Maximizing Damage

Most assailants in Dragon Age II have fixed resistances and vulnerabilities. Acquiring a basic understanding of how these affect combat encounters can enable you to formulate more effective strategies against each enemy type. As this feature is examined in far greater depth in the Strategy & Analysis chapter (with individual strengths and weaknesses revealed in the Bestiary), the following introductory guidelines are merely designed to whet your appetite for further reading.

• Broadly speaking, enemies can possess some form of resistance or susceptibility to physical or magical damage. This explains why an opponent might wither under an arcane barrage yet stand tall in the face of whirling blades and whistling arrows.

• There are five distinct “elements” in Dragon Age II: Fire, Cold, Electricity, Spirit, Nature

• Enemies can possess a resistance to elements graded on a scale of one (light resistance) to five (immunity) or a two-level susceptibility: vulnerable and highly vulnerable. If an enemy has neither, elemental attacks will cause standard damage.

• The most obvious way to inflict elemental damage is through spells, but weapon attacks can also be imbued with the five elements. Staves almost always cause one specific type of elemental damage, though this is less common in other weapons (which tend to inflict purely physical harm).

Let’s use a very simple example: the Rage Demon. As its body is a mass of flame, you might (correctly) assume that it possesses some degree of resistance to fire but continue to use such attacks regardless of that fact. However, it actually has a blanket immunity to fire attacks: you might as well be proffering pleasantries. Cold, by obvious contrast, is profoundly effective.

In difficult battles, pausing the action and directing all party members manually – even in short bursts – enables you to exploit weaknesses such as these and minimize wasteful assaults. Furthermore, if a party member is wielding a weapon that inflicts elemental damage, it makes sense to carry at least one backup to avoid situations where their default attack is mitigated by a resistance. On higher difficulty levels, you might even consider having a range of different elemental weapons (particularly staves) to exploit vulnerabilities in any given situation.