Best Mage build in Dragon Age: The Veilguard – Companions, spells, weapons & more

Using the best Mage build in Dragon Age: The Veilguard will ensure you destroy all your enemies in battle. 

Before choosing the Mage, it’s important to know its strengths and limitations. Appearing in the A tier on our class tier list, the Mage is a glass cannon that hits for a ton of damage but can quickly find itself lacking in health in the game’s toughest fights.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to mitigate that lack of health through your character and party build, so these are our recommendations for the best Mage build.

Best Mage build in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Features	Best build
Specialization	Death Caller
Skills	Spirit Bomb Arcane Shot Corrupted Ground The Crypt’s Herald
Stat Priority	Necrotic Damage Ability Damage Stagger
Faction	Shadow Dragons
Companions	Taash Lace Harding

As previously mentioned, the Mage has a low health pool and takes a lot of damage when hit, arguably making it the most difficult class to play compared to the Warrior and Rogue. As such, you have two directions to take when building, depending on how you’re looking to play.

For the more cautious, mitigating incoming damage and health loss is a solid play. This can be done by using specific gear, taking the right skill nodes, and bringing support companions along.

Dexerto/Bioware

We have eschewed this approach to lean into the Mage’s biggest strength, namely high single-use spells and damage-over-time abilities. To complement this, it will usually be better to use the Orb and Dagger for speed and DPS, though enemies who are particularly dangerous up close may necessitate the use of the staff.

Counter-intuitively to our all-out approach to building the class, your best friend is actually the double dodge, which allows the Mage to dash forward before teleporting an extra few yards in any direction. This allows the class to skip over some of the game’s deadlier and more difficult to avoid enemy attacks.

Best specialization

In our build, we recommend speccing into Death Caller.

Though Spellblade may seem like the obvious choice considering how fun the orb and dagger style is to play, it simply isn’t able to compete with Death Caller in terms of raw damage output.

Dexerto/Bioware

Necromantic powers are comfortably the best in the game, with Necrotic outstripping Burning and Cold damage by some margin. It offers excellent field control via abilities like Corrupted Ground and AoE damage that quickly burns down enemies in larger group fights, which can quickly become overwhelming otherwise.

Best skills and abilities

These are the base skills and abilities we’d particularly recommend running for the best Mage build in Dragon Age: The Veilguard:

Base Skill Tree

• Destructive Light – An Ultimate Ability that deals immense damage to bosses, and bigger groups of enemies and also applies Burning. Ideal to use in the early game.
• Arcane Shot – Launches Fireballs toward a target and nearby enemies and applies Burning.
• Wall of Fire – Creates a flaming barrier that burns enemies who touch it. Anyone inside the wall will receive continuous damage.
• Degrade and Prolong – Passives that increase damage and extend the duration of Afflictions.
• Breathing Room – Extends abilities area of effect by 50%
• Insidious Rot – Increases to maximum applied Necrosis stacks
• Arcane Defiance – Increases Electric and Necrotic resistance by 10%

Dexerto/Bioware

Death Caller skill tree

Here are the skills we’d advise investing in once you hit Level 20 and unlock the Death Caller specialization:

• The Crypt’s Herald – Ultimate ability that summons a necrotic storm, absorbing the life force of enemies, ending in an explosive wave with huge damage. Does massive damage over a large area.
• Spirit Bomb – Drains enemies’ health and throws the absorbed life back to enemies creating an explosion that damages anything it hits.
• Death’s Blessing – Provides a 10% buff to Necrotic damage.
• Concentration – Provides a 15% buff to Ranged damage.

Dexerto/Bioware

Once you’ve got all the skills above just keep building into the Death Caller tree as much as possible, picking up all of the nodes in that section as you level.

Outside of that, you won’t need to pick up any more active abilities, so prioritize passive buffs above everything else and you should be in a great position to tear through the enemy ranks.

Best Faction

The ideal Faction for the Mage is the Shadow Dragons. Their biggest benefit is that your class-specific resource will renegrate faster so you’ll never be short of Mana on the battlefield for long.

Alternatively, the Grey Wardens are a good option to counter the Mage’s lower health pool as you get a slight increase in your base Defense and Health.

We’ve provided a full rundown of both Factions below:

Shadow Dragon benefits	Grey Wardens benefits
Light in the Dark – Gain reputation with the Shadow Dragons more quickly	Bonded in Blood – Gain reputation with the Grey Wardens more quickly
Never to Rise – Deal increased damage vs. Venatori	Blight Killer – Deal increased damage vs. Darkspawn
Resourceful – Your class-specific resource regenerates slightly faster	Vigilant Training – Base Defense and Health are slightly increased

Best stats, weapons & armor

• Necrotic Damage
• Stagger
• Ability Damage

For this build, you will want to prioritize an orb, dagger, and staff that directly increases Necrotic Damage. This isn’t particularly important in the early game, as you only truly unlock the build’s power once you hit Level 20, but it’s good to get the gear in place as you approach that milestone.

Dexerto/Bioware

There is an easy-to-pick-up Unique ring that you can grab from the Hall of Valor. To earn it, you simply need to win ten fights in the arena, something which becomes pretty trivial once you hit a level in the late 10s. Though it doesn’t buff Necrotic Damage directly, it offers huge increases to Stagger as well as passive gold, making it a great option until you find the perfect item in that slot.

Other stats to look out for are increased healing from your belt, with Reinforced Binding being a nice option that also provides the Resistant status when you take advantage of Lace’s Soothing Potion. The other priorities outside of the above are increasing Stagger further and tertiary stat buffs like Control Ability Damage or Ability Damage more generally.

Best Runes

These are the best Runes we’d recommend using as a Mage, and their benefits:

Rune	Benefits
Scrouge	All weapons deal Necrotic damage for 20 seconds, letting you deal even more devastating damage on the battlefield.
Overflow	Your current Potions additional effects are applied. +1 Maximum Potion – helpful in regards to the Mage’s lower health pool.

Being able to increase your Necrotic damage even further by activating the Scrouge Rune will make your Mage an even deadlier force on the battlefield.

Having access to yet another Potion thanks to Overflow means you’ve got some an extra resource if you need to quickly recover during a hectic fight, something that could be vital for a Mage considering their lower health compared to the Warrior and Rogue classes.

Best companions

• Lace Harding
• Taash
• Lucanis

For the Mage, it’s nice to head into battle with additional support for those moments where you get caught out and take damage. To cover this, Lace Harding offers an excellent combination of healing and damage, thanks to her Soothing Potion and Seismic Shot abilities, respectively.

Alternatively, Neve and Bellara also offer helpful support (as well as some excellent ability synergies), but we generally still have Lace as the most reliable party member with the Mage. Alongside her, high-profile damage options include Taash (who can detonate our Corrupted Ground ability with Dragonfire Strike) and Lucanis, who deals monstrous damage in his own right.

Generally, we prefer the former, though Taash doesn’t have direct ability synergies with Lace when using their pre-determined setup. Between the two, you should find yourself able to comfortably output significant damage, while also staying away from the deadly damage of your enemies.

That’s our complete guide to building the ultimate Mage in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. For more on the game, check out our romance guides for Lucanis, Bellara, how to respec, crafting explained, and how to increase Faction strength.