So me and Bamz0rs made it about 70% of the way to finding a way to skip the gates fight. Steps:

1. Talk to Riordan in Denerim Castle so that you trigger the quest marker to talk to Morrigan
2. Go downstairs, use Warden+Daveth/Jory to trigger conversation glitch with Sten.
3. Add Sten and Morrigan to your party, then travel to Denerim Market (which is where the game thinks you are on map for some reason, so it's fastest).
4. Talk to Morrigan, which will trigger her dialogue where she talks to you about making baby to stop archdemon
5. Battle of Denerim cutscenes trigger.
6. You need to pause around .1-.2ish seconds after the your timer resumes after pausing for the load screen (load screen won't have disappeared yet completely) to avoid getting in combat so you can conversation glitch .
7. Conversation glitch with sten. This is pretty hard, sometimes you get only one conversation off before getting dragged into combat.
8. Riordan's post-gates dialogue triggers. However, all the enemies will still be there.
9. Hard part: you need to drop combat somehow to use area transition. We haven't found a good way to do this fast yet.

Note that getting the pause fast is really precise, so this glitch would probably be pretty annoying to do in runs.

Yes, I had it the first two times and then never got it fully again (couldn't talk to Sten with more than one character)

However, these first two times I had started a run before and blah blah, story short: probably some memory leak going on there. I'm going to try it in a run next time I stream to see if the memory leak is sufficient when running 'normally'

This might skip 50-60 seconds when the parametres are just right, 20 without having a clue what I'm doing.

If the memory leak would not be sufficient (or I not fast enough) I'm dropping this out of my runs personally, so much frustration after getting it so easily at the beginning ;)

Made a new discovery, and also a video of the trick so far.

I just had the fight in 1m30, starting at my room right before Morrigan, convo glitch sten, kick jory/daveth, denerim, morrigan ran backwards like Letters just found, H and pretty consistent conversation glitch (over many tries), take everyone to the end of the map, inferno behind you. kill anything oncoming (in the line of visibility) depending on what type

Most importantly, (small but important) when looking at the gate, enemies spawning to the left of you will not be in combat with you until much later keep fireball / inferno more for the spawns on the right side (only use warden) then try to get close to your friends every time, it could have been faster, but i was just too late for another spawn before, so 1m10 is possible (I have an average of 2m40 for that fight, so for me 1m30 is significant.)

I will start putting the gate skip in my runs, even if just to get used to it and to try other spellrotations.

it's still not truly consistent, but 85% is now thanks to Letters, and to me it is as inconsistent as the fight has ever been, so there is no more reason not to do it...

Yup, I definitely would be doing it every run with the level of consistency it's at. Not 100%, but much better than when we had to pause fast.

Eryment, in your denerim gate skip, how do you start out of combat so you are able to do sten's glitch? I try to pause the game as soon as I can but I always get in combat.

You can start entering an in-put from the moment the IGT starts again. So I look at the IGT and as soon as it starts again, I press once very quickly on my space bar. Even though we still see the loading screen at this time, the game is already paused. It works on every loading screen. I also do it to change character, sometimes we do not see that I changed because I did at the time this screen disappeared.

If you can not do it, it's not very serious. You can put all your team back near the back doors, come back with the Warden to kill the enemies close to the doors and back to your team. With a little luck you will not be in combat and you can do the Sten-glitch.

Ok, thanks, I'll try it.