Use a controller, set it to easy and just mash through it. Tactical view is badly done and the keyboard controls are even worse.

How G Plays DA:I

• Slowly
• PS4
• Controller
• Nightmare Difficulty ; Hard when I am lazy ; Normal when I am bored
• All Tactical View, All The Time
• All Auto Tactics Turned Off
• All Auto Behaviors Turned Off
• 70 hours in, just got to Skyhold

FRIENDLY FIRE ON!?

What???

That setting is actually just a funny joke kind of like Big Head Mode. Don't actually try that shit the game is just straight up not designed for that. Area of Effect attacks are so messy in this game. Some seem to queue pretty much instantly rather than having any cast time and your characters all need what seems like ages to even move a foot (and that's if they aren't all colliding into each other). You can play like this but you need to think so far ahead and micromanage to the maximum extent and not in a "fun way". It's an interesting challenge but my god. MY GOD. Would be much easier if you could queue up a move and an action.

edit: I know this is a PC thread but I felt the tactical view was more your topic rather than PC version, so hope that's OK.

I have never played a Dragon Age game before and have relatively little experience with infinity engine bioware games. So take it with a grain of salt when I say that the tactical view for Inquisition is incredibly crappy. I thought I would enjoy tactical view because I like to micromanage my party members for optimum efficiency, but for the reasons you mentioned I have barely used it, and usually fare poorly when I do.

I use the standard camera zoomed out a bit and only use the tactical camera when my view is obstructed. I am using the K+M controls and pausing the game quite a bit to set things up. I just hit level 10 with my human mage on nightmare and I'm taking out groups of enemies 2 levels higher with relative ease now.

I reckon how you play depend a lot on what you play:

I started playing this game felling I had to use a lot of the tactical view (I played on hard to get used to it before starting playing seriously on nightmare only) to make sure to use the cross class combos.

the tactical camera was so flawed that I felt a bit desperate that they took away of the optimized tactical slots that I loved so much from the previous games, allowing me to play in nightmare mode in DA2 without using the tactical view almost ever.

but then I realized that the AI in DA:inquisition is actually decent and that all you need to do is disabling a few key skills that you really want to micromanage (dispel for example) and set them on follow themselves or the right toon. Once you got this done, you hardly ever have to use this retarded tactical camera and they manage to actually exploit the conditions created by others to detonate and combo most of the time if you equipped the right skills.

Now depending on what you play, it is a lot of fun this way: I play 2 handed warrior on my nightmare playthrough and I have a ball playing live because there is so much skills to control the combat: you stun, knock down, knock back, parry, dodge, pull to you, charge back....the main aggro is taken by Blackwall, Vivienne come on top of this to detroy barriers and guard and AoE spamming her spirit blade around the tank...I shut down most annoying targets and Varric DPS from afar....this works great because they do not need macromanagement so I can play my reaver and her insanely short cool dwns to control the battlefield.

playing a mage like this was plain boring, especially once I got to be a KE....press X,X,X,X,X for you spirit blade or for other specializations or pre specialization, just keep R2 down pew pew pew until at last some spell is back from cool down....pffff

playing archer was sort of fun but long cool downs were holding back the fun, having to pew pew on the flanks of the enemy...pfff....

dual dagger rogues....are my next playthrough I guess.

Controller...and no need for any kind of tactics whatsoever as a Knight Enchanter, just run up to the dragon or whatever and hit it until it dies. Sure, the rest of my party might have been dying early and often but without a death penalty, I didn't mind.

I didn't experience any combat in that game that required tactical play.

This games combat is kind of awful across the board, but it's more manageable for me using the tactical view with a mouse and keyboard.

It's not just you being new to Dragon Age games. In Dragon Age Origins, zooming out with the tactical view showed you something a lot like the old Infinity Engine games, Baldur's Gate and its ilk. It never collided with geometry or anything as fucking stupid as that, it just worked. I could deal with all of Inquisition's control problems a lot better if the tactical view actually gave us a tactical view that zoomed out far enough, instead of one whose max height isn't anywhere near high enough and it gets stuck on ceilings and walls to boot.

I like Dragon Age Inquisition's combat best in huge outdoor areas. Pausing and playing the game with the regular camera works decently enough in any area, though I still have some issues with it.

KB/M with no tactical view, this isn't by choice so much as by the tactical view is utter shit and combat is gimped.

You may as well use a controller because even on hard there is very little use for tactics, I'm enjoying the game but it is clearly a "dumbed down" console game compaired to Origins. With only 8 activateable abilites the game has lost much of it's cool combos and CC utility, plus I realised early on that i didn't even need to know what my teamates were doing, since level 10 i've just let them auto-level.

Even the auto-attacks now have you button mashing. Good job the world and characters are so good.

Controller, no tactical view.

Tactical view seems like a bit of a half-assed addition to me. The game was designed with consoles in mind, and playing it that way provides the best experience. I loved Origins on PC, but AAA, multiplatform games can't really afford to be best played on mouse and keyboard any more, and it shows.

I've been replaying it with a controller and tactical view is actually way better as fucked as that is.

Moving the cursor feels more natural and you have more control over time flow

I play with controller and will only enter tactical view when my party needs to heal. And that's only because it always takes me forever to swap to a character that needs healing.

I tried using the tactical view exactly once (M/T) and it controlled horribly. Also it is never needed since 99% of the time I just stand around, hold down the left mouse button and press whatever ability is ready at the moment.
It's like they looked at the combat in Skyrim and said "Let's recreate that"

I just kept my team strong enough to never have to use the tactical view.

Knight enchanters were involved. I have no regrets.

I was disappointed to find the Tactical View as busted as it was. It seems like a really half-hearted attempt at making fans of Origins happy. But I still found my Hard playthrough as an archer to be very, very easy. Only things that ever even came close to posing a challenge were a few of the dragons.

Keyboard, Mouse, barely any tactical view

Played on Normal with a Sword-and-Shield Tank. After the halfway mark, I was so tanked up, I never died, I could solo dragons and the final boss was an absolute joke.

I liked Inquisition, but Origins it was not.

I began about 6 hours of tactical view with M&K. After brutal difficulty, I realized after a while it was easier just to play as the tank and aggro everyone. I even killed a dragon as a tank. So I did that for 15 hours or so, then I got Knight Enchanter and just hit things until they died.

Combat is shit in this game.

I use a controller connected to my PC, hold down the attack button, aim in the direction of bad guys and press most of the other buttons whenever they're not on cooldown. Of the times I've used tactical views, it's taken more time to use the view than it would to have just auto-attacked.

Yeah, the combat was a disappointment to say the least. When I first tried tactical view I was absolutely certain I did something wrong. But nope, it's just ass. I played with M/KB and only used the tactical view to aim certain AOE spells, or to pause and que up some movements when the AI decided to walk Varric up in the face of the enemies.

The keyboard and mouse controls are so bad, I'm amazed any of you could stand to play it that way.

There were a couple battles that were hard enough (on hard) that I resorted to tactical view, and I generally found it improved my outcome a lot. However, that's not to say that I found it enjoyable to use.

I used the controller only because the m & k controls were so bad. Gave up on the tactical view fairly early and then the game after I got to Skyhold.

I bought this game assuming it was going to be a similar experience to Origins and was I ever let down. This game could have been the best in the series if they hadn't dumbed down the combat. I play Bioware games primarily for the gameplay/combat and if it's not up to par, it's not worth playing since you're in combat the majority of the time.

This is only the second Bioware game I didn't finish after I started, the other being Jade empire which I also couldn't get past the controls and combat system.

I hope Bioware doesn't get it in their heads that players don't want a tactical view in Dragon Age. I didn't use it because it was clunky and there was hardly any challenge so I didn't need to mess with it. Dragon Age 2's paused tactical view was still simpler than DA:O's paused view and that was better than what DA:I managed to make.

Glad I'm not the only one who played more than 60 hours before even getting to Skyhold.

Also I do set some skills to persistent or enabled since some of them are actually meant to be spammed (e.g. Vivienne/Knight Enchanter's Spirit Blade as a default attack) or safe to be auto-activated since they are buffs (e.g. Blessed Blades, Poisoned Weapons) or they actually get activated as intended (e.g. mage members cast Mind Blast only when enemies come close).

I never had any issues with Keyboard/Mouse, not really sure where people are getting the idea that the controls are bad. I realize that the left-click-to-attack thing is weird and intuitive, it's not how cursor-based games generally work, but it doesn't take long to adapt to. The tactical view's camera is very weird, I don't understand who thought it was a good idea for the camera/cursor to move along the ground like a character and be bound by obstacles and walls. Very silly decision.

That said, the pausing/tactical was pretty useful for the Dragons (at least, the ones I wasn't massively over-leveled for) so it did have some uses. Totally pointless for most fights, though.

I don't really use tactical view, but thatis due to how broken it is to control.

I really wish it was better. I played Origins on nightmare and loved it.