Dragon Age: Origins Experimental Hotfix Released

If, like me, you find that building a bow-exclusive character in Dragon Age: Origins is less than effective, then Georg Zoeller’s new “experimental” hotfix is for you. Here’s to hoping most of this makes it to the next official patch:

Changelist

Experimental hot fix for the following issues:

• Daggers now get the shared damage bonus from Dexterity and Strength as intended, not just Strength alone.
• Ranged Weapon hit rate increased.
  • Bow range has been increased by 10m on all ranged weapons (not staff), reducing the penalties for ranged shots in most most combat scenarios.
  • All bows and crossbows now grant a +5 inherit Attack bonus. Note that this bonus is shown on the weapon, it does not factor into the characters Attack displayed score on the character sheet.
• Short bow being useless.
  • Short bows now get full attribute bonus from Dexterity instead of shared from Strength. This makes them a natural choice for Dexterity focused character builds.
  • Base Armor Penetration for Shortbows has been increased by 1.
• Ranged weapon damage has been increased:
  • Damage range on all ranged weapons has been increase from 150% to 160%.
  • Critical chance bonus on all ranged weapons has been increased by 4%.
  • Damage bonus from attributes has been increased from 100% to 100/105% for bows and 110% for crossbows.

You can read more details about these issues in this Forum Post on the BioWare forums.

Known Issues

• This hotfix applies to all creatures in the game, not just the party members. Due to enemies outnumbering the party in most situations, the benefits of better ranged weapons act asymmetric in favor of enemy groups. \Installing this hotfix will cause a steep increase in difficulty by almost a full level for any encounters that include multiple archers. If you are having trouble with easy or normal difficulty, stay away from this hotfix until we have updated it to offset these effects.

The plan for the final patch is to not address this issue for Hard and Nightmare difficulty, causing an increase in game difficulty on both settings.