Dragon Age: Origins Diary #4

Fidgit’s Tom Chick brings us another entry to his ongoing Dragon Age: Origins diary series, with his latest focus being health potion addiction.

Health potions in Dragon Age. Right. My point is that Dragon Age is a potion-centric RPG, like most RPGs, but with some important differences beyond your characters eating paste.

For starters, you don’t need potions between battles. The regeneration rate outside battle is so fast that health and mana/stamina will fill up almost instantly. It’s only during battles that you need potions. In fact, some of the harder battles will come down to how many potions you have. (Note that my party doesn’t have anyone with healing magic, but even then, mana is replenished in battle with potions.)

You can buy potions, but it’s going to be more practical to make them using the herbalism skill. In case your character isn’t an outdoorsy type, don’t fret. You’ll meet someone early on with herbalism. To make a health potion, you just need a flask (bought cheaply from any merchant) and a piece of elfroot (harvested from easy-to-spot plants while you’re adventuring). These work fine for a while. “Pish,” you think, watching your characters eat paste to sustain themselves, “this is trivial.”

But as you level up and your characters get more hit points and get hit harder, you’re going to want to graduate to the regular sized health poultice. This takes three pieces of elfroot. At which point, you’re going to burn through your supply of elfroot pretty quickly. Three times as quickly, to be precise.