Kein;
You think too much and miss the point - there is no facts we can rely on.
You can play with your imagination as much as you can.
Your premise, in part, was that it didn't make sense that the Black Ring could be strong enough to force the dragons into hiding and yet weak enough a dragon knight could do so much damage. I proposed a much more logical assumption than yours.
Assuming the dragons left because of the Black Ring is just as much playing with your imagination as thinking it was a reaction to the formation of the slayers.
Dragon Age. To kill hordes of darkspawn we gather the army. The Army even.
So your character/party isn't instrumental is saving the world? You don't start off weak, get strong and win the day?
If your party dies the game keeps going, the army gets formed anyway and the darkspawn army is defeated? If you sit around doing nothing, someone else solves the quests and gets everyone ready?
Being part of an army is certainly a more plausible scenario, but if your choices and actions are not instrumental in the outcome of the game, you might as well be watching a movie. If your actions are what determine the outcome of the game, there isn't really a huge difference between it being you alone or you with an army.
GabeN;
EVERYTHING depended on the summon - WHY hasn't Black Ring sent EVERYONE to protect summoning? Not only Josephina, Iona, etc., but everyone? They had more members, yes?
Maybe they thought the defenses they had in place were more than enough. Maybe they were fighting on multiple fronts, and did not want to abandon other areas or projects. Maybe they didn't care if a bunch of imps and a few Black Ring members got wiped out as long as they delayed long enough for the ritual to be completed. Maybe they thought the Divine One was a diversion, and if they sent in reinforcements they would leave themselves vulnerable to the real attack.
Even worse, Divine One could just kill the baby! Possibilities are endless.
There are endless possibilities Larian could have implemented to make sure the game was impossible to win. The Black Ring attacked you once in the starting cutscene, why not send the whole army to wipe out Aleroth when you are still on level 1?
Larian ended D2:ED with your character encountering a minor setback. Apparently some people don't like games like that, and before FoV was announced many people complained loudly about the ending; imagine the reaction if your character always fails, gets killed and the bad guys win.
Why wouldn't they send everyone they had to protect their only chance of victory?
Because it is a game.
Also, a minor point, but it wasn't their only chance; they summoned an aspect of their master before and were defeated (DD background story), so they would try again if they failed that time.
How does this talk connect to Dwarves gloating that nothing can reach them in their city, and Elves having multiple cities and them both being "beaten" by the Black Ring?
Are you saying that the dwarves believing their city to be invulnerable makes it so? Historically such beliefs have generally proven to be incorrect.
The Black Ring couldn't possibly drop poison gas over a forest or elven city like they did to Broken Valley?
You may not like the fact that there are no dwarves or elves in the game, but it is hardly a stretch to think it possible the Black Ring could have wiped them out, at least in the regions we can visit in the game. If the war threatened their homelands, or there were serious conflicts with the humans, many of the elves and dwarves could have simply withdrew from human areas, and the books in the game are referring to the ones who decided to stay behind or who couldn't get out in time.
Pall;
Please, please, ewerybody calm down.
Everyone is calm, AFAIK. The discussion couldn't even be classified as an argument.
There are many plotholes in game, yes,
The issue is with design choices people don't like. It is hardly a plot hole that an organization can start a war and be quite effective, and yet 50 years later be vulnerable to an attack in a specific area out of their control. Also of great importance is the fact that Damian cares more about something else than he does about a few Black Ring members in Broken Valley and the fjords. For all we know he filled the place up with incompetent people he wanted to get rid of when he heard the main character was coming.
