Difficulty settings (Dragon Age II)

For the difficulty settings in Dragon Age: Origins, see Difficulty settings (Origins).

There are four difficulty settings in Dragon Age II:

• Casual difficulty is best suited to players who are new to role-playing games or expect to play combat in real-time, rather than pausing often to plan tactics.
• Normal difficulty is the recommended setting for players familiar with role-playing games, providing a good balance of challenge and survivability. It requires moderate use of tactical pausing to plan actions during combat. You will generally only need to control your main character, and can allow the game to control your companions.
• Hard difficulty provides a considerably greater challenge than normal difficulty. To survive most fights, you will need to make sophisticated use of tactical pausing as well as clever combinations of spells and talents, controlling each of your party members in turn.
• Nightmare difficulty is intended for tactical geniuses who found hard difficulty too easy. Aim carefully: At this setting, errant spells and attacks will harm your allies as easily as your enemies.

Scaling

Difficulty	Casual	Normal	Hard	Nightmare
Friendly fire	—	—	—	100%
Enemy health	67.1875%	100%	130%	160%
Enemy damage	75%	100%	140%	150%
Enemy attack	100%	100%	150%	200%
Enemy regeneration	0	0	1	2
Enemy ability cooldown	100%	100%	80%	50%
Enemy effect duration	100%	100%	80%	60%
Potion limit	16	12	8	4

Nightmare

Some handicaps are specific to Nightmare difficulty. These are:

• Friendly fire.
• Assassins can steal potions from your party members.
• Enemies receive immunities to some elements. For example, rock wraiths are completely immune to electricity damage.