Dragon Age: Origins Walkthrough - Orzammar - Anvil of the Void

As you head into the Anvil of the Void, the game will stop you and make you pick a new party. Oghren has to go with you no matter what. So I suggest that you swap him out for a warrior and hang on to your mage and rogue. We've got a little bit of fighting to do. Make sure that you're ready though. We'll be locked inside the Anvil of the Void until we finish everything up.

Advance a bit further until you start hitting the piles of corpses. This little battlefield is our first test. There are a ton of darkspawn ahead and we will need to clear our path. The first wave isn't too bad. You just have to hang back with your squad and let them come to you. There isn't much in the first wave, so just hang on. The second wave is a fair bit tougher with an emissary. It is pretty easy if you fire up blizzard on the tunnel. Otherwise, you can just use standard crowd control and grind through them again. Push forward and into the tunnel. There's more darkspawn in here, so we'll just have to keep rolling. Take breaks in between groups and don't be afraid to use a little baiting to break up the groups.

Once we've cut a bloody swathe through the tunnel, we'll find our way into the next room. This place is filled up with a poison gas and has four golems in the center. They will spawn one at a time as you kill them. I suggest you have your group target the golems and then have one person flip the four levers in the room. You can use TAB to find them. This will shut off the gas and stop the health drain. This makes the fight a lot easier. Taking on one golem at a time isn't too hard, except they'll probably each do quake as they wake up. This gets a little annoying. Backstabs and magic work fine though.

The next room just has two standard traps on the floor. There are also two pairs of golems that will spawn as you cross the middle of the room. If you stop to fight the first pair, then you won't needlessly trigger the second.

The fourth and final test is the first real puzzle. There is an odd column that is emitting four spirits onto several spirit anvils. This is really more of a puzzle than a battle, if you do it right. The spirits should only attack you if you attack them. So for now, you can just work your way around the circle killing the spirits. When you kill one, it will power up the spirit anvil. You might only be able to kill one in each turn of the column. It's not a big deal. Just keep going.

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The one important thing to note is that AI is a little odd here. The party seems to want to attack the column itself, but they can't. So they just stand at the center. You'll need to keep ordering them around throughout the fight. Once all four are lit up, we get to do something cool. Pause the game, and then order each of your party to touch one of the four anvils. This will simultaneously hit all four sides of the device. The benefit to do it this way is that we won't risk getting off beat. It's just simpler this way. Note that the forgotten spirits will probably attack all together. Stick together and wait a moment until they get sucked back into the device.

We now have to deal with enraged spirits. These guys are a little more dangerous and we're going to go ahead and mix up our style. Hitting it now will completely knock out the side, which means no more spraying attack. Just pick a side and gang up on the spirit to reactivate the anvil. Fire it quickly and just wait. Unless you killed this one quickly, you probably wouldn't be able to take the next out in time. Catch it on the next rotation. Keep this going until you hit the fourth side and shut it all down.

This should finish it up. The door on the other side of the cavern should open. Save and then head out. We get to make our really big decision.