14 DAY TRIAL // Combat in Dragon Age 2 has been overhauled, as opposed to the same system in its predecessor, Dragon Age: Origins, with BioWare, its developer, putting an emphasis on speed and fluidity.
Another important aspect in the combat of the new role-playing game is the ability to perform cross class combos.
These require the game's three classes, warrior, rogue and mage, to work together and use their powers to set up massively damaging moves, sometimes inflicting over 600% more damage than normal.
While some players may not notice this nifty little feature, towards the end of the game, it becomes an imperative to set your team to work together in order to solve the challenging fights ahead of you.
If you got used to playing on your own and letting your companions be controlled by the computer, you'll be spending a lot of time engaged in fights while tearing away at the enemies that seem to have an unlimited amount of health.
This forces you to go into the special tactics menu, which has also seen massive improvements over the one in the first game, and set your companions to take advantage of special conditions and use the right moves, powers or talents.
Each class has special attacks that can leave an opponent in one of three states: staggered, if attacked by a warrior, disoriented, if attacked by a rogue, or brittle, if attacked by a mage.
When enemies enter one of these three states, the other two classes can use special attacks that deal bonus damage.
For example, I was playing as a warrior, and most of my attacks left enemies staggered. I then set my rogues to use abilities like Explosive Strike, while mages were set to unleash Chain Lightening.
As such, after two strikes from my sword and the attacks of my companions, even the most powerful of enemies or bosses were killed.
If you still haven't gotten around to using these cross class combos, then start crunching numbers and go into the tactics menus, as they're essential if you don't want your regular fights to last a huge amount of time.