awwww.... this playthrough went so fast! why did the adventure have to end so quickly!?!? when was it when i finished the game a first time? 17th May, lol. which means i completed this round in around 2 weeks only.

wad i have to say is, this 2nd playthrough was even easier than my first. i played a melee dps rogue that went duelist first then assassin, but i only learnt the first skill of duelist... cos i din wna waste points in the more defensive nature of the 2nd and 3rd skill in the duelist chain, or rather, they were just not as bloody as the other skills in the dual weap talents like riposte, flurry and the likes. having said that, i find myself investing on lots of passive skills early on in the game, and even until lvl 15, i din have the riposte skill (which was a big mistake cos riposte rocks hell with coup de grace). i mainly used flurry and dual weap sweep till i got my riposte... boring, but dual dagger rogues do much more damage than i expect. now i love rogues more than mages.

so why was this playthrough so much faster than when i was a mage? i tot abt it and came to a conclusion: when i was a mage i was the only dpser, as i rly dunno how to tacticalise archers (leliana) into a high dps monster. so leliana in the 1st play was just a lockpicker and injury volunteer. but in this 2nd play, i out-dpsed my dps morrigan.. so that makes 2 dps monsters. my dagger rogue din shine until i reached Orzammar though (i did the dwarf arc last among the 3 main quests). i was hitting 20+ normal and 40+ for crit/backstab and considering 2x weapons and the fast attack speed of daggers, its nice for lvl 15. or was it 16 i forgot. then i saved hard to 148 sov and got my Rose's Thorn and walalala, my damage nearly doubled. and then i discovered the wonder and monstrosity of Momentum. so simply put, i was attacking faster than fast and doing 40+ to 70+ damage per hit. lol.

so the main cause of this fast and easy play was due to the sheer speed i dove in and ended battles. really. with my mage team i try 5 times also fail to kill a revanant in the dalish forest at around level 15, but with my rogue i owned all the revanants at level 12. every battle was fast and looked so easy. i even defeated the High Dragon (the one u have to sound the horn at the top of the mountains before he will fight you) at level 13, with beginner equips on my chars. with this i mean alistair having oathkeeper and templar armor, me having daggers that add attack but not damage =.= BUT, there are still a few battles that went easier with my mage team, like battle with flemeth. holy crap, i took so long to down it cos of her armor. the catch is that to kill her u cant bring morrigan, so i had no winter grasp and wadeva nuke, and i had to bring my next strongest ally, a leliana that does 1-2 damage every few seconds. lesson learnt: dragons are vegetables to mages with winter grasp, while mages are paper to us dagger rogues.

my mage only got to lvl 17 i tink by the end of the game, but now my rogue is at 21.. mainly because of the amount of extra quests i did and looked up. and its fun to complete all these quests since everything is so easily chopped up, and we get nice rewards sometimes. like the Juggernaut set u get after killing all the revanants, omg. and the imba keening sword and fade wall for killing Gaxkang. this Gaxkang is one hell of a monster, cos he replaced High Dragon as most powerful enemy slain in personal heroic achivements. due to the fade wall only dropping more frequently at higher difficulty, i tried to change difficulty before dealing the killing blow. 1st two times failed, then succeeded! that was when i realise i forgot to set back to normal difficulty and fought it from start at nightmare mode lol. yes even nightmare elite bosses are choppable by my Rose's Thorn :) in every try Gaxkang was slain by me, so imagine the gheyness of my dps.

i tried having wynne melee also :D since i got a sword called ... dunno wad, but is restricted to arcane warriors. but its lame la, cos the most powerful foe wynne slain by the end of the game was still only a Hurlock Emmisary o.o

i tried romancing with everyone possible, morrigan, leliana, zevran and isabella lol. i failed at morrigan cos i slept with leliana beforehand, causing morrigan to permanently be A FRIEND, although her spproval is 100. stubborn apostate. and after sleeping with zevran leliana got jealous and asked me to choose between them... and after choosing to be straight zevran broke up with me and -26 approval. wlao. i shall try the 3/4-some thing with isabella next time. this time i forgot to bring the possible party candidates like a hardened leliana and zevran, wad a waste :/

since it was a 2nd playthrough, i naturally ignored walkthroughs, and just dove into everything, with much success. once we noe the battle mechanics better after experience, battles are no longer as scary as the walkthrough writers describe. they are actually easy at normal difficulty, with a healer somemore.

what needs to be done the next playthrough would be to unlock more achievements haha. cos siding with one particular side always brings more approval, eg. siding with caridin instead of branka, so i couldnt persuade myself this time round to do something different. haiz. the game is seriously very complicated and flexible. i found it necessary to do something different with my skill builds next time as well. i had 2 dps mages across all plays and both are primal, with close to nothing in entropy and spirit. and twice using alistair, he was always a sword and shield tank.. i believe the game can bring more entertainment la, maybe we shld try not using a healer, or use 3 mages, one as tank by becoming arcane warrior or things like that. hmm..

on a side note, they should really cut short the ogre-slaying animation.. it takes more than 5 seconds, rendering my rogue useless and he does stunts to slay the ogre that is already dead but pretends not to. its about the same animation as slaying a dragon, but with dragons there's nothing more to fight after that. while defending the alienage during the last fight, i got so frequently caught up with this animation that i lost the fight altogether.. lame. the rogue jumps and slays the ogre, doing nice stunts and wasting time while my morrigan gets slaughtered by darkspawn and my wynne busy drinking lyrium pots, but gets slapped to death by the ogre while trying to revive poor morrigan..

for now, it wont be another playthrough right away, since i got the awakening expansion a few days ago. i tried the first quest, and gained nearly a level of experience! monsters here are still too easy for my rogue (3 hit kill stuff, which takes like 1 sec) and i din even bother adding talent points for mhairi cos i can basically solo the whole map. and interesting items start to appear like stamina pots. its good that i have 250 sovereigns and all of my hard-earned legendary gear from origins (i stripped my allies off every piece of armor before importing my PC. so back at camp i walk around people who only wear undies), but seriously some of the items that i got at this point since starting the expansion are already quite imba. and wth is runecrafting.. i'll have to read up more from my awakening guidebook so in the meantime, have fun :D