Dark Arisen continues to impress
I expected to enjoy the expansion for Dragon's Dogma 2, Dark Arisen, for a few days. A gear grind has never really appealed to me, and the spoils system made me instantly worried about a power creep.
Well, I've been steadily playing it since my last update. Not obsessively - but regularly enough for me: about two to three nights a week for an hour or two. Norgan is such a fun place to explore, and even if I'm not pursuing the main quest, just getting into random encounters yields spoils to identify and exhilarating chaotic brawls.
There's a clear, linear progression to gear tiers, but it feels so nicely balanced. It also looks great. My current set, seen on the spoils screen above, just looks badass and reminds me quite a lot of the namesake of my Arisen, my half-elf bard Mia, especially nearer the end of the campaign I played her in. I'll come back to that, but focusing on the gear.
Now that I've experienced more of the spoils system, I'm actively hunting for specific skills on items. I found my new favorite skill, which prompted me to switch from Warrior to Fighter:
Cloudfall Strike is an upgrade to Cloudward Strike that can is found on spoils. Cloudward Strike is pretty situational normally, but its upgrade makes it attack on the way up and the way down, while keeping base skill's high chance to stagger. This means, when deployed against non-large ground based foes...
It stunlocks this poor brigand with the first hit and sends them to the ground with the second, and leaves them open for one more manual heavy attack to give a kill animation. And it fires off damn near instantly, so it very rarely misses or gets interrupted.
Warrior vocation requires some careful timing and positioning to make the most of it. Fighter, however, is all about high speed violence. She's a lot like a bear: a bulky and shockingly fast mountain of muscle. Half of her moves are about spinning and staggering, and her built keeps her fast on her feet. This is important as the fights in Dark Arisen can get hectic. I regularly find two different factions of enemies fighting to slam into the center of like a wrecking ball.
That's actually the same way I played my Arisen's namesake. Mia was a valor bard, but she wore a breastplate and stood in the thick of battle with a longsword, shield, and Mirror Image. My Arisen is a Fighter, not a Warfarer (which can equip skills from multiple vocations), but I think it captures the feeling of playing her just fine.
Since I'm just going back to playing my old DnD character from four years ago now any ways, I decided to try recreating her in game again:
She's intended to be fairly bulky, with 18 strength and around 140 HP (with Aid) at level 15. Her father was a warlord who had raised her to be a general. This isn't so reflected in the dainty portrait I used for her above. Still, I like how she turned out. I rarely see her face as a full-face helmet is required to be loyal to the character (who liked being primped, but was practical about defense).
It's also fun to just stop and spin the camera around, but that's always been part of the appeal of Dragon's Dogma 2.
That's all. I just wanted to gush for a bit. I'm having a good time.
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far~