the start of Act 3, I was pulling off 500 hp with a normal hit, over 1k with criticals (and critical chance was around 85%), not to mention the way-overpowered Assassinate skill (add in Petrify and Death Hex and the damage is unbelievable).
But with mage I just ended up spamming a lot of the same spells, and didn't really pack that much of a wallop. I was a Primal/Force mage with a little bit of Entropy (for Horror and the Hexes), so I could at least halt or immobilise every enemy in its tracks at a whim (even the Rock Wraith), but it was still rather boring. Sure, with my Archer it was a lot of auto-attacking, but at least I was still pretty powerful even without my abilities. Hell, you could ignore the Archer skills completely and still be pretty decent. Is there a funner combination to try? Haven't done a Blood Mage yet, that might be interesting. I'd be able to wear warrior armor too I think, sort of like an Arcane Warrior without a sword.
I'm starting to get a little bored with this though, since I've played through it once with an Archer and 2/3rds of the way with a mage, but might give 2handed warrior a whirl. Looks ability-heavy like the mage, since your regular attack is pretty laughable, even though it can hit multiples. Or maybe I'm not seeing the potential (more likely).
Oh, was anyone disappointed with the enemy mages in this game? They were so infrequent, and then most of the time they just turned into boring abominations. Granted, they could tear shit up if you left them alone, but they generally don't last long enough to be any real threat. Kind of like archers as well.
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