45User Rating: 4 out of 5

Lead the Inquisition to hunt down the agents of chaos. The choices you make will forever change the Dragon Age. Explore a vast fantasy world on the brink of catastrophe in Dragon Age™: Inquisition, a next-generation action RPG in which your choices shape and drive the experience.

Review title of Girthy Big MacGreat Story, Disappointing Side Narratives

The main story is great, it has ALMOST everything we've come to expect from a BioWare game: great lore, climactic events, and meaningful characters. However, there are not nearly as many meaningful choices in the game, unlike Origins which had PLENTY. Many choices only add operations on the war table, which give the game a larger sense of scale, but make the choices seem nonessential. Grinding through huge areas is fun at first, but quickly becomes a chore with the uninteresting side plots. The only reason I kept exploring was to do companion quests and to kill dragons (which are spectacular boss fights). The characters are very strong, with only a couple of weak characters. Romance in this game is pretty disappointing, the relationships were great, but as a heterosexual male player, there only two characters to pursue... both still good though. Combat is a lot less tactical then Origins, but more action oriented. Overall, a great improvement to DA2, but not perfect. Still recommend.

In a world like Dragon Age, you can expect it to contain some huge and deadly Dragons. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you can find 10 of these dragons roaming the wilds, and and all of them are slightly different, and will require planning, powerful companions, and the right weapons and armor.

Dragons[edit]

One quick note: If you happen to play a mage (or take Vivienne in your party), at higher levels the Knight Enchanter specialization can pretty much solo all the dragons of the game. See the specializations page for more details on how to correctly build a Knight EnchanterMage.

How to Kill a Dragon
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While each dragon is different, the great beasts all behave in a similar manner. For example, the first Dragon you can come across in the game is a Fereldan Frostback. The Frostback will use fire attacks and flee to nearby rock bluffs and summon smaller Dragonlings to occupy The Inquisitor. The Gamordan Stormrider (the dragon found in the Exalted Plains) uses electric attacks and will fly around and electrify puddles around The Inquisitor. In the subsequent pages you can learn about where all ten dragons are located and how to take them all down and obtain their treasure! Yes, they have treasure.

We'll go into some of the specifics of the abilities that each has (and below shows what each dragon has insofar as these specific abilities).

Tail Swipe - Simple swipe for fairly low damage + knockdown when too much threat is being generated behind them.

Claw attacks - Similarly, pretty simple swipes for fairly low damage when threat is being generated along the sides.

Long distance breath - When no one is in melee range or your ranged character has generated a ton of threat they will fire whatever elemental type (fire, ice or lightning) at said character. Massive damage and an elemental effect. You should never, ever be getting hit by this. They also use this when they are flying overhead.

Close distance breath - This is more strafing fire done from the head directly in front of it. You can actually dodge this nearly all the time (and in fact, the AI does a surprisingly good job of doing so) simply by running toward the dragon's underbelly. The damage is meaningful if you miss it and elemental effects hit you alongside it.

Wind vortex - This is signaled by the dragon stretching its wings for a moment before flapping them. Importantly this draws anyone not in melee range toward the dragon while doing massive damage. It is almost impossible for a ranged character to be attacking and not be pulled by this and will almost always necessitate the use of a potion. As such, it is key to keep ranged characters in melee range of the dragon (ideally around the sides/back) to avoid taking any damage from this ability. The other way to avoid it with a ranged character is to use cover - this works on earlier dragons but some of the latter dragon fights take place in environments where there is very little available cover (or the dragon destroys said cover).

The above abilities all dragons use. The following are only used by some of the dragons.

Full Guard - This generated full guard for the dragon. It is signaled by the dragon stomping its left paw followed by the right one in slow succession (Any passive or ability that deals bonus damage to Guard is quite useful).

Scream for aid - This serves as a 2 second stun to all your characters and summons anywhere between 1 and 3 dragonlings to aid the dragon. Interestingly, the dragons seem to be able to run out of dragonlings at some point or below some health percent (unclear as to which) - though if you're drawing these fights out to 30 minutes or longer it's probably because you're underleveled or soloing on a high difficulty.

Lightning Mark - Vinsomer primarily uses this. It is signaled by him rearing up on his back two legs at which point a small blue circle appears under each character. He then rears back up on those two legs again and when he comes down it creates a three meter circular blue pulsing ring of lightning around each character that moves with the character. The trick here is to use hold position to have your members form an X around the dragon so none of them are causing other members to walk into their ring. It causes massive damage and a stun, so is important to avoid.

Fire Mark - This is used by only the Highland Ravager (the last dragon most people will fight). Much like the lightning mark, the Ravager will rear up on his hind quarters once at which point a light red circle will appear beneath the characters. Go to tactical camera and run each character out of the red circle as soon as this appears. Moments later he will rear up again and those circles (which do not follow your characters) will burst into flame.