In one corner, us. I'm an elven rogue majoring in archery, with a minor in stealth and backstabbing. I have with me two warriors. Alistair, a former templar, is heavily armored and favors a sword and shield, with defensively oriented skills. Sten, a great big qunari bruiser, wields a two-handed sword for hard hitting. Our fourth party member is Morrigan, a mage who favors entropy-oriented spells, with a side of shapeshifting.

In the other corner, a pair of ogres in an open space. Ogres in Dragon Age look more like demons. They've got horns. They're big. Really big. I've learned the hard way they're fond of stompy area-effect stun-oriented attacks. They can also throw things. The thing about an ogre is that you don't want to be close to it and you don't want to be far away from it. There's really no comfortable place to stand when it comes to be in the same vicinity as an ogre. Your best bet is to just kill it quickly.

This is my first serious battle in Dragon Age. And by serious, I mean the battle that I lost four times before finally paying attention to what I'm doing.

After the jump, I'll tell you how the fifth attempt played out.

Taking control of the main character, I tell my party to wait back in the narrow pass. Then I stealth forward. This will turn out to be a common enough tactic for me that I eventually put the "Hold Position" and "Stealth" commands on my character's shortcut options.

I watch the ogres for a bit. They mill around. I wait until one of them is farther back. I fire a pinning arrow that will briefly stun him. It doesn't seem to last long. I presume ogres have a considerable physical resistance that lets them shake off stun effects quickly. But it does what it needs to do. It gives the other ogre a head start so when he chases me back into the pass where the party is waiting, his buddy is trailing him. This will give us time to focus on one target.

In battles up to now, I've had Morrigan shapeshifting into a spider just because it's cool. But not in this battle. I need her using magic, specifically a frost attack that freezes an enemy and all her entropy debuffs. She and I hang back, her attacking with her staff and spells, me with my arrows. As the first ogre comes lumbering down the pass, I toggle the "Hold Position" command. Alistair and Sten move up to fight the ogre. Alistair has a "Threaten" attribute activated that draws an enemy's aggro, in classic tank fashion. Because his default combat tactics have him drawing aggro with "Threaten" and an ability called "Taunt", he's been my most common casualty. I'm constantly burning injury kits to remove the negative effects of reviving him after a battle.

But not this time. I watch his health closely and have him use potions when he takes a big hit. Meanwhile, Sten takes up a position behind the ogre, using his two-handed sword and special attacks to do the proverbial massive damage, made more massive for the flanking bonus he gets for standing behind the ogre, and even more massive still with abilities that reduce his attack speed and improve his damage. It's quite a nice bit of animation to watch him heft that sword overhead and slash it into some monster.

Everything is going swimmingly for several seconds. The lead ogre's health is handily chopped down to about a third of his total. But now here comes his buddy, charging past the point where Sten and Alistair are whaling on the first ogre. Ogre number two makes a beeline directly for me, the last person to have injured him. I switch to my melee weapons (I dual weild!) and get Morrigan out of the way, switching her target to this newest ogre now pounding on my lightly armored body. But before we can start in on him, he does some sort of area effect stun that knocks me and Morrigan back.

Fortunately, at this point the first ogre has died. Sten and Alistair move to the second ogre, whaling away on him, although he's still focused on me. The "Threaten" skill requires a few melee blows to build up aggro. But before the ogre is distracted from me, he picks me up! I'm actually grabbed and lifted into the air. I've never seen this before, but the codex entry on ogres warns of it. However, whatever he's going to do to me is interrupted by Morrigan's frost spell, which covers the ogre in an ice effect and causes him to drop me.

By the time the ogre recovers, we're arranged perfectly, with Alistair and Sten positioned front and back respectively, and me and Morrigan hanging back using ranged attacks. I fire off my crippling and shattering shots to debuff the ogre. Morrigan continues with a little lightning, a little frost, and disorienting mental attacks that stupid ogres probably don't resist well.

I'm soon rewarded with a great animation of Sten leaping onto the ogre's chest, stabbing it in the face, riding it down to the ground, and then plunging his blade into its chest. Ah, the joys of a good old M-rating! And the beauty of this battle is that no one in the party was ever close to getting killed.

This is Dragon Age at is best. I'm a bit surprised that it hews so closely to typical MMO tactics: pulling, tanking, nuking. But the characters have so much personality, and they're so distinct from each other, that it doesn't feel played out. In fact, for a game with "only" three classes -- warrior, rogue, and mage -- Dragon Age does an amazing job offering me dramatically different choices for who to include in my party. Suffice to say that the classes of warrior, rogue, and mage are only just the beginning.

Of course, that was several levels ago for each of the characters, who either have new bags of tricks or relentlessly focused roles. Alistair is all about hunkering down and taking a beating. I've got all of Sten's stamina tied up in sustained abilities that make him hit even harder. Morrigan has a whole new set of spells, which involve putting enemies to sleep and then killing them with nightmares. And as for my elven rogue, she's no longer just a rogue. With her newly acquired ranger speciality, she's got a wolf by her side to help with the tanking.

However, we have a big problem. A drinking problem, you might say.

Tomorrow: addicted to health potions

(Click here for the previous Dragon Age game diary.)