Dragon Age 2 Tank Tactics

I will preface this post by saying that I played through Dragon Age 2 as a 2-handed Warrior on the hardest difficulty, so my experiences come from that style of play. With that being said, everything I saw regarding Aveline can easily be applied to you if you choose to be your party’s tank.

The first advice I can give you is that for the first third of the game or so a tank is absolutely unnecessary for a couple reasons. So if your grand plan was to be the tank, learn to love the Black Emporium.

First off, there are no mobs that actually warrant a character specced as a tank in the first half of the game or so. While you might come across groups with multiple assassins, there is nothing an early game tank could do to survive double Ambush anyways.

As a tip when dealing with Rogues, until you actually switch to bringing a tank with you, I highly recommend two Mages to help survive. I am sure some of you are thinking “BehemothDan, Mages? Really? You must be out of your gorram mind.”

By speccing your Mages into Rock Armor, you can cast it on your two softest characters (one usually being your healer) as Assassins vanish to help mitigate damage when the pop back out to kill someone.

In my experience, a single assassin will not Vanish/Ambush when they are the only mob left.

Secondly, and this is the big reason to me, early game tanks lack enough talents and abilities to make them successful at mitigating damage. Bringing a tank along at anytime before the conclusion of Act I ends up being nothing more than terrible DPS. I feel that once you hit level 11 to 12 you actually end up with enough talents to make a tank a viable party option.

You will find that your tank is going to generate fairly terrible threat in comparison to what your DPS classes are putting out. Luckily, in most packs of mobs, there is only one or two mobs that actually need to be tanked.

These are usually some type of Lieutenant or unique demon. This allows you to stick your tank on any named characters or assassins. You can then take your DPS and mop up the predictable two to three waves of trash mobs you can expect in every fight.

By the time you clear out the garbage, your tank should have had sufficient time to build up threat on whatever major enemy you are currently dealing with. I specced Aveline with little regard to how much damage she was able to put out, in favor of sheer survivability.

In fact it worked so well that during the last boss encounter I could leave her un-managed for minutes at a time while I dealt with adds. I didn’t need her to run out of AoE or constantly watch her health. She shrugged damage off like a champ.

As I reached higher levels and felt comfortable with my survival, Aveline’s survival, and Anders’ (who was my healer) survival, I ended up dropping Merrill from my group composition and brought in Varric for his awesome damage output. Even constantly starved on energy he was like a dwarven machine gun, and was still particularly effective once you were able to get the talent that lets him do tons more damage when the target is attacking someone else.

Anders kept up personal defense talents, as he had to heal so infrequently that even reserving 70% of his possible mana pool was not a big deal and never prevented me from being able to heal, especially while I was using the Warrior shout that allowed mana and energy regeneration for my party or using the occasional potion.

I suppose it is also worth talking about which abilities I chose for Aveline as well that let her absorb so much damage.

As you can see, I all but ignored any stat that wasn’t Strength or Constitution. Only much later in the game did I drop points in Willpower, after I had specced into so many sustained abilities that I was unable to cast her initial Taunt or Shield Bash.

It’s pretty apparent from this overview what the talents that I felt were most crucial in allowing Aveline to absorb the most damage as possible. “Weapon and Shield” and “Defender” is where you will find the bulk of your mitigation talents. In my opinion the stars of the two trees are Safeguard and and Resilience.

Nothing is more annoying than fighting a mob like a giant spider and finding yourself unable to keep your tank on their feet due to constant knock down effects. This is where Resilience proves to be a huge boon against those kinds of mobs.

Safeguard almost doesn’t need explaining as the removal of critical hits allows you to predict the damage your tank will receive. Even Assassin Ambushes are a lot less scary.

All the other talents provide some type of defensive bonus, and if they don’t I usually only selected them if they were a required choice in order to progress further down the ability tree.

Choosing to either make Aveline your Rival or your Friend both provide you with a great benefit. You either end up with extra damage transfer away from Hawke or Aveline ends up with some more damage resistance. But the end of the tree is the real highlight.

A flat 15% damage resistance really ends up being noticeable later on in the game. Definitely do not over look this talent as I feel it trumps anything else available in this tree.

Finally, Bellow is that crucial snap aggro in most situations allowing Aveline to grab all nearby mobs initially while you clean them up. It will also stick any boss-style mobs on to her, letting her build up her slow threat until you are ready to focus your attention on the big baddie at hand.

As I stated, Aveline is going to do near nothing in terms of damage output, but alternatively, once her auras are active, she requires very little attention from you at all. If you want to see Aveline’s damage mitigation in action, I recorded a short video last night. So before you watch I must warn you:

MASSIVE SPOILERS APPEAR BELOW THIS LINE

Since I didn’t take a tank to the Deep Roads and I decided to best the Arashok in single combat, the next best situation to show off how little damage Aveline takes with my talent choices is the final boss encounter of the game.

During this encounter, I let Aveline tank the boss while the entire party dealt with the large number of adds that spawn. The video is actually phase 1 and 3 because the second phase I never actually needed a tank thanks to the stagger effect. So obviously Aveline didn’t need to be healed then either. Enjoy!