Yeah, you have to pay the NPC back double.

I was actually over 70 gold until I bought the act 1 ability tome.

Tempting, but I don't think i'd be able to make 20 gold back.

I've spent quite a bit on potions. : /

Yeah, this may be the first RPG where I've actually used potions. I always ignored them in the past. Never needed them.

It really helped once I got Anders.

I finally did Night Lies last night. That may be one of the worst encounters in Act 1. At least pre Deep Roads. I've already run into one really nasty something I won't spoil in there.

Night lies was pretty tough but I only wiped once. It's not as tough now that I kinda have the hang of what I want to do each fight - Aveline runs in, taunts, stonewall, and then focus fire on each trash mob until you isolate the boss type mob.

And I used potions in DA:O quite a bit.

The problem for me was that there were about a billion mobs and no space to really set up the fight. Which is bad for my party setup (me mage plus anders, varric and aveline). Plus there was one more wave than I expected. I actually took the Captain down early, but there were two lieutenant-y guys that were both chugging potions at the end of the fight, so it just dragged on and on.

Anders is great at healing, but he's like a death magnet.

Do you use Panacea with him? I use it but noticed you had to be fairly close for it to take effect.

My main party now is Hawke (Rogue), Aveline, Anders and Merril. Merril is used mainly for crowd control and hex of torment, Anders for healing.

I don't usually use it unless it's a situation where he absolutely has to heal. And yeah, you have to be right on top of him.

I'm going to start working on damaging skills with him once I get the party upgrade for Arcane Shield. He's got the Friend buff now, which is something like 10% to all his damage.

Can you ever lose the friend buff?

For instance, if I unlock the buff and then do something Aveline doesn't like, does she lose it?

I don't know.

I actually just hit full Friend with Aveline (achievement unlock...). She's had the buff since very early in the game.

Act of Mercy got me over the buff line (whatever it is) with both Anders and Varric. I could try and get a negative reaction out of one of them, see if it drops. Won't be for another 10 or 12 hours though, I'm working.

Excellence.

Just got to the Primeval Thaig. This is really getting awesome.

that quest on the coast called Tal Valshoth or something really owned me the first time.

it's like the whole cavern is just full of them horn heads. :cuss:

The last fight is pretty tough. Stay away from the mages thunderballs or whatever they are called.

yea, it was easy until the last fight. Then i got careless and went walking in like i owned the place.

1st wave was just grunts but it made me use all my AOE attacks then came the leader with mages behind. Dang lightening attack by mages drop the health of my entire party by half. Then more archer joined it.

goodnight

wouldn't be a good game if you didn't get owned every so often though. :D

Yeah, I thought "how the **** am I going to win this" at one point. Then I realized you can simply run away from those spells he launches, they are pretty slow.

Small patch incoming for PC players. Nothing major. I did have a problem with the game asking me for stuff on my A:\ drive (which I don't have)

-Fixed save game issues on single core machines
-Fixed game asking for non-existent drives
-Fixed release control issues where some players were unable to unlock correctly
-Fixed a Steam-specific issue related to VO not playing after switching languages