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

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In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the Mage serves as the ultimate spellcaster, blasting through swathes of enemies with ease – but only with the right build.

As with previous Dragon Age games, The Veilguard features four races, Human, Dwarf, Elf, and Qunari, and three classes, Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. The latter is restricted to Human, Elf, and Qunari, with Dwarves unable to tap into the magic that the Mage needs to excel.

Before choosing the Mage, it’s important to know its strengths and limitations. Appearing in the A category on our tier list, the class 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

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. 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.

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 play using 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

Best specialization: Death Caller

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.

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 the larger group fights, which can quickly become overwhelming otherwise.

Best skills and abilities

Necrotic abilities – Corrupted Ground and Spirit Bomb with The Crypt’s Herald

For the early portion of the game, we have filled out the section of our core Mage abilities that offers enough output to get us to our specialization as efficiently as possible. Destructive Light is the ultimate ability that we use throughout the earlier portions, and it’s a dominant, laser-style attack that does immense damage to bosses and even groups if it is aimed well.

This direct route adds important staples to our arsenal, such as Arcane Shot and Wall of Fire, which, although we won’t continue with them forever, make life a lot easier before Level 20. Passive buffs like Degrade and Prolong add to our damage and extend the duration of our Afflictions, with the latter becoming particularly useful when we gain access to Necromantic spells.

We have also built into Breathing Room, which extends the Area of Effect of our abilities by 50%. This is a significant boon for Wall of Fire in the first instance before becoming a necessity once we unlock Corrupted Ground. The Insidious Rot node also grants us an increase to maximum applied Necrosis stacks, while Arcane Defiance improves our own resistances.

Once we arrive at the Death Caller spec tree, you will quickly gain access to two new abilities that should go straight into your rotation. The first is The Crypt’s Herald, an Ultimate ability that does huge Necrotic Damage over a large area.

Though it is slightly lower single-target than Destructive Light, it’s much easier to hit more enemies and it synergizes far better with the way we’ve geared the class toward Necrotic output.

The other is Spirit Bomb, which deals very high Necrotic Damage, as well as Detonates and Sunders enemies. From there, make sure to pick up Death’s Blessing and Concentration, which provide a 10% buff to Necrotic Damage and a 15% buff to Ranged Damage, respectively.

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 stats and gear

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.

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 companions

Lace Harding
Taash
Lucanis/Neve/Bellara

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 a reliable party member. 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 the complete guide to getting the most out of your Mage in Dragon Age: The Veilguard! Make sure to check out our breakdowns of the Rogue and Warrior if you’re looking to try out what the other classes have to offer.

We also have a full tier list explaining exactly how each class is performing in the current patch, as well as a look at the game’s often tricky crafting system that’s integral to upgrading and enchanting your gear.

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