Done with DS2:BW for Good

Evidently, it took about three months to play through the Veteran and Elite difficulties of Dungeon Siege II and its expansion after I finished them on Mercenary in May.

Of course, I wasn't playing constantly but I feel the playtime was about same what it was in Dungeon Siege -- near 30 hours per playthrough. (DS2 doesn't have a timer to show how long you've been playing, unlike its predecessor. Weird.)

With each difficulty level the maximum party size grows by one, and with each party member the multiple elevators in the game become more annoying. Sometimes one or two of your characters simply refuse to step on the elevator with others when you click the lever, and are left behind.

And micro-managing the party member on the elevator is painful as the character won't move where you click if its too close to the others. And when you finally get everyone on and click the lever, another character has decided to step off -- very frustrating.

Another annoyance is how your party follows the selected character when everyone is spread out and not moving; they first move to the spot the selected character was before starting the movement. This can be fatal when you are controlling a melee character and click to move out of the nova spell a boss is spamming. The whole party, except for the controlled character, then proceeds into the nova to take damage. This is a problem especially on the first three bosses of Broken World, who all have the same high damage nova attack.

My main character turned out to be quite a tank in the end, although I probably should've tried to max all of the resistances (esp. non-elemental magic) as well instead of just stacking health and armor.

My combat mage (Finala) on the other hand was quite a glass cannon for a long time. I spent a lot of her skill points to other skill trees and eventually she started to survive more than one subsequent hit.

I think I'm done with this game for good this time; never planning to touch it again. It was great fun, though. Surprisingly challenging at times.

Edited 2024-04-22: Fixed typos and removed the deprecated screenshot carousel.