Quote Originally Posted by Lord of the Helms View Post
Storm of the Century. Grease Fire. Shockwave. Entropic Death. Improved Drain. Plus all-around a wider selection of spells offering far more tactical options, especially with superior range and battlefield control.

Now, it was totally and insanely unbalanced (especially Storm of the Century) , and nice that they tried their best to balance classes better in DA2 as well as improving cross-class cooperation, but for all its over-poweredness, the magic in DA1 was still way more complex and fun, and really made you feel like you had a large-scale, long-range effect in fights.
Eh, DA2 is pretty much the same there. Some things were toned down (forcefield) but... large AOE disrupts are pretty much the same (cone of cold is MASSIVE) if not stronger (force staggers aren't common in DA:O; see Firestorm). There's a bit of a problem on nightmare, since DA2's number scaling is idiotic (any friendly fire at all is pretty much certain death, only alleviated by hardcapping FF at 90% health in one hit). Force Mage is amazing for AOE control, for example.

Sure, there's no Storm of the Century, but that power was DUMB. It was completely unusable in 90% of situations, impractical in another 9%, and only vaguely useful in the remaining 1%. (Drains entire mana pool, aoe increases enormously and somewhat unpredictably, slaughters party members) Unless you're playing on some easy difficulty without friendly fire.
Or maybe you miss the amazing cheapness that was Mana Clash? Nah, probably not. DA2 even has Blood Wound, so I can't think of any more particularly ridiculous spells from DA:O that weren't translated over.