Dragon Age Inquisition IV: Deal. With. It.

[Zevox]

Aaah. Right, so, sort of not actually no healing magic - as in "no-significant-in-combat healing" (thank you again, Witcher 2, taking away the one way in the first one), but more like no healing magic SPELLS. Important difference! That's not anything like as bad.

Correct. And the new barrier spells actually work better in a sense, as you can get other abilities that synergize with them. A mage investing in ice magic can pick up a particularly useful passive upgrade that causes your barrier to burst and freeze nearby enemies when it goes down, for instance, or a fire mage could pick one that causes every spell they cast to drain half of their current barrier to increase its damage.

Would I be lynched in this thread for saying DA:O's gameplay has aged poorly? I guess you could play it as a tactical game, but it's not a very deep one and simple to break, and most of the difficult fights come about as a result of the game teleporting you into the worst possible positioning. I actually found the more action-y DA2 more fun to play, at least for the first two waves of every fight.

I think that's fair. Although DA2 isn't actually more action-y in any mechanical sense, just faster-paced and with better animations.

(They got rid of bad guys rappelling out of invisible helicopters for Inquisition, right? Right?)

Right. The only wave-based fights are the Fade Rifts, which spawn demons once as you approach them, then again after the first group dies. And there's a couple of areas where undead will rise up out of the ground, but only a couple.