Now the Christmas retail rush is out of the way and I've finished Assassin's Creed I've picked Dragon Age back up. Be warned, there may be spoilers in here (though I think you're all well ahead of me). Thanks to the new PC I'm running everything on max settings as well, even AA is on x8.

As a recap my main is a human female mage who is concentrating on healing/crowd control and has picked up herbalism as well. My party so far is Alistair as tank, Morrigan as DPS and Leliana as a condition archer (slowing down etc). It seems to be working very nicely now as well, most fights consist of me controlling Alistair and running around with Threaten running to keep mobs on me whilst the others use the tactics slots to kill whatever I'm targetting. They also have other tactic slots in case they get overwhelmed or, in the case of Pevil, to heal Alistair/others if they get damaged.

After Lothering I went straight to Redcliffe and chose to visit the mages tower to try and save the boy but ended up visiting Brecilian Forest next. I absolutely loved this quest, got quite a few nice new equipment upgrades and most of the fights throughout it are nicely challenging without being insanely hard. There are also a few really colourful characters, such as the mad hermit. At the end of this I chose to talk to Zathrian and bring him to the Lady and ended up siding with the werewolves. The curse is lifted and the Dalish are going to help me, hooray!

After that I decided it was about time I picked up Shale so I've just completed the quest to get him, and gained Zevran along the way! So I think I now have all the npcs I can except for Wynne.

Oh and I finally got Alistair to step into my tent with me

hehe... yea, there are a lot of points to earn in there. It's just a matter of getting all the forms and redoing all the parts so you don't miss anything.

Think I got about 9 or 10 in total, probably missed some. The final fight with Uldred took a few attempts but felt so damn good when I finally did it!

Leliana managed to attract the attention of the four abominations you start with and lasted until it was just Uldred and one abomination left before biting the dust. Alistair was doing ok with taking hits and Pev and Wynne were doing a good job of healing him up, but neither exactly have much firepower. Then I missed using the scroll thing once so we ended up with two abominations and Uldred all beating on Alistair. He came so close to death it was unbelievable and I had to micromanage the two healers to drink lyrium pots/heal Alistair and at one point he must have been down to one hp but somehow with no more firepower than auto attack from two staves and Alistairs occasional Shield Bash/Shield Pummel/Assault we finally got him down AND I managed to then finish the two abominations without any further deaths!

I'm currently in camp listening to Wynne natter on about everything then I'm going to head over to Orzammar.