Anaximander

So here's the link to all the special spell combinations. I have to say,there are a few I never would have thought of:

Spell Combos

And here's one for specialization classes (SPOILERS):

Specializations

Click the name of the specialization you want to see where and how to unlock it.

Actually, now that I think about it, what spells does everyone recommend?

Mana Clash - An AoE that can pretty much instantly kill any enemy mage, wich the exception of elite bosses. Even against them it does tremendous damage (I took one boss down to 50% with a single cast of this spell). The spell drains all mana from mages caught in the radius and does spirit damage to them proportionate to the mana they lost. Get some +spirit damage gear, and they don't stand a chance. The disadvantage is it's long refresh time and that it's sometimes difficult to get enemy mages clustered together, meaning you'll likely only take out one of them with a single cast of this spell. Still, for those times when you can use line of sight to bottle neck some mages together, this spell is awesome.

Cone of Cold - Damage and crowd control in one. Frozen enemies can be shattered with Stone First, Crushing Prison, or any crtical hit. Pair up with a rogue for lots of shattering fun. I had Leliana set to use Critical Shot with her bow against any enemy that was stunned or paralyzed. The Coup de Gra rogue talent is also very nice against frozen enemies. In dungeons I often set up an ambush by having Morrigan stand to the side of a door, then using Alestair to lead a group of enemies through it. Once they were all within range of CoC, Morrigan would let them have it. Having multiple mages with CoC and Stone First is pretty devasting too.

Misdirection Hex and Death Hex - I mention these two together because I alsmost never cast one without the other. These two spells are amazingly effective for boss fights.

Curse of Mortality - Useful against pesky mages who like to heal themselves. Of course, if you have Mana Clash, pesky mages suddenly aren't so pesky anymore.

Grease and Fireball - an excellent first strike combo. Playing as my mage, I could often clear an entire room of badguys by casting Grease, Affliction Hex, and Fireball. Sometimes I'd throw a Walking Bomb in before the fireball for good measure. At higher levels, I'd use the time that fireball's knockown bought me to cast either Inferno or Death Cloud.

Blood Magic - Unlocked in Redcliff, the Blood Mage specialization has 2 very nice spells available at level 14 and 16 respectively. Blood Wound paralyzes all hostile targets (no friendly fire) in a huge radius while doing persistant spirit damage to them. Blood Control turns an enemy into an ally whlie doing persistant spirit damage to them. By the time the control wears off they've either been killed by other enemies or are nearly dead from the damage over time. My mage was a blood mage. Blood Wound + Affliction Hex + Walking bomb was my favorite combination of spells. The disadvantage is that blood magic only works against enemies that have blood, so it's ineffective against undead or golems. Just remember to deactivate Blood Magic after casting your blood mage spells, as Blood Magic causes all spells to use your health rather than your mana. I killed myself once by leaving blood magic active then selecting another party member. My character kept casting spells per his AI and killed himself. Was kind of funny, actually.

I didn't get into the Creation or Spirit lines that much. The glyphs look interesting,and there's a loading tip that says they can be used offensively or defensively but I didn't experiment with them much.

Other than that, all of the official spell combos that you get an achievement for discovering are pretty devasting. I found a link to all 10 of them somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it up again and post it here.

The last game I actually purchased was Mass Effect, although I have rented quite a few since then. I suppose I could have rented the XBox 360 version of ME as well, but when I know a game will be ported to PC I prefer to have the PC version. The 360 is a nice system and all, but my PC's hardware blows it out of the water.

I will probably get Dragon Age when it comes out, but I may wait to see what reviewers have to say about it. I find that as I get older I'm becoming much more particular about the games I play, and much more critical of them as well.

KOTOR and Mass Effect are good, although there are certain aspects of Mass Effect that I feel could have been done better or not at all.  

I found Jade Empire enjoyable, but it focuses more on the story and the action than on character development.   There were a couple of characters I liked, but in my opinion most of them are simply not worth speaking to.

I'm going to cast another vote for Bloodlines as well.  That is one of the best games I have ever played.  There are no NPC followers, and no romances per se, but there are a few. . . romantic? encounters.  Bloodlines was just an all around great game.  Good graphics, great characters, interesting story, the most phenomenal voice acting I've ever heard, and very unique gameplay.  The worst thing about the game is that was developed on a beta version of Valve's Source engine, and it was rushed to release by the producers.  The developers then went out of business.  As a result, the game as released was pretty buggy, making player made unofficial patches a must.  If you download the one linked in a previous post, I strongly recommend you install the "basic" version.  The full version changes a lot of things that, quite frankly, were not broken and did not need to be tampered with.  Well, that's my opinion anyway.

It's rather long arms, even for a dwarf.

Well, but if you take a look at real people who are affected by dwarfism, you'll see that their arms tend to be disproportionately long compared to their bodies. I'm not sure if that applies to the dwarven race of the Forgotten Realms, but I'll give WeeR the benefit of the doubt on that one.