Optimized Class Guides - Nightmare

This guide is a compilation of information regarding builds and roles for each class in painstaking detail. The guide is designed around making a Nightmare playthrough as smooth as humanly possible

Opening Info

I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins essentially since it came out and have spent a ton of time playing it both on Steam and on other platforms. Most of this playtime has been on Nightmare difficulty, and that is what this guide is going to be focusing on. Any difficulty lower than Nightmare is easy enough to where you don't really need to optimize your party and get serious with tactics, and lower than Hard makes the game a bit of a joke.

For this guide, I will be assuming that you are willing to use certain glitches/exploits (within reason obviously, no infinite XP or something legitimately gamebreaking). I don't use any of the community patches or bugfixing and the bugs that exist within the game are almost always slanted against you rather than in your favor - I think it's okay to fight back a little bit with your own cheese.

I'm also going to be assuming you have a way of generating money for buying gear off merchants, as that is where a good chunk of the best in slot items for various classes can be found. You can do this without glitching, but it's way more time consuming and I'd rather just get on with things personally. It's up to you in the end though. Generating money and getting infinite consumables is far more impactful than buying the best gear, and I'd recommend you limit yourself to only buying equippable gear if you want the balance to be somewhat maintained.

Finally, you need to have all class specializations unlocked, this is a hard requirement. The game can be quite unforgiving on Nightmare, and if you are leveling up without access to an important specialization you could potentially be missing out on game changing abilities that can swing fights on their own. A Mage without Arcane Warrior can never tank, a DPS Warrior without Champion is just a worse Rogue, etc etc.

Shapeshifter hate edition

Attributes

It's good to know exactly what each stat is doing for you before we get into the smaller details of building out your party. Some people may not know exactly which stat is doing what, and this section will just be to clear it up for anyone that wants it. If you already know everything in this section feel free to just skip it.

Strength - This stat does two important things. First, it directly adds damage to all physical attacks - even bows. The only weapons that strength does not affect are Staves and Crossbows. It also raises your attack, making you more likely to land hits on the enemy. Second, strength is the required stat that is used for most of the gear in the game. Having just barely enough strength to equip what you want is useful to avoid extra points in this stat if you aren't a DPS Warrior.

Dexterity - This stat increases hit rating with the same returns as strength, but also gives ranged attack bonus as well. Dex is also the main defense stat, making you much less likely to actually be hit on any given swing. If you are specifically using a piercing weapon (Daggers and Bows), Dex will boost your damage as well, making this stat even more attractive for Rogues.

Willpower - This just increases your Mana/Stamina by a flat amount on each point. While having enough resources to use your abilities is important, you'll mostly find that Willpower only needs a boost here and there before you have enough to cast whatever it is you want. In fact, I almost never put more than 5 points into this on any build for any class.

Magic - Main stat for Mages, they don't need strength or dexterity at all so every single stat point should be funneled into Magic with only a few going into Willpower to maintain a comfortable mana reserve. This stat also makes potions heal for more, but you should literally never ever level it for that purpose. Warriors and Rogues should avoid this stat entirely.

Cunning - Lethality is a Rogue talent later on that will allow Cunning to completely replace Strength in a Rogue's damage calculation, meaning that Rogues should be putting most of their points here after hitting breakpoints in other stats. Warriors and Mages should only ever have a max of 16 in this stat for if you plan on grabbing the Coercion skills.

Constitution - Similar to Willpower, but for your health bar. You may think that leveling this is perfect for tanks, but realistically each party member only needs enough Constitution to survive ~2 very big hits. Anything further would be overkill with how quickly and consistently you can heal and recover in this game. I almost never touch this stat on any character except for the tank, and even then I wouldn't go beyond 20.

Warrior Overview

This is where the guide really begins. We'll talk about the Warrior class as a whole and then get into each specific talent tree, which each correspond to a different build for Warrior. In general though, Warriors are either going to be tanking for you or acting as a very bulky DPS. Tank Warriors will be using a weapon and shield, while DPS Warriors will be using either dual wielding or a two handed weapon. Warriors do technically have access to the Archery skill tree, but this is not a legitimately viable build until Dragon Age: Awakening and I don't want to get into the expansion for this guide. As far as specializations, Warriors have access to Templar, Berserker, Reaver, and Champion.

Every class has it's own talent tree with universal abilities that you can pick up no matter what build you choose to run, and the tree for Warrior has two rows.

The Powerful Line
This line is mostly passive abilities that just make your Warrior more effective in general ways.

Powerful - This is a pure passive that gives you +25 flat health and a flat 10% reduction in fatigue. This skill is one of the big reasons Warriors are able to wear such heavy armor, as they are far less affected by the fatigue penalty than a Rogue might be. Every Warrior should have this, it's just free stats.

Threaten - A sustained modal that doubles all damage related threat you dish out. Obviously this is only useful for tank Warriors, and should only ever be activated if you are wanting to take aggro off of your other party members. That being said, it's not a completely dead talent for DPS if your tank dies and you need an immediate backup.

Bravery - Another pure passive stat buff, giving you +3 to both physical/mental resistances, +1 damage to your attacks, and a stacking crit chance boost that scales with the number of enemies are in melee range. Just like Powerful, this talent is free stats and should be taken on every single Warrior no matter what.

Death Blow - Pure passive that causes killing blows dealt by the Warrior to restore stamina equal to 20% of the victim's health. This has varying effectiveness, but in theory a high HP enemy can restore significant chunks of stamina. Not very useful for tanks, but can be insanely good for DPS Warriors that want to spam abilities especially if you game the system and force party members to stop attacking and allow the Warrior to get last hits. Not a super high priority and takes some extra micromanaging, but if you have the points to spare there's no reason not to take this.

The Precise Striking Line
This line on the other hand has no passive abilities and consists entirely of regular abilities, each one either pertaining to your attack rating or manipulating threat.

Precise Striking - Modal ability that causes your attack speed to take a 10% penalty, but in exchange gives you +10 attack rating and some extra melee crit chance. This ability is very useful early on, as having a 10% slower attack speed while landing hits is much better than missingthe target and doing 0 damage. You should pick this up early and keep it on until you feel that it's not doing much for you any more. Dual wielding Warriors have a very specific interaction with this that I'll talk about when I reach the Mage tree - you'll see later.

Taunt - Non-damaging AoE that instantly deals 300 threat to all nearby enemies, up to 400 when taking a certain Reaver talent. This is not affected by Threaten. Again, for tanks this skill is absolutely vital for early threat in the fight, and for everyone else it's an emergency button.

Disengage - Works exactly the same way as Taunt except it removes 100 threat instead of adding 300. While it removes much less threat than Taunt adds, this ability is still good at what it does. You'll likely never have to hit this however, as a DPS Warrior will always be tanky enough to deal with 1 or 2 stray mobs no problem.

Perfect Striking - The title of this skill is pretty apt; It is a 15 second activated buff that adds a comically large amount of attack rating to the Warrior. I believe the exact number is +100. This basically means that for 15 seconds you literally can't miss, and if you do I'd recommend buying a lottery ticket.

Looking at these two talent rows, we've got some varying usefulness based on what build you happen to be using, but in general all of the Warrior tree is valuable and worth taking at some point in your build's development. Tanks in particular need to pick up Threaten and Taunt as soon as they have access in order to do their job effectively.

Templar

Seeing as specializations in DA:O only have a single talent line, the only choice you make involving specializations is between them, rather than within them. Each character will have access to 2 of the 4 class specializations (except Sten lol) and the talents you'll find within the spec trees are much more high impact than what you'd find elsewhere. This means that picking the 2 specializations that help you accomplish your role is highly important, so we'll go over each one in detail, starting with Templar.

Templars are the anti-mage specialization, and thus almost every ability they have will revolve around making the life of enemy mages very difficult. The talent tree for Templars consist of Righteous Strike, Cleanse Area, Mental Fortress, and Holy Smite.

Righteous Strike - This is a passive that will cause your auto attacks to steal mana from mages equal to 25% of the damage you deal to them. From the outset, this might seem insanely good for dealing with enemy magic users, as it would likely only take a few auto attacks to completely empty their bar. The problem with this is that most mages are squishy as all hell, and a few autos would probably be enough to flat out kill them anyway. It's also important to note that this is really only useful for a dual wielding/2 Handed Warrior, as Shield users will hit far too slowly and with too low damage to make any real use of this. With that said, this never hurts for the few bosses in the game that use mana.

Cleanse Area - An activated AoE dispel that affects everyone except the caster. This talent has the potential to be insanely strong, but you need to take care while using it because it will dispel ALL magical effects, not just harmful ones. Be careful not to remove any of your own important buffs if you can avoid it, although you could always take a few seconds to turn them all back on. On the other hand, this talent can single handedly save a party member that has been paralyzed, Curse of Mortality'd, anything magical. It will also affect friendly non-party members that are nearby (they'll have blue location circles).

Mental Fortress - Another passive, and literally just gives you +20 mental resistance. This means that enemy stuns, fears, etc. will be much less likely to actually work on the Templar. This is very good, but not exactly gamechanging IMO. Just a nice talent to have if you aren't currently heading for anything else.

Holy Smite - An activated ability that targets an enemy and releases an explosion from their location. This will stun the target and knock down any nearby enemies, making this an incredibly useful AoE CC ability. It will also deal extra damage to enemy mages and drain a ♥♥♥♥ ton of their mana, but they have to be the primary target. If you are taking this talent expecting it to be Mana Clash for Warriors, you're wrong and will be disappointed. If you are taking this talent for the stun and area knockdown, it is one of the best in the game at locking down a group - Especially knowing that there is no friendly fire with this ability.

Overall, Templar is a very nice specialization to have for dual wielding DPS warriors specifically. Not only do they get the highest efficiency out of Righteous Strike, they also have very limited CC within their weapon talent tree and Holy Smite allows them to make up for this pitfall. Cleanse Area is enough to completely trivialize certain fights that may otherwise be difficult for one magical reason or another. If you are using a DW Warrior, I would highly consider this tree. This might be a hot take, but tanks should steer clear of this - they have two far better options available to them and Templar is more of an aggressive utility specialization rather than a defensive or supportive one.

Reaver

Remember when I said that tank Warriors shouldn't be picking up Templar? Yeah this is why. Reaver is basically meant to be the physical counterpart to a blood mage, and so all the abilities will reflect this. The talent line for Reavers consists of Devour, Frightening Appearance, Aura of Pain, and Blood Frenzy.

Devour - An activated AoE that targets nearby corpses (enemy or friendly) and draws energy from them to heal you. This ability seems awesome at first glance, but has some glaring issues that make it borderline useless. First off, the equation for the heal is (40+Spellpower)*0.4 for each corpse. Do you see the problem here? Warriors will never have any significant number for spellpower, and this means that you'd need quite a few corpses around you in order for a significant heal to take place. If you have that many corpses around, you've probably already won the fight. The other big problem with Devour is that corpses have some real jank around whether or not they can actually be targeted by this ability, with the result being that it only targets bodies dead for long enough that you can loot them (often blood pools under them as a sort of signal). Overall, this ability is required to move forward in the line, but if we had the option to skip it we absolutely would.

Frightening Appearance - Single target ability that horrifies the target for a while, and also has a passive benefit of making Taunt deal more threat. This ability, unlike the previous one, is busted as hell. First off, the boost to Taunt is always nice for making sure your tank keeps aggro of the enemies. The description will say that Threaten is also buffed, but this aspect of the ability is bugged and does nothing so ignore it. Now the big thing to know about this ability is that the horror effect is unaffected by magical resistance, which means that you can horrify enemies that a mage simply could not. One of the best single target CC's in the entire game.

Aura of Pain - A sustained AoE that will continuously deal flat spirit damage to both enemies and yourself at a rate of 6 per second. This modal will also reduce your health regeneration by 5, meaning that you will have a lot harder time regenerating health during combat (or stopping it entirely). While health regeneration can never go into the negatives, the spirit damage done to yourself is significant and cannot be reduced or mitigated in any way on your part. This creates an interesting problem for the tank - you are constantly taking damage on top of whatever the enemies are doing to you, but you are also dealing just as much damage spread to every enemy nearby. This ability is obviously powerful, but you will want to be very careful when and where you decide to activate it because it could very well just kill you.

Blood Frenzy - Another offensive sustained ability, although this one is far less powerful than Aura of Pain before it. This modal will cause you to gain +1 damage to your attacks for every 10% health that you are missing, up to +9 damage as you cannot be below 100% health (duh). It should be very apparent why this ability is so weak for what it is giving you; having the tank be low enough on health to get a decent bonus is just begging for a damage spike to kill him, and DPS Warriors shouldn't really be getting hit to begin with. On top of this, 9 damage is a pitiful buff when the trade off is being inches from death at any moment. Just to give you an idea, Aura of Pain will outdamage this ability at max effect every single second against only 2 targets (6x2=12>9) while also being far safer and easier to manage. Don't use this ability and save the talent point for something more useful. Oh and it also reduces your HP regeneration by 5 like Aura of Pain too because ♥♥♥♥ you I guess.

So with this look at Reaver, I hope you can see why I always prefer it on my tanks over Templar. While Blood Frenzy is straight up terrible, Aura of Pain and Frightening Appearance are incredibly strong abilities and Devour can still be situationally useful time to time. The passive stat bonuses you get for picking the spec are also much more useful to a tank than Templar's, plus Taunt becomes more effective after learning FA. If you're using a Shield tank, pick Reaver as your second specialization.

Berserker

This brings us to the Berserker, which is easy to go over because it is the de facto DPS specialization for Warrior. Whether or not you should pick Berserker is an incredibly easy decision; Tanks should never take it and DPS should always take it immediately. The talent tree consists of Berserk, Resilience, Constraint, and Final Blow.

Berserk - Basically the entire point of picking the specialization is right here. This is a sustained self-buff that will give you +8 damage to all of your attacks, as well as a hidden +10 mental resistance for some reason, making you harder to stun. +8 damage to attacks is ridiculously good, and is equal to being under 20% Blood Frenzy HP at all times. Insanely good for a DPS Warrior, take this as soon as humanly possible. Also make sure to reactivate this sustain for every fight, as it turns itself off once combat ends.

Resilience - A passive talent that will make Berserk even more useful. This causes Berserk to also now provide a small bonus to health regeneration and nature resistance. Nothing groundbreaking, but we need to take this in order to move on and the bonus is always nice.

Constraint - I forgot to mention earlier that Berserk will cause a -4 penalty to your stamina regeneration, and if you cross into negative total regeneration at all this will result in a slowly draining stamina bar. Taking Constraint will cause this penalty to disappear, which is very nice for allowing more ability spam. Take it as soon as it's available.

Final Blow - An activated single target nuke ability. This will dump literally your entire stamina bar and deal damage equal to half of the stamina that was lost. This talent is undeniably strong damage, but is sort of impractical to use. First off, using this and emptying your bar will usually deactivate Berserk and some other modals, which is bad. Second, while the damage is very very high for a single hit, you can probably get more total damage by just using all of your other abilities with a full stamina bar. This talent isn't bad or anything, I just think it's horribly inefficient.

As you can see, the benefits that this tree provides to a DPS Warrior are far too good to ever even think about giving up. If your Warrior is not a tank, it needs to be a Berserker if you want to do remotely optimal damage.

Champion

The final Warrior specialization in the game is Champion, and it is by far the most universally important spec for your Warriors to have. I would personally argue that every single Warrior in the game should always have Champion as one of their two specs, as the benefits and control this will give you are unmatched by anything else. The talent line consists of War Cry, Rally, Motivate, and Superiority.

War Cry - An activated AoE that does no damage, but will generate some threat and cause a -10 attack penalty on enemies. This isn't anything groundbreaking, but a -10 attack penalty on enemies will make them miss their attacks noticeably more often. Since Warriors will always be right in the middle of the action, this ability is always useful and even generates threat for tanks. (This ability does not stack with itself, you cannot double up and get -20 attack)

Rally - Modal AoE that buffs the Warrior and his party members, giving them +10 to defense as long as they're moderately close to the Warrior. This is just yet another defensive buff, making enemies even more likely to miss their attacks when combined with the penalty on War Cry. Keep in mind that Rally will reduce your own stamina regeneration by -2, although this usually isn't noticeable with decent gear.

Motivate - Rally now also gives you and allies a +10 attack boost, making your party more likely to land their attacks. This is literally free and is good, just take it.

Superiority - Passive that means War Cry will now knock down all enemies who are affected by the penalty. This passive is stupid and way stronger than it has any right to be. Remember Holy Smite from the Templar tree? War Cry is now Holy Smite that costs way less stamina, has a way shorter cooldown, debuffs enemies, and you also get to use Rally. One of the strongest single talent points in the game.

Champion is so good that every Warrior needs to have it for one of their specs with no exceptions. In fact, if you have two Warriors in your party, they BOTH need to have Champion because you get 2 War Cry knockdowns and Rally will stack with itself allowing you to get double the bonus. Get Champion, use it, love it.

Weapon and Shield // The Tank Warrior

Alright we're finally done with the Warrior specs, now we can dive into the actual meat of the builds. I have labeled this section both Weapon and Shield and The Tank Warrior, because these two terms are synonymous with each other. You will never use a Shield Warrior for DPS, and you will never tank with a Warrior that does not use a shield. Overall, this build will result in a Warrior that does low to moderate damage, but will hold aggro incredibly well and will be borderline impossible to kill if they have a proper healer behind them, in whatever shape that may be for you. As far as specializations, you should be taking Champion and Reaver as they both contribute to threat and make you harder to kill.

Unlike specializations, weapon trees have three different skill lines to progress through, so there are some legitimate choices to be made in this department. I'll go over each individual line during this section of the guide, and the next section or two will discuss the actual gameplay of the tank and the best options you have for gearing out.

The stat requirement for Weapon and Shield talents is dex, so be leveling this up enough to keep working through the tree as you go.

The Shield Bash Line
This line will focus on directly activated offensive abilities, and they usually have a utility purpose attached to them.

Shield Bash - This ability does exactly what it sounds like. You pick a target, walk up and bash them with your shield, knocking them down. This ability doesn't have much impact if used randomly, as knocking a single target down for a few seconds really isn't worth the stamina most of the time. Where this really shines is actually using the knockdown to save party members from abilities like Overwhelm, which otherwise can outright kill that party member. Save this ability for that and you'll love it.

Shield Pummel - Activated ability that does a short combo and stunning on the last hit. It's important to note that even if your attacks miss the target, you can still stun them at the end. Again, just like Shield Bash, this is very low impact when used without much thought, but can save an ally's life single handedly if used correctly. There are some monsters you simply can't knock down with Shield Bash, but you CAN stun them with this and cause them to release the ally from a grab attack. This and Shield Bash should probably be the first two shield talents you learn as a tank warrior.

Overpower - This is sort of a cross between the previous two skills. Activates a combo that bashes the target three times and knocks down on the final hit. This should be used in an identical way to Shield Bash, but also has another useful aspect. Overpower will always cause criticals on each hit, and when combined with abilities that freeze such as Cone of Cold, has a relatively high chance of shattering whatever it is that you're hitting. Not a huge priority within the tree, save it for later when you've gotten the other more important skills.

Assault - Causes a four hit combo on the enemy target that does 40% less damage on each successful hit. This ability is actually horrible and really shouldn't ever be used, as it costs a good chunk of stamina that could be used on literally anything else. Don't take this unless you just have points to burn.

The Shield Defense Line
This line forms the core of the tank build, providing very powerful sustained buffs to your tanking ability as well as some vital passives that make your survivability with a shield much stronger.

Shield Defense - Very good defensive sustained ability. Gives the tank a small -5 penalty to attack rating, but will provide +5 defense and +5 missile deflection, making melee and ranged attacks less likely to land. This mode is mutually exclusive with the other modal abilities found within the Shield tree, so you will have to pick one. Overall, this ability is very strong early on to keep your tank from dying, but will be outclassed by Shield Wall later on. Pick this up very early and keep it on at all times.

Shield Balance - This just removes the attack penalty from Shield Defense. This is nice, but ultimately useless as you'll be switching to Shield Wall around midgame. Too bad this is required in order to reach said ability. This isn't super high priority until you want to dive into Shield Wall, so you can save it for when you want to make the switch.

Shield Wall - This ability is just Shield Defense but better tbh. Modal ability that gives the tank +5 to armor and +10 to missile deflection. This means that the attacks will be more likely to land than Shield Defense (for now), but when they do land they will do less damage. More missile deflection is a straight upgrade. The ability is supposed to reduce your damage by 20% while active, but thanks to a bug it does not reduce damage at all. Overall, Shield Defense is better until we get a few key talents elsewhere in the tree, so don't switch as soon as you get it.

Shield Expertise - A passive ability that makes Shield Defense give an additional +5 to your defense rating, making you even harder to hit while this is active. The big kicker however, is that Shield Wall now makes the Warrior completely immune to most knockdowns in the game. Get this immediately at level 12 when it opens up and swap to Shield Wall, as it will now be the best modal. You can also swap if you chose Shield Mastery at 12.

The Shield Block Line
This line is very forgettable with 3/4 of the talents being pure passive bonuses, but is actually vital for making your Warrior harder to kill.

Shield Block - Simple passive that means enemies will be unable to flank (read:Backstab) the tank on it's shield carrying side. In practice a bug actually reverses this, so the enemies will have backstabs blocked on the sword carrying half. Weird, but pretty useful for stopping rogues. Pick this up whenever you feel like it, but don't wait terribly long as the later talents in this line are very good.

Shield Cover - The third and final modal available to tank Warriors, and gives +10 missile deflection. That's it. This is just Shield Wall without all the other benefits we've mentioned so far. Take the talent, but never activate it for any reason. It's mutually exclusive with the other two as well.

Shield Tactics - Passive that just completely turns off all backstabs on the tank. This talent is pretty insane for fights where you are forced to be surrounded and some of the enemies are rogues, otherwise doesn't do a whole lot. Despite being just okay, you need to make sure this is taken before level 12 when the last skill for each line is available, because...

Shield Mastery - This is another pure passive but gives you a ridiculous amount of value. Causes Shield Bash line to all be more effective and deal more damage, gives Shield Defense another +5 defense, gives Shield Wall a +10 defense making it even more busted, and gives Shield Cover an extra +10 missile deflection that you'll never use. This talent is every bit as important as Shield Expertise and should be taken immediately at level 13 if you did not pick it at 12.

I hope it's clear now why I said that this tree is only for tanking and should never be used for anything else. Almost every talent in the tree is defensive in nature and even the offensive ones have more important utility purposes for saving party members rather than damage. You should ideally get every single talent in the tree except for Assault, and this means that the decisions you make are more down to personal preference up until level 12 when you should be prepped and ready to pick up Shield Expertise/Mastery. As long as you're doing that and swapping to Shield Wall at that point in the game, congrats you're leveling up optimally!

Tank Tactics and Gearing

Now that we've gone over all of the talents that your tank is going to have slotted into the bar, we'll talk about how to actually apply them as well as what gear you need to stick on the Warrior. Overall, Warrior tanks are probably the easiest of the three tanks to use because they don't have many buttons to press and maintain threat very easily.

Basically, you're going to maintain your chosen shield passive (Defense/Wall) at all times, maintain Rally at all times, and maintain Threaten at all times. Use Taunt immediately at the start of combat and again if you lose aggro for some reason. Use War Cry on cooldown to keep enemies debuffed and knocked down. Use your Shield Bash/Pummel/Overpower whenever an ally gets grabbed or overwhelmed by a dog. That's really about it, you can honestly set all of this up within the tactics menu for a tank and they will literally play themselves without any input from the player. Very simple and very effective playstyle once you get things set up behind the scenes with stats and gear.

As far as stat priority goes, you need to get up to around 42 strength for the best armor and weapons in the game. Going above gear requirements is pointless because you won't be doing much damage anyway compared to a DPS Warrior, just rely on runes and Mage buffs. Put maybe 20 constitution if you feel like you're getting damage spikes that are too high, and then dump literally every other point you get into dexterity. Dex will increase your defense rating, meaning that every point put into this stat is going to make you harder and harder to hit. You'll eventually reach a point where you can tank large amounts of mobs and maybe get hit once every few seconds with all of them trying their hardest to hit you.

Gear
Weapon - Starfang is the best sword in the game, so use this UNLESS you also have a DPS party member that wants to use it. In those cases, I'd say use Maric's Blade with Cailan's Shield for the set bonus.

Shield - Fade Wall / Cailan's Shield with above sword.

Armor - Cailan's full armor set or Warden Commander set will end up being best for you, they're pretty interchangeable based on what sort of stats you find yourself wanting. If you opt for Warden Commander, you should use the Rock Knocker or Corruption if another party member is already taking Helm of Honnleath.

Rings - Lifegiver is absolutely required, giving you a disgusting boost to your bulkiness. The other ring is much more open for personal preference between the Harvest Festival Ring and the Key to the City. Use whichever you feel is best as they are very similar. Ring of Ages is also an option, but the overwhelming majority of damage in this game will be physical.

Belt - Andruil's Blessing and the Cinch of Skillful Maneuvering are both your best options, so use whichever one you please. Andruil's Blessing should always be used by someone in the party though.

Neck - The Spellward is the best amulet in the game, so use it. In fact, make sure you take advantage of Bodahn's restock after Lothering so that you can buy two of them.

Some items are leveled, so if you need to upgrade them to the next tier just sell them to a merchant, close the window, and buy them back upgraded. Also keep in mind that any item with "+ healing received" is bugged and this modifier does literally nothing.

This gear setup will generally maximize your defensiveness and make your life much easier. If you went Templar for some reason and you are having trouble with a spellcaster in any given fight, go ahead and swap your chestpiece to the Knight Commander's Plate to become basically immune to spells. This situation shouldn't ever really come up though, and is more of a Solo run issue because of tools like Mana Clash.

The Dual Wield Tree

Now we get into the first of the two DPS trees for Warrior, which is based around dual wielding. When compared to using 2 handed weapons, this type of Warrior will do much more sustained DPS and has more access to AoE damage. 2 handers on the other hand will have far better burst and CC at their disposal, but overall these two choices are similar in usefulness to a party. As far as specializations, you should be using Berserker and Champion in all situations as they are just flat out better than the other two for dealing damage. Templar is most effective on a dual wield Warrior, but giving up Berserker is idiotic and Champion is simply too good to pass up.

The Dual Weapon Training Line
This tree is entirely passive stat buffs that make dual wielding more effective.

Dual Weapon Training - This is a passive that gives you a 25% attribute bonus with the offhand weapon. Dual wielding comes with a penalty to your offhand, but this talent essentially makes it to where both sides are now equal to the main hand. This talent is mandatory for dual wielding and should be taken first before any other points in the tree.

Dual Weapon Finesse - Very simple passive stat buff that gives you a permanent +5 in both attack and defense. You'll land more hits and enemies will miss you more often, just take it as soon as you can.

Dual Weapon Expert - Causes your auto attacks to apply a small bleed to the target, dealing damage over time. This also gives a flat 2.5% melee crit chance, which is very nice to have and more useful than the bleed. Be very careful, as once you take this talent, and form of self damage will apply your own bleed to yourself due to a bug. This includes abilities like Aura of Pain.

Dual Weapon Mastery - Up until now, you will have been forced to use a dagger in your offhand slot. This talent will finally allow you to use two full sized weapons in each hand, and also gives a nice -2.5% to your fatigue. While this ability is definitely very useful, there is a bit of a trade off here because of the fact that dexterity increases dagger damage. Basically, your abilities will undeniably do more damage because of the higher base stats on swords, but your auto attack DPS may actually decrease due to slower attack speed and swords not getting damage from dex. In practice, this matters little and you can pick swords or daggers as they're both useful.

The Dual Striking Line
This is basically the single target skill line for dual wielding, and all of the abilities will reflect that.

Dual Striking - This ability is a sustained modal that causes you to attack with both weapons at the same time rather than alternating hands. Attack rolls still happen for both sides, meaning one side can miss while the other still lands, and weapon buffs will apply independently for each hand. In theory, this literally just doubles your auto attack damage, although it does come with the caveat that you can no longer critically hit. However, this ability has an absolutely crippling bug that causes one of the three possibl attack animations to always miss no matter what. This means that on average, you will be doing 0 damage on 33% of your attacks minimum. This alone causes the talent to go from being amazing to being downright frustrating and not worth using in my opinion. Never activate it unless you're going to download a patch for it.

Riposte - A very simple single target attack that hits twice. The first hit will stun the target, and if the stun is successful then the next hit will always crit. This is pretty good for interrupting enemies who are doing something important or grabbing allies, so I'd personally save it for those situations if possible.

Cripple - Another very simple single target attack. This causes an automatic crit and debuffs the target with -40% movement speed as well as -10 to both attack and defense. The automatic crit is decent, but the debuff is pretty huge for a priority target or something that needs to be kited.

Punisher - Single target attack that causes a three hit combo, the third dealing damage from both weapons. Each hit has a chance of causing a -10 debuff to both attack and defense. The final hit from both weapons also has a good chance of knocking the target down. Overall this ability is very strong for damage, albeit a bit expensive on stamina.

The Dual Weapon Sweep Line
Where the middle row is mostly CC and single target abilities, this bottom row is the AoE line of dual wielding.

Dual Weapon Sweep - Causes a quick sweep 180 degrees in front of you that hits with both weapons towards the center of the arc. Each hit will also do 50% more damage than a normal auto. This attack can never crit, but also never misses. This ability is incredibly stamina efficient and does a ton of burst damage, so it should be used as often as possible even in single target situations.

Flurry - Three hit combo that comes out faster than normal auto attacks. The first hit seems to deal damage from both weapons for some reason, and I can't really tell if that is intended or not. This ability is very good burst but isn't anytihng too crazy, just use it when you want to hit something hard.

Momentum - This is the big one for this tree. A modal ability that when kept up, will increase your attack speed by a colossal 43% at the cost of -2 stamina regeneration. This ability is your absolute highest priority to get while dual wielding, and should be taken as fast as you can possible path to it because of the sheer damage buff. It is one of the biggest single point damage increases in the entire game. Turn it on and never let it fall off.

Whirlwind - Sort of just does exactly what the ability sounds like; You spin around and hit all enemies around you for normal damage. This is basically Dual Weapon Sweep but hits all the way around you instead of an arc.

Just like the Weapon and Shield tree, you are going to eventually want every single talent point that exists here, so the only real decisions you make are concerning the order to get them in. As I said before, the only priority talents are the first two from the top row and making sure you get Momentum as fast as possible. Every other talent is really down to personal preference so just get whatever you feel will be most useful at the time.

The Attack Speed Bug

This is an extra section that needs to be added because of the implications that it can have on your damage as a dual wield Warrior or Rogue. Momentum is definitely the most important ability that a dual wielder has access to, causing their attack animations to be cut down by 30% (a 43% increase in attack speed). So, attack speed is a base value of 1 and this ability subtracts a flat 0.3. Easy.

The real problem comes in when you start stacking this attack speed with other sources of attack speed, specifically the Mage spell Haste. Haste is a sustained buff that affects the entire party, speeding you up and causing an additional 0.25 reduction in attack animations. When combined with Momentum, this reaches a total of -0.55 to your base attack speed value of 1. Sounds super good right?

The problem is that there is a horrific bug causing your attack speed to be automatically set to the regular base 1 if the total animation modifier exceeds -0.5. Since Haste + Momentum will = 0.55, this means you lose all attack speed bonuses from both skills by having them active at the same time. So while using Haste to help boost your attack speed seems like a perfect idea, you will actually lose damage by doing this and thus makes this a trap combination that you should never make use of UNLESS you activate Precise Striking. Precise Striking will add a small +0.1, bringing the total attack speed modifier to -0.45, which is great. Rogues do not have access to Precise Striking obviously, so they cannot use this workaround.

This bug will apply to all sources of attack speed as well, not just Haste. Keep this in mind when stacking them and you should be fine, just remember never to go below 0.5 animation speed.

DW Tactics and Gearing

Keeping in line with the Tank Warrior, DPS Warriors are just as easy to play and set up tactics for. There really isn't much nuance going on gameplay wise, we don't have a huge amount of abilities and so you'll spend most of your time sort of just spamming them around. Since Warriors have Death Blow to restore stamina, you'll be much better at spamming abilities for damage rather than auto attacking like a Rogue would. Warriors also naturally pump points into strength, meaning that using full sized weapons is much more accessible.

As far as gameplay, this is even simpler than the Tank. Keep up the Momentum modal, activate Berserk at the beginning of every single fight, and make sure you always have Rally activated. As long as you have these sustainables active, you can sort of just spam whatever ability looks good to you, saving Riposte in particular for if you want to interrupt something big. Don't touch Final Blow if you can help it, it just drains all your stamina and deactivates important sustainables. War Cry will have the knockdown effect, and you should be using this often to keep enemies from acting. Tactics should be very easy to set up, although you may want to personally control the use of the AoE abilities to maximize the amount of targets hit. Dual Striking will still be an overall damage increase despite the bug, but I can't handle watching all the missed attacks so I just leave it off anyway.

The stat priority for DW Warriors is going to be nothing but strength. Dexterity will be important for hitting the requirements on the dual wield tree, but once you hit 36 in dex every single other point should be funneled into strength for damage. Willpower is an option if you feel like you can't spam enough, but if you game Death Blow it shouldn't matter.

Gear
Weapons: Starfang and Keening Blade are going to be doing the most damage by far, so these are your best in slot. Put 3 of the biggest frost runes you can find on Keening, they have odd scaling that makes the damage get out of control fast.

Armor: Just like the tank, you should be using Warden Commander armor or Cailan's armor. It doesn't matter which one as they perform very similarly so use whichever you did not put on the tank.

Neck: Technically the High Regard of House Dace would be the optimal choice for damage, but only if your party doesn't use a Rogue as they need it more. If you're not using this, just put on The Spellward to make yourself more durable as well as adding some free stamina. You can get two of these.

Rings: The best rings in the game for DW Warriors are going to be the Dawn Ring and Harvest Festival Ring. Dawn Ring is gotten very late in the game, so use Ring of the Warrior or Key to the City until you get there.

Belt: Andruil's Blessing is the best belt in the game for non-mages, so use it. If you want someone else in the party to have this, use the Cinch of Skillfull Maneuvering.

This setup will result in a Warrior that does very strong damage, especially through abilities, as well as being very tanky. Because dex is going to naturally be much higher than a 2 handed Warrior, this build has the ability to basically tank for the party on a small scale if you ever need to. Threaten and Taunt are taken in order to get talents behind them, so you'll naturally have the toolset available to you anyway.

The 2 Handed Tree

We come to the final build option for Warriors, which is another DPS tree. This one focuses on using a single 2 handed weapon, and is actually the only build in the entire game that will use these weapons. In comparison to dual wielding, this tree will be doing a bit less damage in my experience but have way higher burst and CC capability. Just like before, your specializations should always be Berserker and Champion because they just give you the most damage. The other options really can't compare unless you're going to sit at 10% health all the time for Reaver (you won't).

The Pommel Strike Line
This tree focuses primarily on different forms of CC for the Warrior

Pommel Strike - This is literally just Shield Bash but for DPS. It does no damage and knocks the target down. This isn't particularly useful for damage but it can free allies from grabs and overwhelms, as well as interrupt other important abilities. Use it exactly how a tank would use Shield Bash.

Indomitable - This ability is a sustained buff to yourself that will make you completely and utterly immune to stuns, knockdowns, and slips. It'll also give you +1 to your damage which is cool. While the upkeep is pretty drastic at 60 stamina reserved, this mode will make your Warrior basically impossible to stop and with the amount of enemy CC in this game, that's massive.

Stunning Blows - Pure passive that gives your critical strikes a 50% chance to stun the target. Crit chance can be stacked relatively high in this game, especially with help from party members, so you'll actually see something get stunned by this ability at least once a fight. It also cannot be resisted at all, so you can theoretically stun anything that isn't hardcoded to be immune.

Critical Strike - Weirdly enough, this ability is almost completely inferior to an earlier talent elsewhere in the tree. This is an activated ability with a 60 second cooldown that just inflicts an automatic crit. If an enemy is below 20% health, they will instantly die. While this ability is still very strong for on demand burst, there's not much reason to use it or prioritize it compared to your other options in the tree, so save it for last.

The Sunder Arms Line
This section of the tree is almost entirely devoted to debuffing enemies and getting through enemy armor

Sunder Arms - This ability is an activated combo that does two quick full damage hits, and also reduces the target's attack by 10 for a short while. This is actually the best overall damage ability you will have as a 2H Warrior, mainly due to the low cost, short cooldown, double hit. Each hit can also crit, making it even stronger. Take it as your very first talent in the tree and spam it all the time.

Shattering Blows - While this talent says that you get a bonus to damage against constructs (Golems, sylvans, corpses, skeletons, etc.), there is an unfortunate bug that makes this talent do literally nothing. Womp womp.

Sunder Armor - This ability is almost exactly the same as Sunder Arms, but with higher cost and higher cooldown. The debuff also hits the target with -20 armor rather than reducing attack. Just like Sunder Arms, spam this if you want some big burst as it is still very efficient and powerful.

Destroyer - Pure passive that causes every critical hit to reduce the target's armor by 5 for a few seconds. This effect does not stack at all. It should be clear to anyone that this talent (and honestly the tree as a whole) is very weak and is not a priority whatsoever, so you can save these abilities for last after you've gotten Sunder Arms. Disappointing

The Mighty Blow Line
After the tragedy that was the middle row, we are now to the big boys in the tree

Mighty Blow - Activated ability that inflicts an instant, automatic crit on the target with a very short cooldown and very low cost. This ability is basically just a better version of Critical Strike, and it's also at the very beginning of the tree. Take it ASAP and use it just like Sunder Arms.

Powerful Swings - Modal ability that provides +5 to your damage while subtracting 10 from both your attack and defense. This is a lot of damage, but you're going to be missing and getting hit noticeably more often. Keep it active at all times but if you start missing too often, take it off. Hitting for less damage is better than missing for 0 damage.

Two Handed Strength - Pure passive that increases the armor penetration of your weapon by 25%, and also reduces the penalties from earlier down to -5. This makes Powerful Swings much more palatable and the armor penetration is crazy good.

Two Handed Sweep - This ability is crazy. An activated AoE that does big damage and knocks down all targets in a circle around you. This ability is basically War Cry, but it also does the damage of a Mighty Blow to enemies instead of debuffing them. This is the highest priority for you to pick up as a 2H Warrior and it's also very easy to prioritize because the other two rows of skills aren't exactly the most enticing options.

You'll eventually have all the talents in this tree, so whether or not they are good or bad is mostly irrelevant. Just make sure you're pathing down the bottom row as soon as you can, then the top row, then the middle row. Take Sunder Arms early for the damage efficiency. That's really about it.

2H Tactics and Gearing

2H tactics are very similar to the DW build because your role within the party is identical on top of having identical specializations. Basically keep up Indomitable, Powerful Swings, Rally, and Berserk for every single fight. Don't touch final blow. Spam Mighty Blow and Sunder Arms, use Critical Strike and Sunder Armor on bigger targets because they're less stamina efficient. Two Handed Sweep and War Cry need to be used on as many targets as you can fit into a single cast of each. Make sure you're gaming the Death Blow talent by giving the Warrior all the killing blows so that you never run out of steam and have to sit and auto attack. While a DW Warrior is mostly fine using autos, the 2H build has no access to Momentum and your time between hits will be painful. As long as you're doing all that, you'll have a good time.

Gear
I'm not going to dive into the specifics of gear beyond the weapon for this build because it's literally identical to the DW Warrior gear. The only difference will be down to the weapon you pick, as you obviously will be using a different category than two main handers.

Weapon: There are 2 real high end options you have when considering what weapon you're going to use, and some other options that are less optimal but close enough to use.

The biggest two choices are going to be the Dragonbone Cleaver or the Chasind Great Maul. Dragonbone Cleaver will be giving you a bit more damage on each hit, while the CGM is going to give you more stamina to play with throughout a fight. Either of these are insanely good weapons though.

Starfang has a 2 handed option that you can pick when forging the sword, but is notably worse damage than either the CGM or DBC. You can certainly use Starfang, but IMO it would be a travesty not to pick the main hand version that is miles better for other characters.

Other than these, there are plenty of strong 2 handers all over the game at different stages, so just use whatever seems best until you get access to one of these that I listed.

Warriors and Archery // Why you shouldn't do it

We're finally on to the last weapon tree of the Warrior, and instead of actually pretending that this build is viable I'm going to go into detail about why you shouldn't be doing an Archery Warrior. There are plenty of reasons not to do this, the biggest of all being that Rogues are flat out better and more useful than Warriors when built this way. Let's go ahead and break down why Warrior archers are so comically bad.

First off, the entire point of playing an Archer is to deal damage from a long range. This has two sides to it, one being safety from enemies and the other being safety from your own Mages. AoE attacks are very dangerous in this game, and if you have a well built Mage you'll have to contend with friendly fire from yourself. Archery solves this issue for DPS as they can just not stand where things are blowing up. If you didn't want to be at a safe range while dealing damage, you would just play a melee character right?

Let's look at specializations. Berserk is an ability that all DPS Warriors will pick up, but it literally cannot be used with a bow/crossbow in your hand. Amazing. While you could theoretically swap to a melee weapon and swap back to ranged, this will deactivate all of your ranged sustainable abilities and overall be an annoying time sink at the beginning of every single fight. It does technically work though, so there's that.

Next we look at Champion, because that's the next obvious choice. War Cry will never be useful to you, as you'll never be close enough to debuff/knockdown more than one enemy at a time. The same can be said of Rally, as you'd have the conflict of wanting allies to stay within the buff, but also wanting to stay far away from enemies that they're fighting. I guess you could stick your character into melee range with a bow, but this begs the question of why you aren't building like a normal person if you'll be in melee anyway.

Reaver is horrible for archery, as you don't want to be close enough to use Aura of Pain, you'll be too far away to use the stun or Devour, and you won't be getting hit so Blood Frenzy is worthless. This specialization, while strong, has comically bad synergy with being a ranged damage dealer.

Finally we have Templar, and I bet if you paid close attention earlier you'll already see the problem with this one. Righteous Strike only applies to melee attacks! That's right, the mana draining hits will be a completely dead, wasted talent point along with Mental Fortress as you'll almost never be targeted by things you'd want to resist. This leaves Holy Smite, which is admittedly useful no matter what build you're using, and Cleanse Area which is good but limited in scope as you'd have to reposition in order to get close enough for use.

Gearing out an Archery Warrior is also a huge pain because of the interaction with aim speed and heavier armor types. In DA:O, attack speed with a melee weapon is NOT the same as aim speed with a bow. These are two separate stats. One of the biggest draws to playing a Warrior is having the stats and fatigue to make good use of massive armor sets, but your aim speed will decrease dramatically as your chestpiece gets heavier and heavier. When wearing a massive chestpiece, your attack speed will be so slow that you become a useless party member, even slower than a 2 handed weapon.

Yes, you read that right, if you play an Archery Warrior, YOU WILL HAVE TO GEAR THEM EXACTLY LIKE A ROGUE. While a Rogue can use stat boosting items to pull together the Strength for some of their best in slot gear, a Warrior will have to actively avoid using one of their biggest strengths in order to do even remotely similar damage.

Then we get to the Warrior talents specifically, which have some serious anti-synergies with Archery as a whole. First off, Threaten, Taunt, and Disengage are completely worthless to an archer because you'll never want to tank, and you'll never be in melee range to hit Disengage.

Next, we have Death Blow, which still functions but is not useful due to the fact that Archery builds focus entirely on using auto attacks rather than spamming abilities. This is because of the fact that once Archery hits it's peak, your autos will be doing so much damage that it is an overall DPS loss to sit and wait for the slow casting abilities to come out. Bravery is also gutted in usefulness because you'd need to be in melee range to get the big boost in critical chance.

Finally, we have Precise Striking and Perfect Striking. The main stat for Archery is dexterity, which means you will almost never need to touch either of these skills because you'll never be missing anyway. The crit chance from Precise Striking also doesn't work on ranged weapons because whoever made the Warrior decided to give them the Archery tree as a cruel joke.

Overall I think this entire build is basically a big joke, and while you can theoretically make it happen, I really don't understand why you'd want to. Archery Warriors become the strongest build in the game come Awakening, but the expansion has respec tomes so there is never a reason to play one in Origins, even if you plan to switch! Save yourself the trouble and avoid this entirely, or just don't listen to me but I'm not helping you build one.

If you did build one it would be better than a Mage doing a Shapeshifter build though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rogue Overview

That's all there is to say about building a Warrior, so now we arrive at the other physical based class. Rogues are much less durable than Warriors, and have no ability to function as a tank or as a healer, so they are pigeonholed into being DPS. This isn't so bad though, as Rogues are capable of putting out significantly more single target damage than both a Warrior and a Mage, making it ideal to carry around at least one with you for most of the game.

Rogues have a few mechanics that are notable because they are unique to Rogues; Warriors and Mages do not have access to these abilities. First off is lockpicking - Rogues can unlock doors and chests throughout the environment based on either their cunning skill or level of the Deft Hands talent. Rogues also are able to backstab targets in melee range, causing automatic critical hits no matter what so long as you are positioned behind the target (the red targeting circle will be thicker and darker to show the proper angle). This class also receives a skill point to spend every 2 levels instead of every 3, meaning they have more access to crafting skills. Rogues also have by far the biggest universal tree, comprised of 4 unique talent rows.

The Dirty Fighting Line
The first two lines for Rogue are a mix of different effects that will change the way you play this character in various ways

Dirty Fighting - Very simple single target stun that can only be done from point blank range. Every Rogue in the game starts out with this no matter what, so if you ever need to immediately stop an enemy from doing something, this is one of your best bets.

Combat Movement - This talent is a pure passive that provides a free +2% melee crit chance as well as a better attack bonus for flanking. More importantly, it greatly increases the angle for backstabs meaning you can backstab the target from much farther away from their back than you could before. The exact angle goes from 120 degrees to a full 180 degrees.

Coup de Grace - This causes all melee attacks made on a stunned or otherwise immobilized target to become backstabs. Dirty Fighting now becomes an offensive ability that will let you backstab from the front, and other CC's that your party can use also gain this utility for you. Awesome talent for when you can't get behind something, also gives you a hidden +1% melee crit chance because why not.

Feign Death - Unfortunately this line does not finish strong. Feign Death does pretty much what you'd expect, you drop to the ground and after a short delay you will enter a modified stealth mode where you lose all threat. This is good for keeping yourself alive, but is ultimately useless because you cannot take any action or move without ending the effects. If your Rogue is out-aggroing the tank, something is horribly wrong.

The Below the Belt Line
This line is similar to the one above, except focusing entirely on offensive skills and abilities until the last point.

Below the Belt - This is a very weak single target ability that does normal damage, lowers the target's defense by a measly 5 and slows them by 50%. This ability is pretty underwhelming even at level 1, however is required in order to reach Lethality.

Deadly Strike - Another pathetic single target damage ability, this time attacking with +10 attack rating for this strike and penetrating 10 of the target's armor. Again, this is extremely underwhelming but is required in order to reach Lethality.

Lethality - The single most important talent point a Rogue can take is right here and it's a pure passive. It adds a free +10% melee critical chance, which is huge. More importantly, if your cunning stat is higher than your strength stat, it will be used for damage calculations instead. When considering the fact that the two best Rogue specializations, coercion, armor penetration, and lockpicking all scale with your cunning, taking this talent makes cunning by far the more valuable stat over dexterity. I believe cunning builds are always better than dexterity, and this is why.

Evasion - Pure passive that grants a 20% chance to dodge any attack or knockdown/slip effect. This seems awesome at first for the defensive benefit, but remember that dodging attacks like this has an animation that must play and it will often interrupt whatever you're doing at the moment. This can result in a net damage loss over time as your attacks frequently get interrupted by you dodging something when you'd rather just take the hit and keep slapping people.

The Deft Hands Tree
I'm not going to go over each point in this line because they all do the exact same thing at increasing levels of strength. Each one will add a certain amount of cunning to your character, but ONLY for the purposes of lockpicking - you will not gain any of the other usual benefits from having the stat and it will not reflect in your base stats. If you are building with dexterity as your mainstat and still want to open locks, these points may be worth your time. If you are building a cunning based Rogue, this talent line is completely worthless because at 70 cunning you will be able to open every lock in the game without spending a single point here. TLDR: Dex = Good Cun = Bad

The Stealth Tree
Again, each point in this line does the exact same thing at increasing effectiveness. Stealth starts out as a pretty useless ability, then as you go on you become able to use consumables, activate things in the environment, and even stealth in the middle of combat to disappear. The problem with this ability is that it doesn't really do anything. Sure you can drop aggro, but Feign Death can do the same thing and it's only one point. You could reposition to start out the fight in a certain spot, but why? I never take any points in stealth because it's just not a useful thing to be able to do within the context of this game. This isn't WoW, you don't get some sort of ridiculous opener or the ability to avoid fights altogether.

Assassin

We arrive at the first of the Rogue specializations, which also happens to be one of the strongest you can take for any build. This spec focuses on doing very large amounts of single target damage (shocker), and it is one of the best in the game at achieving that purpose. This is absolutely required on all DW Rogues, but is still very useful for Archery from the first talent point alone. The skill line consists of Mark of Death, Exploit Weakness, Lacerate, and Feast of the Fallen.

Mark of Death - Basically the entire reason you're taking this specialization at all. This ability is a targeted debuff that causes the target to take 20% more damage from all sources, not just the Rogue. This point gives some insane value that honestly competes with some Mage spells in impact, and is the entire reason an Archer even picks the spec to begin with. Every Rogue should have this, although keep in mind it does not stack with itself.

Exploit Weakness - Pure passive that adds a small amount of damage to each backstab you land, scaling with your cunning stat. While the damage you're getting seems small, it adds up very quickly when considering that flat damage on daggers gets out of control very quickly. Your attack speed is already incredibly high, meaning that over the course of a fight you're applying this bonus dozens of times. At 75 cunning, you'll be getting almost 12 extra damage per hit. Huge.

Lacerate - Ignore whatever this ability tells you because it is bugged. This talent does literally nothing and is a waste of a point, only take it if you want to reach the last point in the skill tree.

Feast of the Fallen - This is basically the Rogue's version of Death Blow. If you kill an enemy with a backstab, you gain a chunk of stamina back in return. While Death Blow is an incredible tool for Warriors to keep up their reserves for ability spam, Rogues really don't have much use for that sort of thing. Backstabs are free, and running out of stamina really isn't much of a concern since you'll be spending the majority of your time using auto attacks. I'd personally skip this, it is far less useful than it sounds on paper.

So interestingly, we have 2 out of the 4 talents in this specialization being basically worthless, yet it is still the best overall Rogue spec (unless you're a cunning Rogue, then Bard is better). This is solely due to the raw damage you're getting out of Mark of Death, plus Exploit Weakness if you're using daggers. The fact that you can get so much value from the tree with only 2 talent points is actually somewhat of a strength if you think about it, because it allows you to get what you need and then spend your points elsewhere, unlike specs such as Templar that stick their most useful ability at the ass end of the tree. Overall very strong, even for an Archer, and you can't go wrong when picking it.

Bard

Bard is a bit of an interesting one because the effectiveness of the specialization depends entirely on whether or not you are using cunning as your main stat. For dexterity based Rogues, Bard will not be providing any real sizable bonuses to you or the party and should be avoided in favor of Duelist. If you ARE running a cunning/Lethality Rogue, Bard suddenly becomes the best option for you in all situations because of the big scaling you get on the talents here. While from the outside this seems like a boring buff spec that doesn't do any damage or have any flashy abilities, this will actually constitute just about as much damage as Assassin. Except for this one, it is applied to your entire party. The spec line consists of Song of Valor, Distraction, Song of Courage, and Captivating Song.

Song of Valor - This is a sustained ability that the Rogue can keep up to buff party members, granting everyone with no range limit a boost to mana/stamina regeneration that scales with cunning. If my math is correct, the calculation for this will provide +1.15 exactly if the Bard has a cunning of 75. This is pathetic and never worth using, and that's a good thing because it clears up competition for the real buff later on.

Distraction - Activated ability that disorients a chosen target for a few seconds and will reset their threat to 1 for all members of your party. This is an interesting effect, as it can be used to dump Mage spells into an enemy and then wipe the threat board clean if you need to. I've personally never had to use this ability, so take that for what you will. It's still decent CC.

Song of Courage - This is the reason you're picking Bard, and unlike SoV it is actually a respectable buff. When activated, this will give a buff that scales with cunning and provides boosts to damage, attack rating, and critical chance. Similarly to SoV, this has no range limit. To give you an idea of how powerful this buff can be, let's look at what you'd be getting if your Rogue has a cunning stat of 75. At this level you'd get +9.5 attack, +5.25 damage, and +9.5 critical chance. 5 flat damage is nothing to scoff at, and the attack bonuses mean you will be hitting noticeably more often than usual. Finally, having a higher crit chance will make all of your party members much better at dealing damage over time. The only real drawback is that these bonuses won't do much for Mages, meaning that Bard's prefer to have a mostly physical party rather than Mage spam setups.

Captivating Song - This is a sustained mode that is actually very similar to Shale's Stone Aura. Activating this will completely brick the Bard, making them unable to take any actions at all other than canceling the ability. In return, nearby enemies will be stunned for 3 seconds every 4 seconds unless they pass a check against the Bard's cunning. I've never really had to use this skill, but theoretically it disables enemies 75% of the time and there's nothing they can do about it if they don't resist the stun. Pretty cool if you find a use for it, I never really did though.

While underwhelming at first, Song of Courage hard carries this spec from being niche and hard to apply in realistic scenarios, into being a very strong physical buff to the party while giving the Rogue even more ways to cripple and disable the enemy during fights. All cunning based Rogues should have this chosen as one of their two specializations.

Duelist

This is a bit of an oddball specialization, mainly because it generally falls short of what Assassin and Bard can both do for you when cunning is your main stat. If you are allergic to one of the former for whatever reason, then Duelist will definitely be your go to over Ranger. The talents found within this line are nothing groundbreaking, but they offer a consistent improvement over the course of the entire game that is very simple and easy to make use of without any sort of hassle or thought really.

Dueling - Sustained ability that gives you a bonus of +10 to your attack rating. This is a noticeable boost especially early on, but by the end of the game it's a pretty meh ability overall. Definitely not worth taking the spec just for this.

Upset Balance - An activated ability that strikes the target, dealing no damage but reducing their defense by a whopping -20 as well as slowing them a bit. Losing 20 defense is pretty huge in all stages of the game, especially when considering your teammates will likely have ways of further dropping defense levels. This can result in a huge damage increase with everyone suddenly hitting far more often.

Keen Defense - Pure passive that improves your Dueling sustain, allowing it to now also provide a +10 boost to defense while active. This means that Dueling is now identical to a Champion's Rally, but without the aura or penalty to stamina regeneration.

Pinpoint Strike - This is an activated ability that lasts 15 seconds and will cause all melee strikes you deal to become critical hits. If you are behind the target, you will still backstab them as normal and Pinpoint Strike will do nothing. I have mixed feelings about this ability, mainly because giving yourself automatic critical strikes is absurdly strong, yet at the same time a Rogue can already do this for free just by standing behind a target or stunning them. In practice this will only ever come in handy if you are tanking a mob and physically cannot be behind them because they always face you.

When looking at this specialization as a whole, it is difficult not to be somewhat disappointed. Rogues are a purely damaging class with no real ability to tank, yet this line seems to be designed around a Rogue being stuck against a target in a 1v1 situation where they must mitigate damage. This is excellent thematically, but gameplay wise it leaves a lot to be desired when every single part of this line is done better by some other ability in the game. Dueling is just Rally but for yourself only. Upset Balance is alright, but later on in the game no one in your party will be missing anyway. Pinpoint Strike seems awesome, but Rogues can already backstab and it only applies to yourself where a Mage can just cast Death Hex and it works for the whole team.

Ranger

Oh boy this specialization is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥. The idea with this one is that it functions very similarly to a Mage's Shapeshifter, but instead of becoming the creatures, you summon them to fight alongside the party as a semipermanent fifth member. Despite how simple this sounds, the spec has some extreme jank that you can manipulate and when done correctly is actually somewhat competitive in strength with Assassin and Bard. Let's just cover the abilities themselves before I get into the weird ♥♥♥♥.

All summons will be 75% of the Ranger's level, and then 90% with Master Ranger. Summons scale exclusively with level, meaning the stats of the Ranger do not matter at all.

Summon Wolf - This summons a wolf to aid your party for as long as the ability is sustained, and the wolf will do pretty much what you'd expect a wolf to do. At a base level, wolves will use Howl, an AoE that drops the defense of nearby enemies. When Master Ranger is learned, they will become a Blight Wolf and gain access to Shred which does an automatic critical hit as well as a bleed DoT. (JANK ABILITIES: Overwhelm, Dread Howl, Charge, Growl)

Summon Bear - This one is a bear, and will have access to Slam and Rage. Slam is available from the start, and will just cause the bear to automatically crit as well as knock the target down. This functions as basically an improved Shield Bash. Master Rangers will summon a great bear that knows Rage, functioning almost identically like Berserking for Warriors. (JANK ABILITIES: Rage before Master Ranger)

Summon Spider - Lastly we have a spider summon that will have access to Poison Spit and Web. Web will stun the target for a short time, basically a weaker version of Paralyze. Poison Spit is a ranged attack that deals nature damage over time, only available with Master Ranger. The spider doesn't really have any jank to be concerned with, and is thus the least useful summon by far.

Master Ranger - I've pretty much already gone over this by proxy, but just to be thorough I'll list it again. This causes your summoned creatures to be a much higher level, as well as giving them access to new abilities that they did not have previously as well as improved health regeneration.

You may be wondering what exactly I mean by "Jank abilities", so that's what I'll finish this off with. When a creature is summoned, you don't actually get to control it in any way. They act just like blue circle friendly targets that follow the party around and help using only their AI scripting, nothing more. However, we can manipulate this with a glitch involving the tactics menu, such that they can become almost fully fledged party members with predicable and intelligent ability usage.

The moment you summon a creature, you will get a notification that "you have gained X tactics slots". This pop up is talking about the Ranger summon, and even though they do not appear in the tactics menu normally, clicking on this notification will bring you to their hidden tactics menu. From here, you can customize things so that you have almost direct control over the summons, as well as gaining access to abilities that the summon would normally never cast. This immediately spikes the Wolf up to being the best out of the three summons, as these "jank abilities" doubles the amount of talents the wolf has and among them are some of the strongest CC abilities in the game: Overwhelm and Dread Howl.

If you're willing to properly set up the tactics so that these abilities are being used every single time you summon the Wolf, I would argue that Ranger becomes worth using over one of Assassin/Bard because you are basically now able to run around with 5 party members instead of 4. The summons also function as health batteries for a Blood Mage to cast Blood Sacrifice on, making them even more useful than they already are.

I'm personally not willilng to fight the tactics menu dozens of times over the course of the game, but for those that are, this is a solid contender.

Rogues - Dexterity vs Cunning

Rogues (both melee Daggers and Archery) have an interesting choice to make when considering their stat allocation. Dexterity increases damage with piercing weapons - daggers and bows. However, Rogues have access to Lethality like we went over earlier, meaning that we can use Cunning instead of Strength for our damage calculations. Cunning doesn't give the same attack/defense rating increases that Dexterity does, but WILL give us armor penetration per point. This means that a Rogue has to choose which main stat they will be using between Cunning and Dexterity.

For those wanting to pick Dexterity, you'll overall be doing a bit less damage than your Cunning counterparts but will be far more durable and difficult to hit. You'll also never miss. The big drawbacks however are that you won't be getting much scaling from the Assassin/Bard specializations, which are sort of obviously the best damage boosts that a Rogue has access to. That being said, Ranger and Duelist are both options and Assassin is still perfectly usable without dumping points into Cunning. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that Dex Rogues should never pick Bard.

Cunning on the other hand will have far more armor penetration (and thus damage) than a Dex Rogue, and will be more useful to the party by providing Bard buffs with maximum possible scaling. Lethality is a required talent for this to work, but Dexterity is required for all weapon talents anyway so you'll be able to boost this up where you need it before Lethality is even available. You will be missing attacks significantly more often than a Rogue using pure Dex, so be very careful and do your best, it takes about halfway through the game before Cunning begins to overtake Dex in DPS but the damage increase and utility increase is well worth the trouble.

Dagger Rogue

Quick note, I've already gone over the dual wielding tree back in the Warrior section of the guide. If I mention a specific talent and you don't know what I'm talking about, go read through that section first before reading this one.

While both Rogues and Warriors can both be built as dual wielding DPS, the playstyle and tools available to them are going to be very different. While Warriors can make excellent use of the Dual Wield Mastery talent, Rogues generally don't care about this point at all beyond the small stat buff. Why? Because Rogues will generally not have enough strength to equip the best full sized weapons in each hand, nor will they have any desire to because of their ability to use backstabs and daggers together.

Backstabs are a Rogue specific mechanic that Warriors flat out do not have access to. Essentially, any attack made from behind the target will deal an automatic critical hit. This does not apply to activated abilities like Riposte or Flurry, which is one of the biggest reasons for Rogues choosing to build for auto attack damage rather than abilities like a Warrior might (along with no access to Death Blow). By using a pair of daggers, you will achieve the highest possible melee attack speed while every single hit comes out as a backstab, which can be further boosted by crit damage gear and certain backstab talents.

Strength, then, is not a useful stat for Rogues at all. Any stat requirements on gear can be met with the litany of +Strength items littered throughout the game. We can boost our melee damage with cunning instead from Lethality, and dexterity will also boost piercing weapon damage from the daggers. Whether you decide to be a dexterity or cunning based Rogue is largely irrelevant on the playstyle itself, as the only differences will be in specializations and damage calculations. Gear and actual combat tactics will be exactly the same in either case.

This should hopefully give you an idea of the differences between Rogues and Warriors when used as a duel wielder. Warriors should stick to big weapons with higher numbers on activated ability spam, while Rogues should just stick to auto attacks due to the insane DPS that backstabs and Lethality allow you to achieve.

Dagger Tactics and Gearing

Dagger tactics are for the most part identical to a DW Warrior as you are using the exact same set of abilities to deal your damage. The main difference between the two playstyles is that Rogues have backstabs and no Death Blow. This combined with the lower strength values for gear requirements means that instead of using full sized weapons with ability spam, you will forgo using abilities at all most of the time and instead deal all of your damage through dagger backstabs.

There is no hard line for when abilities stop becoming useful, instead you will sort of just feel it out as you progress. When you pass this threshold though, your backstabs will begin doing so much damage that casting an ability becomes a DPS loss as you could have fit in multiple more backstabs during the time it takes whatever ability to come out. CC abilities are obviously exempt as they have more utility beyond just bigger numbers.

The other big thing that changes between a DW Warrior to Rogue is the specializations. Assassin gives you Mark of Death that you can use on priority targets and bosses, greatly increasing the damage that your entire party deals to them. Bard will give you a couple CC abilities that can be used, but more importantly provides Song of Courage that should be in play nonstop from the moment you unlock the talent.

Tactics wise, you should always be behind the target you are hitting no matter what, and if you cannot be behind the target you need to CC them as much as possible to take advantage of Coup de Grace. Keep Momentum and Song of Courage active at all times. This is really the extent of the tactics, just use your CC intelligently and stab things lots of times.

Gear
Weapons: The Rose's Thorn is by far the best dagger in the game and it isn't even remotely close - it's also available as soon as you can enter Orzammar making it very accessible too. The offhand dagger is up to personal preference, but should always be one of these three:
- Dead Thaig Shanker
- Duncan's Dagger
- Thorn of the Dead Gods

The best helmet in the game despite being classed as heavy will be the Helm of Honnleath. While it is a massive armor piece, the runner up would have to be Corruption for the big dexerity boost and capping your spirit resistance by itself. See the glove section for how this can be equipped by most Rogues.

Chest armor should be either the Felon's Coat or the Battledress of the Provocateur. Both pieces have slightly different benefits but generally it isn't going to make a big difference for you, just pick whichever you like more and use it.

Gloves are important - The best light gloves in the game for you are going to be the Red Jenny Seekers for their increased critical/backstab damage. However. There is a pair of gloves that gives this exact same benefit, except at a higher % and with more armor. Cailan's Gauntlets are a massive armor piece, but can be worn by a Rogue with very minimal strength investment by using +Strength gear on a large scale to force your stats high enough to equip the gauntlets. As soon as they are on your body, you can allow your strength to fall back down to normal because they will not be unequipped from you. If you keep every bit of +all attributes and +strength gear, you can make this happen.

Here is a list of +Strength gear you can stack and the heights you can reach. With all of the following equipped, you gain +19 to your strength. Combined with the free +4 you get from the Fade, this means you can reach the goal of 42 strength for Corruption/Cailan's as long as your Rogue levels strength up to only 19:
Blood Dragon Plate - Adds 3
Effort's Gloves - Adds 1
Helm of Honnleath - Adds 2
Heart of Witherfang - Adds 1
Key to the City - Adds 2
Harvest Festival Ring - Adds 2
Andruil's Blessing - Adds 2
The Veshialle - Adds 2
Reaper's Cudgel - Adds 2

That's right. If your Rogue has 19 strength, you can eventually worm your way up using other assorted strength items (just check the wiki for a full list, you'll need most of them) to equipping this entire set, and then the BiS pieces you were working towards.

The best boots in the game for this build will undeniably be the Cadash Stompers. These aren't available until quite late in the game, but have a very lax strength requirement that you can beat with stat buffing gear and the stats on these are very good.

For amulets, the best will be the High Regard of House Dace - this item was practically custom made for Rogues. The best ring is the Key to the City with the other slot being a toss up between the Harvest Festival Ring and the Dusk Ring depending on what rings your party members want. Remember that the -1 Strength on the Dusk Ring does almost nothing because Lethality will make cunning your main damage stat instead.

The best belt in the game is Andruil's Blessing (seeing a pattern with some of these gear choices?) for the increased stats. The Cinch of Skillful Maneuvering deserves an honorable mention as it is just a slightly worse Andruil'ls Blessing.

Archery Rogue

The other option for Rogues will be Archery, allowing them to deal their full damage while at long range. In fact, this is the longest range build in the game because longbows have a much longer range than staves do, and most spells coming out of a Mage must be cast at more of a mid-range. This distance between you and the targets makes you very safe and very hard to kill without wasting lots of dead time as the enemy slowly approaches you. Let's go over the talents, because although the build itself is very strong, the talents from the weapon tree are actually quite weak.

The Melee Archer Line
This line is mandatory all the way down purely for the passive benefits you gain access to.

Melee Archer - This is a pure passive that only does one thing, but it's vital in order for this build to function at all. Without this talent, any enemy that hits you in melee will interrupt your shot and leave you unable to deal damage as long as they keep hitting you. This passive allows you to shoot things even if you are being hit in melee range. Take it first no matter what.

Aim - A sustained passive ability that gives you a huge bonus to the damage of your arrows at the cost of aim speed. Early in the game the aim speed reduction is brutal, but by late game you will be firing fast enough that the speed reduction no longer matters. When you have Master Archer, this talent provides a crazy +15 attack rating, +3 damage, and +5 armor penetration along with doubled critical chance.

Defensive Fire - Sustained ability that is mutually exclusive with Aim, making it completely useless 99% of the time. When activated, it slows your aiming speed but gives you a +30 boost to your defense (With Master Archer). This can save you in a last man standing situation, but other than that it is just a damage loss to use.

Master Archer - Greatly improves most of the other talents all throughout the tree in one way or another. This is the highest priority for you to pick up when playing this build, as it makes Aim better and that's the most important skill you have. Get this ASAP, once you have it the rest of the tree can be taken in any order you like because none of it is particularly crazy and you have enough points to get them all.

The Pinning Shot Line
This line is pretty bad until the very last point, which is a very highly damaging shot even compared to your auto attacks.

Pinning Shot - CC ability that will immobilize a target for quite a long time. This is a single target ability and takes a bit to cast, so the effect comes at the cost of losing several arrows' worth of damage. If you need a CC and this is all you've got, I guess it works. This immobilize is almost always resisted once you are past the early stages of the game, making it useless later on.

Crippling Shot - Shot that does normal damage while also reducing the target's attack and defense by 10 each. This is yet another useless ability, as the damage you lose by taking the time to cast this long ability isn't worth the moderate stat reduction that many other classes can apply much easier. Some can even apply a similar debuff completely passively.

Critical Shot - Just like the previous abilities in the line, except actually has reasonable use cases! This is an activated shot that deals an automatic critical hit as well as penetrating an extra 10 of the target's armor. This ability is fantastic for shattering frozen targets as you can always be sure it will crit, and early on in the game having a talent that does on demand high damage is nice. It does not stay strong forever though, and will eventually become not worth using when auto attack damage becomes high enough.

Arrow of Slaying - This is just Critical Shot on steroids. After lining up the shot, the target will take an automatic double critical hit, as well as increased damage based on how much higher level you are than whatever you are shooting at. This is one of the rare abilities that is always worth casting, even late in the game when auto attack damage trumps all.

The Rapid Fire Line
This line is similar to the one directly above, but focuses on defensive shots rather than offensive ones.

Rapid Fire - Sustained ability that is mutually exclusive with Aim, making it utterly useless. This will greatly increase your rate of fire, but make inflicting critical hits impossible. This is decent early on in the game when fire speed is slow and crits aren't happening often anyway, but as soon as you get some Rapid Aim on gear this sustain will go straight in the trash.

Shattering Shot - A normal damage shot that takes time to line up (as usual) and decreases the target's armor by 20 with Master Archer. 20 armor is quite a lot to lose, and this will also knock down anything that does not resist. This is worth using against bosses, but pretty much nothing else unless you want the knockdown.

Suppressing Fire - Finally we have a sustained ability that can be used at the same time as Aim, meaning that it is not immediately overshadowed and useless by default. This mode causes each of your shots to apply a stacking -7.5 attack debuff every time you hit, making this a very solid ability to have active at all times since it does not come with any real drawback. Very nice.

Scattershot - Chain lightning but for archers and also it stuns. This alone should be enough to sell you on this ability, as it is probably the strongest activated shot you have access to as far as battle impact. Stunning the entire field is very powerful, and will deal damage twice for each enemy that is hit. This additional hit also applies a second stack of Suppressing Fire, meaning that in conjunction these two will allow you to spread a nasty -15 attack debuff to the entire field. Crazy ability and worth casting all the time so long as there are enough targets.

You've definitely noticed by now that Archery got shafted pretty badly by whoever designed the tree's activated abilities. Aim is great, but once you take into account the opportunity cost of aiming and stopping your auto attack, almost every ability in this tree is just not worth casting and even the very strong ones are only on the same level as some baseline Mage spells that cost less and do more damage.

Archery Tactics and Gearing

Archer tactics are sort of a cross between playing a Mage and a DW Rogue on the same character. Like a Mage, you will want to stay as far away from the fight as possible so that any enemies who want to attack you must not only make their slow approach to you, but they also stray very far from allies who could possibly help them. Unlike a Mage however, you will eventually reach a point very similar to Daggers that will make ability usage a DPS loss rather than a gain. When you keep in mind the fact that Archery active abilities are among the worst skills in the game, ranged Rogues will reach their "auto-only" threshold much sooner than dagger users do.

As far as tactics, this is the easiest build in the game. Keep Song of Courage active at all times, keep Dueling active at all times if you took it, keep Suppressing Fire active at all times, and make sure you keep Aim active at all times for the crazy damage boosts you get. As long as these abilities are active, your gameplay will consist of right clicking things and waiting until they die, with the occasional Arrow of Slaying or Scattershot thrown in when needed. It's not a difficult build by any means, but it is certainly an effective one and much safer as you aren't ever at risk of eating poorly aimed AoE spells.

Gear:
Gear for an Archery Rogue is a very very easy section for me to right because it is quite literally identical to a Dagger Rogue. Each build wants exactly the same stats in basically all situations, so just go read over that section for what gear you should be using on this build.

The only difference then is the weapon choice, as you cannot shoot things while holding two knives. The best bow in the game comes down to a decision between the Sorrows of Arlathan and Far Song. Both of these bows have incredible stats on them as well as the very important "Rapid Aim" modifier, making them fire much quicker than other bows. Far Song will give you less damage per shot, but comes with a 10% critical damage boost. The Sorrows of Arlathan has no such bonus, instead dealing more damage per shot, penetrating more armor, and has a +6% crit chance boost over Far Song's +3%.

I am firmly on the Sorrows of Arlathan team, especially because gaining access to Far Song requires some dubious story choices to be made while the former is available in your inventory as soon as you make the character provided you unlocked all the achievement gear for yourself (you should, btw, it's all crazy good).

Rogue Role Compression

You may have noticed that Archery Rogues and Dagger Rogues have eerily similar stat allocation choices to make - Dexterity or Cunning mainstat. These two builds have nearly identical gear choices to make. You may have even noticed that the best specializations for these types of Rogue are *also* very similar. With how many talent points you get throughout the game, this means that you can very feasibly create a Rogue that can do both Archery and Dual Wielding at very close to full power for both sides.

The biggest drawback with this is that you must skip out on certain talent points in both trees in order to focus down the most vital points for each. However, I would personally say that the detriment to your Rogue is very minimal and in exchange you can now completely swap a member of your party to deal with whatever threat is in front of you without needing to change your composition or even leave the room you are in.

I would basically always recommend you do this on your Rogues, although it is really not necessary if you don't feel like it just because the game straight up isn't hard enough to demand one playstyle over another most of the time. The main scenario that you'd want to swap weapon types would be fighting dragons and other huge bosses, as being ranged for those fights is noticeably safer than being in melee where you'll get cleaved and knocked around. On the flipside, some fights just feel better as melee because daggers have access to runes and poisons while bows do not.

The Legend of the 2H Rogue

I'm going to use this tiny section to cover something that I think is funny despite not being legitimately viable. DA:O has a ton of items that give you a bonus to various stats, possibly none more than strength. With pretty minimal investment, one could theoretically equip the heaviest items in the game with little issue, and it's even optimal in the case of Cailan's Gauntlets! This then begs the question...

What happens if you want to use a 2 hander on a Rogue?

Well the answer my fellow gentleman is that it is moderately functional, as suboptimal as it may be. Backstabs are a mechanic that is unique to Rogues, and this mechanic does not discriminate. Combine this with Haste from a Mage, you can reach a respectable attack speed on a massive two handed weapon that is guaranteed to crit every time as long as you're behind the target. You might think okay, well what about the damage? This is where Lethality comes in. As long as your cunning stat is above your strength stat, the damage calculations will use that instead meaning that at this point your only barrier is your attack rating which is easy to work around. The resulting build is a Rogue with almost no activated abilities that at the same time does more auto attack damage than a dedicated 2H Warrior.

I think this is hilarious and if you want to do a meme build, this is the one to choose. It's actually somewhat effective, definitely more creative, and way more entertaining than just playing a bad build like Shapeshifter. It's also incredibly easy to set up because the gearing is going to be identical to a cunning based Dagger Rogue - all you have to do is stack +Strength gear to get the two hander equipped, and then you go right back to the regular BiS for that build. Voila, you can now also transform this meme build into a perfectly fine Dagger Rogue on demand for fights that are just too steep for your shenanigans.

Mage Overview

If you've stayed with me for this long, we've made it to the last of the three playable classes in the game. Unlike Warriors and Rogues, the diversity allowed by this class is on another level to the point where it seems like Mages in DA:O must have been plucked from a different game. Mages have access to the most powerful abilities in the game and I mean it when I say that a truly optimal party setup would just be 4 Mages. However, in reality almost no one would want to play that way and the highest number of Mages that can ever be in the party is 3 anyway.

While Warriors and Rogues have decently fleshed out universal class trees, Mages do not have this luxury really at all. Instead, Mages have four different spell trees that have four lines each, and a Mage is not beholden to sticking to one tree at all. This is different from the physical classes, as they are very much restricted to filling out the entirety of a single tree rather than cherry picking what they want from a much larger list. The universal spell tree for Mages is just a single line with some mediocre benefits, consisting of:

Arcane Bolt - Very cheap, but very weak single target spell that does spirit damage. I say this is weak, but that is only when compared to the wealth of other options that Mages have access to. In reality, this spell will do very decent burst on a target at such a low cost that it may as well be free. You will also get this spell for free just by creating a Mage, so there's really no opportunity cost here either, you're going to have it no matter what. Morrigan does not have this because she was raised by a redneck furry witch in the swamp.

Arcane Shield - Moderate cost sustained ability that will increase your defense by 10 plus an additional amount equal to 10% of your spellpower. It is my belief that a caster should never be taking damage for any reason outside of a stray hit or two, so I do believe this spell is mostly useless for those sorts of Mages. Arcane Warriors on the other hand love this spell, because it is cheap and an easy way to boost tankiness.

Staff Focus - Very simple pure passive, just makes your staff auto attacks deal 33% more damage across the board. Obviously this is completely useless for Arcane Warriors as they will be holding melee weapons, but for casters this is a very easy improvement to their damage throughout the fight as you do tend to spend at least a bit of time using your staff in every fight as well as when you run out of mana but don't want to activate Blood Magic for some reason.

Arcane Mastery - Pure passive that adds +5 spellpower. This is just free stats and you should always take this if you grabbed the earlier points in this line. In the grand scheme of things 5 spellpower isn't much, so I wouldn't say that this is a priority or anything. Get your other more important spells first and circle back around to this in the mid to late game.

Spirit Healer

Based on the title of this specialization, you should already know what to expect out of the spell selection - This is the dedicated healer spec and consists entirely of spells that heal. Shocking. This specialization should always be taken by caster focused Mages no matter what, simply because it is the only option other than Blood Mage. Arcane Warrior is for tanks, and Shapeshifting is for the clinically deranged. This spec tree consists of Group Heal, Revival, Lifeward, and Cleansing Aura.

Group Heal - This is a very simple spell, but also obscenely powerful. It causes a very large amount of healing on the entire party, whether you have line of sight or not. The only requirement is that they be reasonably close to the Mage, which they always will be.

Revival - This spell will raise a fallen party member from the dead when cast at their body. Important to note, this is an AoE, so if party members happened to die in a pile you will be able to revive them all at once. This spell is in an odd spot, considering that it requires you to be actively losing a fight before it becomes useful at all. Having a party member die is indicative that you've made some sort of mistake somewhere since deaths can always be avoided, so this spell will only become useful if you just absolutely cannot make it through a fight without someone dying no matter how many times you retry.

Lifeward - Where Revival functions as a failsafe for when fights are so brutally difficult that you just have to accept someone is going down, Lifeward will prevent them from ever going down in the first place. This applies a buff to the target party member that will automatically heal them up a solid amount at the exact moment they drop below 1/3 HP. This is an incredibly powerful defensive cooldown, as you can cast it on a party member and effectively ignore their health bar until the Lifeward has been consumed.

Cleansing Aura - This is an aura sustained spell that will pulse out strong healing every few seconds, but will cause a -10 penalty to mana regeneration. This spell unlike most other sustains will turn itself off once your mana reaches 0. Thus, this spell has a few issues that make it mostly unusable outside of edge cases. First off, the mana issue is very difficult to deal with because it will siphon out your entire bar that could have been used on other more impactful spells. Then we come to the healing itself on the spell, which is completely overkill in most cases. Generally your tank will be the only one taking damage in a fight, so pulsing healing out to the entire party means that the vast majority of the healing is wasted by applying to allies who are at close to full health. However, this spell has two big use cases that make it worthwhile at least late game.
1.) CA will cleanse injuries from allies, making injury kits obsolete after learning this
2.) CA will heal blue allies as well, such as the Redcliffe militia and your forces at Denerim

Overall, Spirit Healer is a decent specialization, the most important spell by far is Group Heal, meaning that it is a very low investment spec to pick up for any Mage that is looking to be a more capable healer. That being said any Caster Mage can function as the party's healer whether they take this spec or not, although since your options for specializations are so limited you will always have these spells regardless. Don't think too hard about it, just take Spirit Healer/Blood Mage if you're a caster and call it a day.

Blood Mage

Blood Magic is definitely the premiere offensive specialization for a Mage, as it unlocks access to the single most powerful offensive spell in the entire game, as well as ways to circumvent your mana bar and allow you to keep spamming your other ridiculous spells that you've learned outside the spec. It is my personal belief that every single Mage should always take this specialization with no exceptions, as it is a vital part of your toolkit for both tanking and casting. The specialization tree consists of Blood Magic, Blood Sacrifice, Blood Wound, and Blood Control.

Blood Magic - This modal is very interesting and already opens up so many possibilities for a Mage regardless of specialization. Activating this sustain will cause your spellcasts to drain HP instead of Mana at a 0.8:1 ratio. That is, the health cost of your spells will be 20% lower than their mana cost. YOU CAN KILL YOURSELF WITH THESE HEALTH COSTS. This modal will also cause any healing received to be reduced by 90%, and it is important to note that this only applies to direct heals. Health regeneration is not affected. This all sounds very bad, but we have ways of dealing with this later on down the tree.

Sidenote: If you take Blood Mage as a specialization, you need to be wearing one item somewhere on you that gives "Improved Blood Magic". This will cause the HP/Mana ratio to be further reduced down to 0.65:1, meaning health costs are now 65% of what the mana cost would be for a spell.

Blood Sacrifice - That didn't take long. This ability will siphon off 50 health from an ally, and heal the Mage for double that. This healing is not affected by the -90% penalty from Blood Magic, making this an easy way to basically fill your entire HP bar if you ever need a heal. While this does take a solid chunk out of a party member, simply choosing someone who is not taking aggro means the damage is null anyway because they aren't taking damage to begin with. You can also use this on Ranger pets as they are pretty much expendable anyway. Shale is not affected by this ability for obvious reasons.

Blood Wound - Hot damn this spell is insane and will single handedly trivialize almost every fight once you learn it. This ability is an instant cast wide area of effect, I believe the size is identical to Fireball. When cast, every enemy within that area will be frozen in place, take very high spirit damage over time, and this spell does not even cause friendly fire. That's right, Blood Wound is an AoE Crushing Prison with no friendly fire, no cast time, and does the most effective damage type too. This spell is your new best friend.

Blood Control - While this spell is still good, basically nothing could live up to Blood Wound so it will be comparatively boring and ineffective. When cast, this will deal very strong spirit damage over time and force the target to fight against their allies for the duration. If the target doesn't resist this spell, it's basically a free kill because nothing in the game that fails the resistance will survive.

I hope it's plain to see why Blood Mage is so strong and has so many possible applications, whether that be from the PoV of a caster or AW Tank. Casters gain access to the strongest spell in the game, as well as what essentially amounts to a second mana bar to throw out with their HP. Mage Tanks on the other hand benefit as well, seeing as their mana bar is almost completely tapped out from the start due to the wide array of sustainables that they need to keep rolling. Blood Magic allows them to actually cast other spells as they are unshackled from the restraints of their mana, and they also get Blood Wound bc ♥♥♥♥ it why not.

Arcane Warrior

Here we are, we have reached the tank spec for Mages. I'm not going to dive too deep into Tank Mage mechanics on this section, that will come later when I discuss the build holistically and bring all the moving pieces together. For right now, we're going to look at the mechanics behind what makes this even possible and the specific spells from Arcane Warrior that you're working with. The spec line consists of Combat Magic, Aura of Might, Shimmering Shield, and Fade Shroud.

Combat Magic - Kicking right off the spec line, we have the spell that makes the entire playstyle even possible in the first place. Combat Magic has two equally important sections, one being the active sustained ability and the other being a purely passive change to the way your stats work. The sustained modal causes your attack damage to be increased by spellpower rather than strength. It will also give you a bonus to attack based on spellpower as well as a raised fatigue (making your spells cost more mana). The passive bonus is the big kicker though; Your Magic will now decide the requirements on gear, not Strength. This means that your Mage can suddenly wear the heaviest, strongest items in the game just because you picked this spell up. This is what allows a Mage to tank, you need this ASAP.

Aura of Might - Combat Magic sustain will additionally grant more attack bonus, a large +10 defense bonus, and will just straight up increase weapon damage by 5. This is a pure passive that improves your combat abilities and makes you tankier, take this as soon as you can.

Shimmering Shield - Forewarning, this is the single most stacked defensive ability in the game and through smart gearing, can be maintained 100% of the time. This modal will give you a huge -10 penalty to mana regeneration, and turn itself off when you reach 0 mana. You may ask, what could possibly make up for this abysmal drawback? You get +15 armor, 75% resistance to all elements, and +75 physical and mental resistance. Shimmering Shield, if kept up, will make you nigh on immortal for every single enemy in the entire game bar none. Nothing can break through your defenses so long as you keep this up and have a competent healer in the party (or potions out the ass).

Fade Shroud - Closing out the tree we have another simple passive improvement to Combat Magic. This passive will cause Combat Magic to provide +2 mana regeneration (this already cuts down on the steep requirements of Shimmering Shield), and a free 25% dodge chance while Combat Magic is active. This is a perfect way to cap off your Tank Mage toolkit, and is worth picking up immediately.

So I think it's fairly clear just how defensively stacked this specialization truly is for Tank Mages, and it is no surprise that a well built Arcane Warrior will be much, much harder to kill than an equally built Shield Warrior. While Mages don't have quite the same control over threat that a Warrior would, the sheer defense that they bring means that with good tactics, you can faceroll any fight in the game with barely any thought.

This brings us to the Caster/Tank divide when building a Mage. While they want similar stat allocations with some slight differences, Arcane Warrior is just completely useless for any Mage that is not planning on tanking. While Blood Mage is universally useful no matter what you might be doing, Arcane Warrior is much more specific and focused in it's strengths, and has zero means of making your caster better at being a caster. Never take Arcane Warrior unless you plan on being the party's main tank.

Shapeshifter

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, Shapeshifter is the worst specialization in the entire game and it's not even close. This specialization is literally so bad that I would argue that picking it is actively detrimental to your Mage because of the opportunity cost involved with both picking the spells on level up and using the spells in combat. Basically, the crux of the tree is that you gain access to three different animal forms with different abilities, and each form is a sustained modal.

There are several problems with this, the biggest of all being that you lose access to every other spell your Mage normally has access to while transformed. Fireball? Force Field? Heal? Weapon buffs? None of it is accessible while shapeshifted. This takes the entire reason that Mages are so overpowered and removes it for as long as you want to stay in a different form.

The next huge problem with Shapeshifter is that the forms themselves are just plain bad. Each one has fewer abilities available than your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Mabari companion, and will do less damage than the dog too. The Spider has some CC abilities, but they are all weaker than a regular CC based spell. The Bear has stats that would suggest it is the tank form, but has no way of manipulating threat. Swarm form is alright enough, but again comes with a colossal opportunity cost of losing access to all other spells when you could just as easily cast a heal or Insect Swarm or something.

There's really no point in going over each individual spell as they all come with the exact same problems and none of them bring any strengths that are particularly noteworthy. Like I said, each form is like having a worse version of the Mabari on your team, and it replaces your Mage. Awful, horrible, never pick it, pretend it doesn't exist.

Shapeshifter is so bad that I would rather have an Archery Warrior or DPS Arcane Warrior on my team. I would rather have a strength-stacking-2H-using Rogue on my team than a Shapeshifter. It is impossible to convey just how horrendous having only 2-3 active abilities for each form is without seeing it for yourself and trying to make it work. Just don't do it.

The Primal Tree

The first major tree for the Mage is going to be the Primal tree, which is comprised entirely of different elemental spells like what you may expect to see from Mages in other fantasy games. The four lines for this tree focus around Fire, Frost, Lightning, and Earth. Speaking generally, Fire and Frost are going to be the strongest lines, while Earth does have some useful spells still. Lightning is unfortunately a very underpowered spell line, and in most cases you'd be better off spending your talents elsewhere.

The Fire Line
This spell line is definitely the strongest direct damage that you have access to as a Mage, although does not really carry any sort of meaningful control.

Flame Blast - This is a cone based AoE that will do fire damage over time to all those who are caught in the blast, including friendlies. The DoT is applied instantly, meaning it's okay to interrupt the long cast time of the spell once the initial blast has gone out, making this spell deceptively fast when animation cancelled. Pretty solid AoE damage, just watch your melee.

Flaming Weapons - Very simple, this is a sustained ability that adds fire damage to your entire party's melee strikes. The damage scales based on spellpower, so as you progress through the game this buff will keep up with you. Only one weapon buff type spell can be active at once unless you are willing to glitch it, allowing two at a time. For a melee based party these spells are awesome and really add up, for a ranged party this is worthless.

Fireball - This is the poor man's Blood Wound. Same size area of effect, roughly the same-ish damage, and knocks down instead of stunning for a very long time. Notably, Fireball causes friendly fire and yes, you will one-shot your party members if you are not careful with how you aim this. I personally like to just Force Field the tank and let this fly, otherwise use it as enemies are coming in before anyone has reached close range.

Inferno - While the first three spells in this line are all very very solid, Inferno is a bit of a trap. Despite doing colossal amounts of area damage, it has several problems to contend with. First off, the friendly fire is ridiculous and unlike Fireball, is continuous making it hard to bypass. The spell has a very high mana cost and long cast time before it actually takes effect. Finally, Fireball basically does the same thing as this spell and is better. The only realistic way to use this spell is to bomb enemies in a different room than you, as it does not require line of sight to cast - you can just drop it anywhere you want.

The Earth Line
Where the Fire line put damage before all else, this line will be much more focused on defensive spells and control.

Rock Armor - Cheap sustainable that adds an amount of armor that scales with your spellpower. Snapshots based on spellpower when you activated the spell, this is not dynamic. For caster mages, this is a dead talent point as the armor is not going to save you from aggro and you shouldn't be taking damage to begin with. Even activating it is a net loss because you could have spent the mana on more damage/healing. For Arcane Warriors, this is a bread and butter sustainable that should be active at all times with no exceptions.

Stonefist - Simple direct damage spell that acts almost exactly like Arcane Bolt, though does much higher damage. This spell also has a knockdown component, meaning that this spell can CC individual targets. This can be used to save allies who have been targeted with a grab/overwhelm, making this a very strong defensive spell to take with some respectable damage output when you don't need to save anyone. This spell does physical damage and is prone to shattering frozen targets, instantly killing them. Definitely never a bad pickup for any Mage.

Earthquake - Similarly to Inferno, this spell is basically a trap and will probably hurt you more than it helps. This affects a wide area and does no damage, but significantly slows targets and will periodically knock them down. I can't really think of a realistic use case where this spell is exactly what you're looking for. You'd always want something else to CC with for any given situation, especially since your own melee will be affected as well.

Petrify - Very long duration single target stun that opens the target up for the shatter combo. This spell seems nice but is utterly inferior to Cone of Cold, and also requires that you take Earthquake to reach it. A stun is always nice, but Mages have no shortage of CC spells in other trees and those spells have other utility to them which makes them more attractive. Skip out on the second half of the Earth line.

The Frost Line
The other big daddy of the Primal tree, this line is basically Fire if you traded out some of the damage potential for CC.

Winter's Grasp - This spell does a very high amount of single target damage and freezes the target, opening them up for a shatter combo. While the stun is much shorter than Petrify, the damage more than makes up for this and shatters are still easy to fit in. This spell is straight up superior to Petrify, and it requires no prior investment. The cooldown is also comically short, so it can be reasonably used 3+ times per fight.

Frost Weapons - Exactly the same as Flaming Weapons, but does frost damage instead of fire. Use whichever spell will do the most damage to the current target's resistances, or glitch it out and activate both of them. Not much else to say, its required in order to reach...

Cone of Cold - This completes the holy trinity of Fireball/Blood Wound/CoC. This spell is an AoE cone that will freeze every target it touches, while doing a small amount of damage on top. This allows shattering, and the stun is fairly long, making this the most effective CC ability a Mage has access to outside of Blood Wound. All Mages should have this spell, it will save your life left and right all the way through the game. Just don't freeze your own party.

Blizzard - Very similar spell to Inferno, uses the same casting mechanics and can be used without line of sight. However, Blizzard is much easier to find use cases for since instead of fearing the targets, it will just freeze them. This means you can Blizzard a room before entering, freeze everyone, then open the door and launch Fireballs and other AoEs inside to destroy things before they even get a chance to react. Overall not a super high priority spell, but is very fun.

The Lightning Line
Unfortunately this is just an inferior version of the Fire line, and no spells in this tree should be taken if you want to play completely optimally.

Lightning - Identical to the Stonefist spell, but does not knock the target down and deals electricity damage instead of physical. While electricity does drain stamina as well as health, this effect is not going to be noticeable for you and thus basically doesn't exist - enemies have a tendency to ignore it anyway.

Shock - Identical to Flame Blast but does less damage. Stamina thing still applies. This spell is pathetic, you'll almost never find yourself using it just because it feels bad to even cast.

Tempest - Same type of spell as Blizzard and Inferno. Does not freeze like Blizzard, and does less damage than Inferno with no fear effect either. Does decent enough damage but is utterly outclassed by the other storm spells and is really only useful for pulling off the SotC spell combo.

Chain Lightning - The biggest insult of the entire spell line is that Chain Lightning is actually pretty good, but never taken because wasting 3 talents to get here is detrimental. Has a cast time similar to the storm spells but will cause a jumping bolt of lightning that does very good damage and (despite the description) will cause absolutely no friendly fire.

The Creation Tree

While the Primal section of the Mage all had a pretty clear focus on direct damage spells, the Creation tree is much more diverse and varied when it comes to the spell selection. This tree has a line that is dedicated to healing and rejuvenating the party, a line of AoE glyphs that are placed on the ground like traps, a support esque buff line, and then finally a sort of oddball line at the bottom of the tree.

The Heal Line
This line as the name suggests, focuses on the Mage's ability to heal the party. It is important to note that while these spells are important, they are far weaker than what is available from Spirit Healer.

Heal - This heals a party member for a big chunk based on spellpower. Every single Mage should have this spell at all times with no exceptions. It's cheap, heals a solid amount even on tanking builds, and only requires a single point to take.

Rejuvenate - This spells applies a buff to a party member that greatly increases mana/stamina regeneration based on spellpower. This spell is best used in longer fights where the enemies won't be dying as easily and you'll have time for the regeneration to take place. It is probably best used on yourself or another Mage, as their auto attacks are the weakest of the three classes.

Regeneration - This is basically Heal but works over time rather than as one large chunk. Interestingly, this does not count as a healing spell, meaning that this will bypass the penalty from Blood Magic. Along with the very solid healing you get from this spell, it is more than worth your time to pick up if you already got the most important spells from other trees.

Mass Rejuvenation - Basically the same spell as Rejuvenate but will affect the entire party the same way Group Heal does. This effect actually can stack with Rejuvenate, and combined this will allow you to pretty much refill your entire mana bar over the course of 10 ish seconds. Pick it up if you want but usually you'll have access to Blood Magic which makes mana sort of an afterthought anyway.

The Buff Line
This line focuses on buffs that are directly cast onto party members to increase a given stat, and ending with a very interesting sustained buff to the party.

Heroic Offense - Gives the target a big bonus to attack for a while that scales with spellpower. This is much less useful than it sounds, as attack only increases your chance of hitting the target rather than damage. Use this if someone is missing too often.

Heroic Aura - Gives the target +30 missile deflection for 20 seconds. This will make arrows much less likely to hit whoever this is cast on, so just use appropriately if archers are ruining your day for some reason.

Heroic Defense - Finally we get to a decent buff. This gives the target a spellpower scaling boost to defense, elemental resists, and physical resistance. This is an excellent spell to throw on your tank if they happen to end up in deep water with enemies that are outpacing their existing defenses. Shale loves having access to this.

Haste - The big one. This is a sustained buff to the entire party that greatly increases movement speed, attack speed, and aim speed. This does come with a small -5 penalty to attack for the party, as well as -3 mana regeneration for the Mage. This ability is incredibly buggy, and there are some important things to understand here. First off, when used alongside Momentum, you will actually cause the target's attack speed to be decreased as a result of the 0.5 speed bug, so never use Haste with a dual wielder. Second, the aim speed reduction is bugged and actually makes your arrows take 2 seconds LONGER to fire rather than shorter, so never use Haste with archers in the party. If you can work around those limitations, this is one of the strongest buffs in the game.

The Glyph Line
These spells are all AoE glyphs that are placed on the ground, and either provides some sort of buff when standing on them or act as traps that are consumed when enemies walk over them.

Glyph of Paralysis - This glyph acts as a trap that will apply a 10 second paralyze to the first target that walks into it. Since this is considered a trap by the game, it will bypass all spell resistances no matter what, making it much more reliable than the regular Paralyze spell. Being an AoE, this also means you can cast it directly onto a group and since they all activate it at the same time, they are all paralyzed. Very strong CC spell, every Mage should take this point.

Glyph of Warding - Glyph that greatly increases the defense (+30) of all party members within the area, as well as providing so much missile deflection that you become borderline immune to arrows. If a fight is giving you trouble and you're able to stack everyone together to fit inside of this, it can easily turn a hard fight into a formality.

Glyph of Repulsion - When placed on the ground, acts as a trap that knocks back any enemies who enter as if they were hit with a Fireball. This will also slow them by a large amount. This is great for protecting ranged party members, especially since this glyph can be casted more than once (up to 5 times). This can also theoretically save allies from grabs, as it will immediately knock the target down when placed on top of them.

Glyph of Neutralization - This glyph is interesting, as it completely shuts down all forms of spells and spellcasting for anyone within the area. Allies and enemies alike will gain almost complete immunity to spells, as well as being drained, get this, -1000000 mana with the same penalty being applied to mana regeneration. It does not matter how high your mana bar is, you will not overcome this glyph. If you need to completely remove magic from the game, this is the tool to use.

The Spell Wisp Line
This line caps out the tree with some sort of miscellaneous spells that don't really follow any sort of theme with their effects.

Spell Wisp - Sustained mode that increases spellpower by a small amount, scaling with spellpower. This is a nice, cheap little buff to have, although the impact will be incredibly low and even at 100 Magic you'd likely get barely more than +10 spellpower out of it. It's meh.

Grease - Ground targeted AoE that hinders enemies with a very large slow, and will cause them to slip and become stunned for a few seconds. They can only slip one time, but the slow is nice I guess. Using a fire spell on top of this will remove the slow and activate a Grease Fire, which is utterly useless. This spell will probably sit on your bar and do nothing for the vast majority of the game.

Spellbloom - AoE buff to all creatures (enemy and party) that gives a +3 boost to mana regeneration for a while. This spell is completely worthless, you will never notice an effect from casting it and the cost of the spell makes any regeneration gained by the Mage essentially null. The only use case for this spell is casting it right before a difficult fight, as the +3 boost in that case is completely free of cost.

Insect Swarm - This spell makes me very angry, because it is actually an incredibly solid AoE damage spell. This is the only spell in the entire game that deals Nature damage, and it deals 40% more damage than Blood Wound. Why is it so bad? About 1/3 of the enemies in the game are completely immune to nature damage in my experience, and taking this spell requires you to waste 3 talent points on taking the worthless, low impact spells that come before it. If this spell were swapped with Spell Wisp, it would be an obvious no brainer. As it stands, this is almost never worth taking the tree up to this point despite the admittedly high damage.

The Spirit Tree

While Primal undoubtedly has the most important damaging spells in the game, Spirit possesses the bulk of the utility spells that you'll be casting. This tree is very important for all types of Mages, so let's go ahead and work through which parts of the tree are useful because it also has some stinkers just like Creation did.

The Spell Shield Line
This line focuses entirely on defensive spells that deal with opposing Mages in a very similar way to the Warrior's Templar specialization.

Spell Shield - This is a sustainable that will cause every spell that hits you to have a 75% chance of just being absorbed and doing nothing. If this happens, you will take damage to your mana bar instead of your health bar. This seems awesome for Arcane Warriors, but the mana drain will probably end up turning off your Shimmering Shield. Casters want as much mana as possible and enemy casters should never be alive long enough for this shield to matter. Worthless spell, never cast this.

Dispel Magic - You choose any target, allies included, and this will dispel all effects that are possible to dispel. This can theoretically save a friendly that is afflicted by Crushing Prison or Curse of Mortality, but won't have really any notable use cases for enemies. This is decent, but Force Field is better at this same purpose. Yet again, there isn't ever a reason to cast this spell.

Anti-Magic Ward - Applies a 10 second buff to the target that causes them to be completely immune to all spells for the duration. Using this proactively for enemy Mage's is a bit of a waste because they should be dying within the first 5 seconds of the fight. This has exactly one reasonable use case, and that is to cast this on your tank so that they become immune to your Fireball and other AoE's, letting you go wild without obliterating them. Guess what. Force Field does the exact same thing but better.

Anti-Magic Burst - This is literally just Dispel Magic but affects an entire area rather than a single target. I'm going to save you the trouble, no this is not worth casting ever and caps this useless line out with more trash. This is the worst spell line in the entire game bar none; at least Insect Swarm and Chain Lightning did good damage.

The Mana Drain Line
After the travesty that was the previous line, I hope you're excited for spells that are actually worth casting. Well, the last two of this line anyway.

Mana Drain - This seems nice but let me tell you, it's actually useless. Draining a decent chunk of mana from the target seems nice, but this only affects enemy spellcasters, as well as demons and abominations. That alone makes this not worth casting, because you want spellcasters to either die or be incapacitated as soon as possible and this spell is just a waste of time in that regard. You aren't going to drain their entire mana pool with this, they are still going to cast Fireball and Mortality at you.

Mana Cleanse - This spell is hilarious. The intended effect for this is that you choose an AoE and every caster within that area is going to lose a gigantic chunk of their mana pool, usually just bottoming it out. Sounds good right? Well due to a bug in the game, this spell will actually replenish their mana by the amount they were supposed to lose. Don't ever cast this, it actively makes the game harder.

Well after the first two spells being useless, you're probably wondering whether the last two are good enough to make up for the extra cost. I am here to tell you that they are absolutely worth the garbage that came before them and these are two of the strongest spells in the game.

Spell Might - This is a sustained buff to yourself that will increase your spellpower by an amount that scales with your spellpower, as well as giving a medium -4 penalty to mana regeneration. If you were to cast this spell at 100 spellpower, you'd gain a boost of +20 just from Spell Might alone. This is a very noticeable buff to damage and healing and should always be active for casters.

Mana Clash - Here we are, this is the big daddy of "anti-mage" spells. While every other spell that came before this in the tree was trash, and Templar is generally ineffective at dealing with Mages, this spell single handedly destroys them. This creates a large AoE that completely empties the mana bar of any caster caught inside and will do spirit damage based on the mana that is lost. The resulting damage is so colossal that it is capable of dwarfing even Entropic Death, meaning that this spell is essentially a free instant kill against any Mage you want. This spell has the highest damage potential in the game.

The Walking Bomb Line
While not terribly high priority for any build, these spells are a lot of fun and not really much of an investment to get decent value out of.

Walking Bomb - This causes a very powerful spirit damage over time effect (40% more damage than a Blood Wound) that will explode if the target dies at any point during the curse. This explosion will deal a huge amount of damage to anything nearby, often enough to finish off whatever may be in the blast zone. This includes party members, so be very careful with where you kill things affected by this.

Death Syphon - Absorbs a chunk of mana from nearby corpses in much the same way a Reaver's Devour does, except as a constant sustained ability. Each corpse can only be drained once. This is a meh spell, it can be alright but I never personally find it very compelling.

Virulent Walking Bomb - This spell is almost identical to the regular Walking Bomb, but does around 50% more damage and enemies hit by the explosion have a chance to become Walking Bombs themselves. This spell is obviously very powerful, but also has the potential to just chain erupt onto party members and kill them before you can react. Use with caution.

Animate Dead - This is a sustained spell that animates a nearby corpse to become a semipermanent party member (Very similar to Ranger summons). When used with Spell Might, they are much stronger, so this should never be casted without SM active. Overall I find this spell to be very underwhelming for the ridiculous 80 upkeep cost it has. Use it if you like it, but it's nothing game changing.

Spirit cont.

The Mind Blast Line
This line has some crazy CC spells within it and I personally believe that every Mage should always pick up Force Field with no exceptions.

Mind Blast - Activated spell that causes a small explosion around yourself, doing no damage but stunning all nearby enemies for a short time as well as clearing all threat. This means that if you use this spell and run away from the group, enemies will likely begin targeting someone else. Unfortunately this is very bad for Arcane Warriors, so avoid casting it outside of emergencies on that build.

Force Field - Creates a shield around the target that completely paralyzes them, but also makes them totally immune to all damage and they become uninteractible. The level of utility that this spell possesses is unrivaled, as it can be used on both enemies and allies alike. When used on enemies, it will freeze them for a very long time allowing you to deal with adds, heal up, debuff the enemy, wait for cooldowns, anything you want. Allies affected by this do not lose threat, meaning that enemies will attack away into a target that is immune to damage while you cast AoE's all over them with no drawback. This will save allies that are being grabbed 100% of the time no matter what. If someone is afflicted by Crushing Prison this will dispel that. You will be in fights where you genuinely feel bad for using this because it trivializes things that would otherwise be very difficult. This is probably the best spell in the game based on impact.

Telekinetic Weapons - This is identical to the weapon buffs that are found within the Primal tree, but instead of adding a flat amount of elemental damage to each strike this will add a scaling amount of armor penetration. This is generally less useful than the elemental buffs but is still very useful against golems and other very highly armored targets. Great to keep active on a second Mage if you are using two.

Crushing Prison - This is basically just Force Field if Force Field also did an ass ton of spirit damage and shattered frozen targets. While it doesn't have the same defensive utility that Force Field does, this spell will completely shut down any target short of a boss and this also does not protect them from damage the way Force Field does. In short, this is single target Blood Wound.

The Entropy Tree

My personal favorite out of the Mage trees, Entropy encompasses all spells that you would find on a typical "Warlock" archetype, with plenty of curses, fears, CC's and damaging effects. Nothing in this tree is terribly high priority, but it has quite a few spells that are able to change the course of a fight on their own. This tree consists of the Weakness line, the Hex line, the Disorient Line, and the Drain Life line.

The Weakness Line
These spells all tend to have one thing in common: they cripple enemies by reducing their stats or immobilizing them altogether.

Weakness - This is a pure debuff that reduces the target's attack and defense by 10 each, as well as imposing a 20% slow. This spell is a bit of an odd one, because while it is incredibly impactful and useful early on in the game, once you reach the final areas it is just a waste of mana to cast this at all. As things scale up, 10 attack/defense becomes less and less of a percentage of the target's overall stats. Good spell, just gets outclassed.

Paralyze - This is a spell that retains it's usefulness throughout the entire game, and does exactly what you think it does. This will completely immobilize a target, while slowing anything that resists it. Very useful in all situations so long as the target does not resist. Interestingly, the duration is dependent not only on the target's rank (as most debuffs/CCs are if you didn't know), but also on the size of the player's party. This means that having less than 4 companions will actually make the paralyze last longer than with a full party, which is never going to be useful but is sorta cool.

Miasma - Sustained spell that applies the Weakness debuff (40% slow instead of 20% though) to all enemies nearby forever. This takes an early game mediocre single target spell into being what is essentially the Mage version of a Champion's Rally. This spell will also generate threat on every enemy it affects, making it one of the core spells that all Arcane Warriors must have in order to function. Casters won't see much use out of this, but tanks are going to need this ASAP for how well it synergizes with them. Also the threat only works on Hard/Nightmare difficulty for some reason idk.

Mass Paralysis - This is a targeted ground AoE sort of like Blizzard, but instead of dealing damage it just paralyzes everything in the area. In my opinion, this is sort of just a worse version of Glyph of Paralysis as it is much easier for enemies to resist and carries the inconvenient 2 second cast time rather than being on demand like most other spells. Casters should stop at Paralyze, Tanks should stop at Miasma. There is never a good reason to take this spell if you have other options available.

The Hex Line
All of these spells are debuffs that cause the enemy to be either much easier to kill or much less dangerous to you. Of all the debuffs in the game, the spells in this line are by far the most brutal.

Vulnerability Hex - Causes the target's elemental resistances to be reduced by a percentage scaling with your spellpower. The absolute baseline for this begins at 30% and by the time you reach around 80 spellpower you will clear 50% reduction easily. It is very important to note that elemental resistances can cross over into negatives all the way up to -100% which equals double damage. This, combined with the fact that the debuff scales and works off of percentages, means that this spell is an absurdly strong damage amplifier at any stage of the game, level 1 all the way to 20. Stacks with Affliction Hex.

Affliction Hex - This spell is identical to Vulnerability Hex, with two differences. Number one, this hex will cause the target to emanate out an aura within 10m that applies this hex to all nearby enemies. Number two, the resistance reduction is a bit smaller than VH. However this literally doesn't matter because the two stack. so go crazy on bosses with both and watch your elemental damage basically double.

Misdirection Hex - Everyone here knows what this hex does if you've played through the game and fought some Mages. This debuff lasts 20 seconds and will cause all critical hits to become normal hits, and all normal hits to become misses. Backstabs will become misses as well, not counting as regular crits. I don't think I need to explain how busted this is, it's one of the most powerful defensive abilities in the game.

Death Hex - This acts as sort of the offensive inversion to Misdirection. When applied to an enemy, every hit they take will now become a critical hit, leading to a huge boost in damage. Unfortunately, a bug causes hits that would have been critical without the hex to become normal hits, so having a low crit chance is actually better when in conjunction with this spell. Still awesome to have though, if only for Entropic Death shenanigans.

The Disorient Line
This line is a bit of a mixed bag of effects, but does have some very strong spells to pick up if they seem appealing to you.

Disorient - Unfortunately we kick off the line with one of the worst spells in the game. This spell is identical to Weakness from earlier in the tree, but only reduces attack and defense by 5 and has no slow component. This is never worth casting for any reason, and you should never pick it up unless you want to go further in this line.

Horror - Thankfully taking Disorient is a small price to pay for the rest of this line, as we immediately gain access to a very strong single target stun. The range is rather small and later on will be resisted often, but this spell remains useful throughout the entire game thanks to it's special combo with...

Sleep - Another awesome spell, this is basically what Mass Paralysis wishes it was. An instant cast ground based AoE that just puts the entire field to sleep if they do not resist it. This spell remains extremely potent throughout the entire game and in combination with Horror can allow some wild bursts of damage to come out on single targets. This spell combination does just shy of 2 Blood Wounds' worth of damage.

Waking Nightmare - Where the spells that come before this are both very strong and IMO always worth taking, this spell is a complete letdown. The mechanics behind this spell are pretty complex, but the gist is that all affected enemies are split into separate "teams" and have their threat table wiped. Enemies that are grouped into different teams are able to draw threat onto each other and fight one another. This has some glaring problems, the most important being that since threat is wiped, it is almost guaranteed that something your party does will draw the most threat and thus all enemies will be attacking you anyway. Never take this, the effort required for it to function is never worth the anemic reward.

Entropy cont.

Character limits are dumb

The Drain Life Line
We have made it to the very last spell line for Mages! This one is pretty good, and consists almost entirely of damaging spells in one form or another.

Drain Life - This is a very decent spell for single target damage, and it also happens to heal you for a good chunk too. Will do double damage/healing on targets afflicted by Vulnerability Hex which is cool too. This isn't super high priority or anything, but you won't ever really regret taking this either.

Death Magic - Pretty much an Arcane Warrior only spell, as casters shouldn't be taking damage. Applies an aura that will draw healing from nearby corpses similar to a Warrior's Devour but as a sustain. This will not really work when Blood Magic is on, but scales with spellpower so the healing will be at least notable. I personally flip between this and Death Syphon on tanks depending on which one I feel is more useful at the moment. Casters should only take this to get Death Cloud.

Curse of Mortality - A badass, deceptive spell that seems way more powerful than it really is. This applies a moderate strength damage over time that will completely prevent the target from being healed in any way. Health regeneration is still possible however, so the Regeneration spell is useful for countering this. The reason this spell seems so powerful is because you mostly only ever see it used against you by enemies. Your tank gets hit by this, you can't heal them anymore, and suddenly you automatically lose the fight. However, the effectiveness is not the same in the other direction simply because enemies in this game rarely heal themselves, and when they do it either bypasses this spell entirely (Sloth Demon) or is negligible (Emissary Heal). This is only worth taking if you want Death Cloud, otherwise I believe this is an overrated ability.

Death Cloud - I'm a bit biased because of the spell combination, but this spell is the best out of the weather spells (Inferno, Blizzard, etc.). This does the exact same damage as Blizzard but with spirit damage instead, which is the most effective damage type for the majority of the game. While Death Cloud does not freeze, any enemies who are affected by Death Hex will take an astronomically high spike of spirit damage as soon as they enter the cloud. This damage is so high that it deals damage equal to about 2 full Crushing Prisons. No regular enemy in the entire game will survive this at high spellpower levels, and even bosses will take a huge chunk. It's not exactly high priority and you'd probably get more value from other spells as it requires taking some real stinkers to get here, but I always grab this at some point just because I think it's fun.

Spell Combinations

Mages have an entire game mechanic that is dedicated to the variety of spells that they bring to the table, specifically the combination of these spells. Certain spells when used together will cause a totally new "spell" to be created as the outcome, and these combos will range from completely useless to game changing in strength. I'll go ahead and outline them below and when you may want to use one, and some are very practical and easy to pull off regularly.

Advanced Reanimation - (Spell Might+Animate Dead) This will cause the Animate Dead spell to raise a much higher level than normal, as well as having more abilities available based on which type of minion you happen to summon. This combo is definitely worth using if you like the Animate Dead spell seeing as it's a straight upgrade, the real question is whether or not you want to be casting Animate Dead to begin with.

Entropic Death - (Death Cloud+Death Hex) Any time a target that is afflicted with Death Hex enters the damage zone of Death Cloud, this spell combo will activate. Entropic Death will remove the Death Hex from the target and deal a hilarious amount of single target damage. This combo will deal such a comical amount of damage that basically nothing in the game will survive outside of main story bosses like the Archdemon or Flemeth. This combo takes some work to set up, but the damage numbers do not lie; anything you cast this on will cease to exist if they don't resist it.

Grease Fire - (Grease+Any Flame spell) This one is kinda stupid, I won't lie. It sounds cool at first, but you will quickly realize that this spell does a pitiful amount of damage at 2 per tick for a total of 30 damage. For reference, 30 damage can be reached in a single auto attack from a Rogue about mid way through the game. This spell combo is flat out inferior to just casting Inferno, and at least Inferno scales with spellpower to make up for the higher cost. Don't ever use this.

Flame Quencher - (Grease Fire+Blizzard on top) This just makes a Grease Fire go out. If you genuinely go out and use this in game, you are a clown. You could have just casted the Blizzard to begin with and skipped the middle man here.

Nightmare - (Sleep/Horror) Want to know a combo that's not for clowns? This one. Sleep and Horror when used separately are already both decently strong CC spells. When Horror is used on a target that is already affected by Sleep, they will take an amount of damage just slightly less than a full Crushing Prison. This is where it's at if you want to burst a priority target down. Sleep the entire group, cast Horror on the target and nuke them, then even if they survive they will now be stunned by Horror as normal.

Improved Drain - (Drain Mana/Life+Vulnerability Hex) This is a good combo particularly for early on in the game when you have limited access to damaging spells. Caster Mages will generally always want to grab the hex spell line, and taking Drain Life is only a single point investment that gives access to a pretty decent damaging spell which also heals you up a bit. This just makes that spell even better.

Paralysis Explosion - (Glyph of Repulsion+Glyph of Paralysis) When overlapping these two glyph spells, the result is both glyphs being consumed and an AoE paralysis burst will happen. Interestingly, this combination bypasses many of the usual resistance checks, meaning that this combination will paralyze things that usually have no business being CC'd like this. When using it with that in mind, this combo can trivialize certain bosses by giving you a free opening for several seconds where you can just shovel damage into the boss without them fighting back.

Shock Wave - (Crushing Prison+Force Field) This combo has two separate but equally important uses. It does not matter which spell is used first, this will work in either direction. First off, when an enemy Mage casts Crushing Prison on a party member, you can cast Force Field on them and immediately detonate it which is awesome and very useful for avoiding damage and dealing it back out to enemies. Secondly, using Crushing Prison on your own party members that you have Force Fielded is also super strong, as the target of the combo takes no damage. This means that they can act as an on demand bomb whenever you need them to.

Shattering - (Frozen/Petrified+Stonefist/Crushing Prison/Physical Crit) This is the most easily applied combo to get out throughout the game, to the point where you will likely discover it by accident without a guide at all. Any enemy who is frozen or petrified can be instantly killed if they are hit by a Warrior/Rogue crit or one of the aforementioned spells. This is awesome when we consider how strong Cone of Cold is, and makes that spell even more high value. Don't think about this one too hard, just Shatter things when you see the oppportunity and don't waste Crushing Prison on something weak just for the Shatter.

Storm of the Century - (Spell Might+Tempest+Blizzard) This spell does exactly the amount of damage that you'd probably expect a combination named this to do. That is to say, anything caught in the middle of this thing is going to die, full stop. Is it worth taking the Lightning line up to Tempest, then going and getting Blizzard, then dumping all your mana on this combo just to flatten an entire room? Probably not. Is it going to be a fun time? Yeah you should try this out at least once just for the memes. Watch out on the radius, the spell combo radius has 2x the radius of either Blizzard/Tempest.

Some of these combinations are more useful than others, with Shatter being far and away the most useful one for basically any situation. Each one has it's place though, and you should keep them in mind when tackling certain fights because they can occasionally accomplish things that individual spells and abilities just can't. Except Grease Fire.

Mage Builds // Caster vs Tank

As you've gathered from the sections covering all the different spell trees and specializations that Mage has access to, there are two distinct ways to build. Casters and Tanks.

Caster Mages will definitely be the more versatile of the two, having access to the full breadth of spells from the class and the ability to cast any of them at any time with no restrictions. This build will be the squishiest in the game by far, but "glass cannon" is a gross understatement of what you can accomplish on one of these. The amount of control and power you have access to makes this class undeniably the strongest and there's no contest - their only downfall is that they cannot Tank and fulfill the Caster role at the same time. Caster Mages will always have both Blood Mage and Spirit Healer, and combined with the other spells you should be picking up, you have a character that can heal, nuke huge areas of the field, funnel damage into single targets, and CC enemies with a vast array of control spells. All on one build, taking up one party slot.

Arcane Warriors on the other hand trade away nearly all of their versatility in exchange for raw defensive strength and unmatched supporting abilities. Tank Mages will be almost entirely unable to cast more than a few spells per fight, as their entire mana bar will be consumed by the laundry list of different sustained abilities that you will have active at all times. This is even further compounded by the fact that fighting in melee means you will have weapons drawn, and about half the spells in the game cannot be cast with a sword out, even by AW's. Mages trying to fulfill this role notably do not have any threat manipulating spells like Warriors, meaning the entirety of their threat must come directly from damaging abilities. It is for this reason, along with the giant mana handicap that Tanks will come with, that I recommend all Mages building this way take Blood Magic as their second specialization. This not only gives you access to Blood Wound, but activating Blood Magic will allow you to free yourself from the bonds of your 90% reserved mana pool and cast what you want, when you want. You won't hit as hard as a Caster and you won't be able to gush out spells quite the same way, but you can do enough to get aggro and hold it while remaining completely unkillable.

There's also the Shapeshifter build for those of you that have brain damage.

The Caster Mage

Now that we've covered the entire breadth of the Mage spell choices, it's time to actually sling a build together. Just like with the Warrior and Rogue builds, I'm not going to lay out what you should be choosing level by level. Instead, I'm going to give you a rough priority list that you should follow, and if you make sure you're getting the highest impact spells before anything else you'll be fine in just about any situation. As for stat allocation, this is very easy on a Mage because they only really need two stats to function: willpower and magic. Willpower needs to be high enough that you can sustain a few things and have enough left over the spam spells. Once you reach this number (I usually say around 20) every single other point always goes into magic. Don't think about it, don't level constitution, just dump everything into magic. Even considering Blood Mages, there are gearing choices that make leveling constitution a waste of time.

Now for the spell priorities. I'm going to group these by tiers so that it's visually pretty easy to understand, and all you need to do when building a Mage is make absolutely sure you have every single spell in the top tier while getting most of the second. There are more than enough talent points to go around, so this is not going to be an issue and by the end of the game you'll be taking spells you don't even care about because there's just nothing good left you don't already have.

Also keep in mind that many of the best spells are locked deep into certain lines, but thankfully the best spells also happen to come from the very best lines so we waste almost nothing by getting there. For example, Crushing Prison is dead last in it's line, but the other three spells are also some of the best in the game and equally as important.

Tier 1: Absolutely Required. You need every single spell on this list as soon as possible.
- Blood Mage line up to Blood Wound
- Spirit Healer line up to Lifeward
- Fireball
- Cone of Cold
- Force Field
- Heal

Tier 2: Very strong spells, but not as game changing as what came before these.
- Stonefist
- Mana Clash
- Crushing Prison
- Glyph Line
- Haste
- Regeneration
- Walking Bomb
- Sleep
- Hex Line
- Paralyze

Tier 3: Everything else, at this point your Mage has access to all of the best spells and now you get to pick things that maybe you're interested in but never got a chance to grab.

Now this might seem like a lot of required spells, which makes the Mage build seem unnaturally strict and unbending when it comes to player choice. I think this is deceptive though, considering that "all of the best spells" comprises about half the existing spells in the game. Mages are fun because of how absurdly powerful their diversity and output is, and taking one or two flavor spells that you just happen to like isn't going to brick the build. For example, once you have all the Tier 1 spells, you don't necessarily need to rush down the entire Mana Clash line if you don't want to. There's nothing stopping you from running down the line to Death Cloud and using that, or picking up Blizzard, etc etc.

This is just a list of what the most powerful spells in the game are and what will give you the most mileage for your talents spent. You will find yourself casting these spells constantly throughout the game, as they are all incredibly useful in their own ways. Just make sure every caster Mage fully completes Tier 1 and gets 60-80% of Tier 2 and you're set to go.

Caster Tactics and Gearing

Tactics for a caster are a bit difficult to outline like the other classes, just because the level of options you have available to you are far more wide than what everyone else. This is compounded by the fact that the some of the strongest spells a Mage will be casting have the very real possibility of murdering your own companions with careless friendly fire. It is for these reasons that I almost never recommend letting a Mage autopilot, and every spell that they cast should ideally be coming directly from your own control. Still, there are a few very useful tactics you can set up just to make sure that if your attention isn't on the Mage they still do things that they're supposed to.

The first thing to do is set up defensive tactics like healing. You can have the Mage cast heal on party members that are under half health, have them use knockback spells or Force Field on companions that are grabbed to free them, cast Stonefist on frozen enemies, etc etc etc. These are very easy to set up and have no margin for error because they do nothing but help the party. As for offensive tactics, this is much murkier because you may not always want a specific spell to be autocast in a given situation, such as Fireball against 5 enemies grouped up - you could kill a friendly. As I said before, it's almost always better to just control the big impact spells yourself, and let the Mage just use smaller spells like Arcane Bolt and Winter's Grasp against big targets.

When thinking about tactics for yourself while controlling a caster, this is very easy because your only real job is to cast as many AoE spells as you can onto the enemy to just destroy the fight, while using defensive spells when needed to keep the rest of the party alive. Most fights in the game will be over by the time you've dumped an entire mana bar, and even if there are still some alive you can just hit Blood Magic and go again. Keep an eye to never cause friendly fire and the game will be very easy for you.

Gear
Weapon: Casters will always be holding a staff, so the choice comes down to whichever staff is going to give you the highest boost to spellpower. The best staff in the game for this will be the Staff of the Magister Lord from the Circle's quartermaster, as it provides not only high spellpower and willpower, but will give +10% spirit and fire damage which are by far the two most important elemental types. (Fireball and Blood Wound)

Armor: Caster chestpieces in this game are actually pretty diverse and I wouldn't say any of them are particularly more useful than the others.
The Reaper's Vestments are what most people would say takes the #1 spot, but I disagree. Yes, the defenses on these robes are hard to match, but they provide absolutely no offensive benefit whatsoever. If you want a purely defensive chestpiece for your Mage, the Battledress of the Provocateur is far better - it boasts higher armor, a higher chance to dodge attacks, gives mana regeneration and a huge +50 flat mana to your pool, as well as some dexterity to help your defense stat out.

If you want nothing but offensive power, then your options are realistically going to be between the Vestments of the Seer and the Tevinter Mage Robes. Vestments are straight up better, but not everyone will have access to DLC equipment so there you go.

As usual the best helmet in the game for any build no matter what is the Helm of Honnleath. If someone else in the party is using this then just use whatever you find as this is the least important item slot by a mile. I personally never use the cloth head pieces because they make you look like you eat paint.

Gloves are an easy choice, the Black Hand gauntlets provide +20% spirit damage and the strongest spells and effects in the game all do this type of damage. You could theoretically go for any of the elemental gloves, but spirit/fire are always the best bet.

Boots are also an easy choice because of how good the Magus War Boots are. +12 defense is very notable on a class that really doesn't want to be getting hit ever, so when an enemy does reach you it's best to be protected.

We're finally going to break the mold on belts though; Andruil's Blessing has been dethroned for this specific type of character because we have another option that is so powerful for casters that it can't be ignored. The Sash of Forbidden Secrets will give us +6 to both willpower and spellpower, which are the only stats a caster cares about at all. On top of this, it provides us the Improved Blood Magic modifier making that sustainable much more powerful and safe.

As always, the best pair of rings will be the Key to the City and the Lifegiver. Lifegiver can be traded off for Dreamsever if someone else in the party needs it more, but I like it for the Blood Magic spam and extra damage cushion for if I pull aggro. Amulets are in a weird spot because there isn't a very clear winner, but the best goes to either Spellward or High Regard of House Dace. The Spellward is just one of the best defensive items in the game, while HRoHD is going to give you a crazy +50 flat mana on top of some extra regeneration and missile deflection. I think the cunning might also affect dialogue choices?

The AW Tank Mage

The Arcane Warrior on the other hand is a different beast entirely. The spell priority for this setup is going to be wildly different than a caster's because you simply are not at liberty to be shoveling spells out all the time. In fact, Arcane Warriors are the class that is most beholden to their fatigue levels because they need to have massive armor on but do not have the passive -10% fatigue that Warriors possess. Instead, Arcane Warriors function by keeping up a wide array of sustains that buff them, debuff enemies, and the puddle of mana they do possess after these will be spent on large damaging spells that draw aggro away from allies. Stat allocation is thankfully just as easy as a caster, but with a few more points in willpower to make sure you're able to get all your sustains stacked up properly.

Arcane Warriors have a few spells that they need no matter what, so I'm going to list these below. Everything on this list is a required to make the build function and these need to be picked up before you take anything else.

- Every spell from the AW spec line
- Blood Mage line up to Blood Wound
- Rock Armor
- Arcane Shield
- Miasma
- A melee weapon buff
- Heal
- Fireball
- Death Magic
- Cone of Cold

These are the most important spells by far for an Arcane Warrior, and as you can see most of them are sustainable buffs that the Mage keeps up in order to become an immovable object on the field. You may have noticed that two high profile sustains are missing from this list, those being Haste and Spell Might. The reason these are not recommended for this build is because they add on additional mana regeneration penalties, and this build will be keeping up a permanent Shimmering Shield. Any penalty to mana regeneration is crippling, as bottoming out would mean your god mode turns off. If you want Haste, bring a second mage to the group.

Remember that even though you are tanking, Blood Magic is going to quickly become your best friend once you gain access to it, allowing you to actually use your spell catalogue outside of the occasional heal or fireball. Health costs of spells will be 65% of the mana cost, and Blood Sacrifice/Regeneration/Even Stone Aura will mean you don't ever have to worry about healing. Don't be afraid to drop even below half health; Shimmering Shield will keep you alive in situations you have no business surviving.

AW Tank Tactics and Gearing

Arcane Warrior tactics are a bit easier to set and forget because they don't have the freedom to cast a load of spells all the time and the spells that are cast are usually much less dangerous to your party than a pure Mage's would be. The first thing to ensure is that all the necessary sustained spells are active at all times, with Shimmering Shield and Miasma being the two most important ones. Outside of this, your AW should just be running around hitting things with a sword and using Blood Wound/Fireball to collect aggro when enemies start to flake off. Despite the differences, they function very similarly to a Warrior.

Once you reach the point where Shimmering Shield is permanent (covered in the gear section), you no longer have to fear literally any enemy in the entire game and with a good number of consumables and self healing, you likely won't need a party at all anymore either. You will be able to slowly beat down anything in front of you forever, your party now only serves to make this process faster.

Gear
Gear for an Arcane Warrior is obviously going to be radically different than what a caster would be wearing, instead lining up much more with what a Shield Warrior might be wearing. This is fine though, as each party only ever needs one tank so all of that gear will be going unused.

The most important thing to know about Arcane Warriors is that keeping up Shimmering Shield is by far the most important thing you can do and almost nothing else matters. This spell will cap out your elemental resists by itself, and the boost to mental/physical resistances will allow you to ignore the vast majority of CC that is aimed at you in all stages of the game. Gaining +15 armor is also huge, which equals out to be almost a second chestplate's worth.

Weapon/Shield: While you may immediately jump to the basic Starfang/Fade Wall combo, this is absolutely not what you want to do and it's vital that you follow this bit of advice. Arcane Warriors always always always want to be using the set bonus from holding Maric's Blade and Cailan's Shield. The stats on these two may not be very flashy, but when used together you will gain a staggering +5 to your mana regeneration. This is already halfway towards offsetting the penalty of Shimmering Shield.

Helmet options are limited as always, and the best in the game goes to Helm of Honnleath. If you'd rather someone else in the party wear this, then you can just throw on whatever has the highest armor because Shimmering Shield will cap out all of your other forms of defense.

The rest of your armor is always going to be the Wade's Superior Dragonbone Plate set. While I do believe this set is outclassed by a couple of other massive armor sets in the game, yet again we choose it for one reason alone - it gives us another +2 to mana regeneration, bringing us all the way to 7 out of the 10 that we need.

The belt slot must always be Andruil's Blessing, not only because it is just the best belt in the game but because it gives us 2 more mana regeneration and this build fiends for that stat like no other. With the gear we've covered so far, we are at 9 out of the 10 mana regeneration we need in order to maintain a permanent Shimmering Shield.

Finally, the ring slots will be taken by the Key to the City and the Lifegiver. The amulet slot will be taken up by the High Regard of House Dace, bringing us to the fabled regeneration breakpoint where Shimmering Shield is now permanent and will never run out by itself. As soon as you reach this point, your Arcane Warrior will become almost entirely unkillable and fights will now be decided on whether or not you can maintain aggro. No enemy in the game will be able to bust through your defenses before you have a chance to heal it off.

A Quick Note on Arcane Warrior DPS

You may have noticed that the section on Arcane Warriors and Mage builds as a whole focused solely on the ability for this specialization to function as a tank rather than as a DPS. I want to take a moment to go over the reasons that Arcane Warrior DPS is not viable just so that everyone is on the same page.

Fatigue is the biggest factor right off the bat, as AW's do not have access to Powerful from the Warrior tree. This means that when equipped correctly in the heaviest, best armor, Arcane Warriors will have the highest fatigue levels of any class in the game. This means that even basic spells become expensive, and the most impactful ones cost an enormous amount of mana and even HP if using Blood Magic. Not only this, in order to cast many spells the AW will have to sheath their weapons as lots of important spells do not allow combat casting.

These issues are further compounded by the lack of safety that a DPS Arcane Warrior will struggle with, as they are forced to fight in melee range all the time (otherwise, there's really no point in taking the spec is there?). Being in melee range is fine for a Warrior or Rogue, but a DPS Mage wants to throw out very strong AoE all the time and being right up on the enemy makes this clunky and dangerous. This isn't even to mention the fact that Mages get no clear benefit for being in melee range, while Rogues can backstab enemies and Warriors have talents like Bravery and War Cry.

Finally, Mages have no access whatsoever to any weapon trees. This means that your active ability usage will be limited to only spells, and while that's not a bad thing due to the overwhelming strength of many spells, it comes with some alarming downsides for melee characters. Dual wielding Arcane Warriors will never be able to hold two full sized weapons, and they are unable to eliminate the penalties to damage and attack on the offhand or use Momentum. Mages trying to use 2H setups will fight against having the slowest attack speed in the game and then also having to sheath and unsheathe weapons in between half of your spells. Using a weapon and shield for DPS just begs the question of why you aren't tanking to begin with. Then, if you - for some unholy reason - would like to make an Archery Arcane Warrior, this is literally impossible because Mages never level dexterity and you don't have access to Lethality for cunning, so your archery damage will be completely unscaled. It also begs the question of why you didn't just use a staff and play a caster if you wanted a ranged DPS.

As you can see, the downsides of playing an Arcane Warrior as a DPS character are many, with the only real upside being you have another character that is capable of casting Blood Wound, Fireball, Heal, and many other spells that are useful no matter what. I also want to always keep opportunity cost in mind, and simply put the opportunity cost of playing this way is far too high when the exact same class could just as easily become the strongest tank or strongest damage dealer in the game. There's no reason to try to mix the two.

This build would still be more useful than a Shapeshifter FWIW.

Companions

I've already gone over the specifics of each and every build in the game, so there really isn't much to say about the companions that wouldn't just be redundant overkill. Instead, I'm just going to go over each one at a very surface level and spit out what I believe they're the most useful for. Keep in mind that you probably want to iron out your party before the playthrough ever starts, as each companion will have a certain set of spells and talents learned based on the level you find them at. As a concrete rule, you always want to collect your companions at as low of a level as humanly possible. This will ensure that you have the maximum control over their build development and they do not come to you with any useless spells that could have been spent elsewhere.

Alistair - This is simple, he's given to you immediately as a Shield Warrior so that you have a tank throughout the duration of the entire game. He's very good at his job once you put some work into him, although he starts out with pitiful stats and very disorganized talent choices. By around level 8 or 9 he should be set to go though. Unfortunately he comes with Templar instead of Champion or Reaver, meaning you don't get access to Champion stuff until way later and won't be able to pick Reaver really at all.

Morrigan - I'm probably going to be crucified for this, but Morrigan is wholly and utterly inferior to Wynne and it's for one reason. Morrigan was tragically dropped on her head as a child (many, many times) and has chosen Shapeshifter as her specialization before you meet her. This alone makes her flat out inferior to Wynne because she will always have the wasted spell point into Spider Form (and god forbid you're too high level by this time, when she could also have Bear Form) and the inability to possess both Blood Mage and Spirit Healer. You can still use Morrigan, but she will never be as good of a caster as Wynne. Interestingly, this makes her a better candidate for being an AW Tank though, as spell variety in that case means way less because she won't have access to big heals anyway. If you're dead set on using Morrigan, just pick caster or tank and go from there.

Wynne - The better mage. Comes loaded up with Spirit Healer rather than Shapeshifter, and thus is primed from the start for being a crazy good caster Mage. While you can technically have Wynne be a tank, that means not picking Blood Mage which is just way too much opportunity cost along with the anti-synergy of healing and tanking. Arcane Warriors just straight up do not have the mana to be casting heals along with their threat spells, and without Blood Magic they don't have the extra reserve to draw from. Use Wynne as a caster only.

Leliana - Bog standard Archery Rogue, even comes with Bard already learned. Because of this, you really have no choice but to build her with cunning as the mainstat, else you will make Bard basically a wasted specialization by intentionally choosing not to scale it correctly. This isn't really a huge deal though, just level cunning.

Zevran - Same thing as Leliana, but for melee. Again, he comes with Assassin and thus you are pigeonholed into making his main stat cunning if you want to scale up his specialization optimally. As I said before though, this has no real meaning beyond leveling cunning up after dexterity is capped out at around 38.

Sten - While I do love Sten's personality and lore, he is just a weaker version of Oghren. Sten has the crippling drawback of being given only a single specialization point throughout the game, rather than the usual 2. This is a drawback that only applies to Sten; no one else has to deal with this and thus he is just weaker than the rest of the cast for no real reason. Use him if you want, he's not bad other than that, you'll just be lacking a big part of what makes a 2H Warrior good by not having Champion. (Berserker is required above all else)

Oghren - Literally just short Sten that can pick both Berserker and Champion. If you want to be optimal and still use a 2H Warrior, use Oghren. No real reason not to unless you just hate drunks, redheads, or the vertically challenged.

Dog - Sort of a weird one, but the Dog basically functions as a more CC oriented DW Warrior in the party. While it's going to be way squishier and do way less damage than a full Warrior, the Dog has access to an AoE stun and the famously deadly Overwhelm ability that often ends fights when an enemy casts it at the wrong time. I'd never recommend you take Dog with you just because it is very one dimensional in what it can do, but if you just like the Dog then it's at least functional. Make sure to find the pee spot in every location for the big buff you get.

Shale - This one deserves it's very own section, but suffice it to say that Shale is more powerful than any party member I have listed thus far.

Shale

Shale is an interesting topic to cover in this guide, because she functions completely differently than all other characters you have access to. Shale is technically a Warrior, but in practice this just means she has access to the universal Warrior talents like Precise Striking and Powerful. In reality, Shale is her own class that cannot take any specializations, she uses her own gear that is specifically made for her, and being a golem makes her uniquely immune or highly resistant to many different mechanics.

The first thing to understand about Shale is her versatility. When used correctly, Shale is the most powerful party member in the entire game bar none and there is never a reason not to take her with you unless you just don't want her for some reason. Shale is the best damage Warrior in the entire game, can act as a tank on an equal level that a Shield Warrior can, provides colossal buffs to your Archery party members, and has access to an aura ability that turns her into a buff totem that is strong enough to act as the party's main healer. The insane thing about Shale, is that she can do all of these roles at once, swapping between them at will whenever it is needed. I won't go too deep into her skills as there is very little choice to be made; you're going to end up with all of them (or close to it) eventually, so the real choice is how Shale is controlled.

Shale functions by activating one of four different sustained modes, each one unlocking access to the rest of the skills in said line. I'll outline these below, and the benefits that they each give and why they are so important to use at all times. Shale without any of these modes active will go from the strongest party member in the game to one of the worst, comparable to the Dog (with less CC). Remember that the real strength of Shale is being able to dance in and out of each mode as is required, meaning that no matter what you will always have access to the exact role you need for any situation. Tank dies? Swap to Stoneheart. Healer dies? Swap to Stone Aura. There is no downside or drawback, switching over is free and you won't even need to change gear or anything.

Melee Damage Shale
Starting off with Shale as a melee dps, this is the easiest place to slot her in without much brain power being needed. Shale does ridiculous amounts of melee damage and due to the way her crystals work, all of her damage will be elemental and thus bypass 100% of enemy armor. Be careful to make sure she always has the best element for the enemy type, and she will greatly outpace Warriors. Not only can she do this, but she also has access to a Slam, Ground Pound, and Final Blow ability that basically allows her to pump out very high single target damage dumps, as well as huge AoE burst and CC (that is FRIENDLY FIRE FREE). The tactics on this one require very little thought, just have her use abilities on priority targets and the rest of her damage will be done through auto attacks similarly to a DW Warrior. The sustained mode for this mode will be...

Pulverizing Blows - Each skill in the line provides bonuses to this sustain, but when fully maxed out this will provide a giant +11 to melee damage, +3 to armor penetration on abilities, and -10 to defense. The bonuses do not lie, while Shale will become much easier to hit, her damage capabilities will skyrocket.

Tank Shale
The other most obvious place to stick Shale is at the forefront of the group acting as the tank. While Shale can't match the sheer defense of an Arcane Warrior, being a Golem and naturally having a ludicrously high constitution stat will make her equally as formidable as any Warrior you could pick. When tanking, Shale will gain access to an AoE stun that is very similar in practice to Mind Blast on a Mage and an extra single target taunt. Finally, she will gain Regenerating Burst, which does damage and stuns for a long time in an AoE around Shale while also giving her an enormous bonus to health regeneration for 10 seconds. These abilities are all fantastic for controlling the fight as a tank should, while also keeping herself alive.

Stoneheart - As the designated tanking mode, the benefits are as follows: +12 to armor, +20% all elemental resists, +3 stamina regeneration, and +6 health regeneration. These benefits, along with the optimal stat spread and help from a Mage supporting Shale will make her very very durable and more than capable of holding aggro with no problems.

Ranged Shale
While this is definitely the least useful sustain for Shale to have active at any given time, it has a time and a place where it becomes just as strong as the others. That time and place is when Shale is standing next to an Archery Rogue, preferably two of them. The abilities that are granted from this sustain are something special however, acting more as the CC mode than anything else. Hurl Rock functions almost exactly like Fireball does, although with less damage. Earthen Grasp is an AoE paralyze ability that is absurdly difficult to resist, even for the highest level bosses in the game. Rock Barrage is just a Mage's Earthquake spell but way better and actually stacks with Earthquake, giving it a solid use as part of this combo. When viewed from this perspective, Rock Mastery can be entered at any time that you need some serious CC to come out, as Shale can get the job done almost as well as a Mage can. Then we get to the bonuses of the sustain, which offer unrivaled buffs to Archery users, adding up to 20% (glitched) crit chance and a huge -2.0 seconds to aim time.

Stone Aura Shale
This is the most interesting one by far, because it fundamentally changes Shale from an active, participating member of the group into the world's most powerful buff totem. When Stone Aura is activated, Shale will basically "turn off" and lock down wherever she is standing. From here, she begins to pulse out an aura that buffs all nearby allies and debuffs all nearby enemies, and this aura is quite literally so strong that it allows Shale to function as the party's healer - that is with a slightly higher potion usage as she cannot burst heal this way. It's hard to really get across exactly how ridiculous this aura is without showing the numbers, so we'll just do that.

Stone Aura - When activated, Shale will turn off and provide a whopping +15 armor and +25% spell resistance to herself, at the cost of -50 defense and -10 stamina regeneration. This is fine though, she shouldn't really be getting hit and stamina is a nonissue as Shale cannot act in this mode anyway.
Now we get to the crazy ♥♥♥♥. Nearby allies will receive +10 to attack, +10 to defense, +10 to spellpower, +5% critical chance, +3 armor penetration, +3 flat damage, +4 stamina regen, +6 health regen, and +4% spell resistance. On top of this, enemies will receive a sizable slow along with -5 to both attack and defense.
As you can see, this aura will basically turn your entire party into very tanky, very damaging murder machines that most enemies just can't keep up with. The health regeneration is large enough to keep most members afloat with some potions here and there, while the defensive buffs will keep them from taking damage in the first place. The damage increase is so high that it basically accounts for being only three party members, as you have the added numbers of what would be a fourth member.

Again, Shale is by far the most versatile companion in the game and the only reason to ever leave her in the party camp is if you just really don't feel like using her in your party. Which is totally valid, the game is not so difficult that you'd need her talents just to get through. But for those of you that do decide to take her along in your party, it's a lot of fun and really opens up a new level of creativity in party composition when you're able to compress every single role into one character.

Party Composition Advice

We're at the end of the guide and from here there really isn't much left to say. You should have a very in depth idea of how each build works and they are all very effective at what they do when you take care to choose good talents, stats, and gear. The only thing left is to give some general guidelines on building the most effective party.

In general, there are a few rules you want to follow and the rest is completely open to you. First off, you need a mage. The amount of damage and control you get from a mage is unmatched and there's really never a reason to go without one unless you're doing a challenge run for some reason. Even an Arcane Warrior will give you levels of control that Warriors and Rogues can only dream of.

Next, you need a healer. This is non-negotiable unless you want to spend all your time in combat chugging potions and wasting a ton of time crafting them. You can use a Mage to heal, or you can take Shale and stick her in Stone Aura. The buff she provides the party in this state is literally so strong that with some light consumable use, you will negate the need for a healer entirely as long as you're using durable teammates and playing defensively.

Finally, you need a tank. This can technically be circumvented if your party is just nothing but Warriors and Dex rogues, but for me personally that's a very odd way to play the game. I really enjoy a tank's ability to pull fights to a central location where AoE becomes very powerful, and without threat management fights can become chaotic and spread out. Tanks are also more fun. You can use a Warrior, Arcane Warrior, or Shale for this purpose. Mages in Bear Form can definitely get the job done as well, but have serious threat issues and requires you to basically waste a Mage when you could just pick AW and be objectively stronger.

As long as your party has a way of recovering health, a way of controlling and shutting down priority enemies, and ways of dealing damage, you'll be just fine in almost any fight throughout the game. Certain party structures will make some things much easier for sure, such as having a party based around ranged damage being much better for fighting dragons than melee. Other than that, handling fights intelligently (kill Mages first, CC enemy 2H users, the usual baseline tactics) will get you through anything the game can possibly throw at you.

Christ this took forever

[ParchmentAlchemist]

Do you plan to make a guide for Awakening and other DLC later on?

[Sleeptalk]

@MrQun No. Aura of Pain does a constant, flat 6 Spirit damage to all nearby enemies. Investing into Constitution does nothing to increase this, nothing to reduce self damage, and if your tank is wearing proper gear you should have more than enough health to just sustain it anyway with a Mage healing you.

It would be much better to just dump stats into Dex like I recommend because it makes enemies less likely to actually land hits, which then makes it easier to sustain AoP because it's the only damage coming through to begin with

[MrQun]

Question regarding Reaver. Since Aura of Pain does constant spirit damage to the user, would investing most points into constitution be a good idea?

[Jadugarr]

Great guide, doing another play through of Nightmare AW/BM and this refreshed my memory perfectly. Thanks mate!

[Diver]

Pretty good guide overall. One note: regarding Arrow of Slaying, it might not be that good. I recommend this paragraph from the archery strategy article on the game's wiki [dragonage.fandom.com]

[Jean Valjean]

I was wondering why this guide didn't have a single comment, and then I looked at the date : were you stuck in 2009 for all these years friend ? You're so late to the party ! Amazing guide though, obviously, and the companion choice becomes so much more interesting with the respec mod installed. Great job, take a like.