Early Shield Toss Warrior Build in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

While Warriors in Dragon Age: The Veilguard don’t come equipped with ranged weapons, they can still deal damage from afar by chucking spectral shields at enemies. This is easily one of the coolest shield playstyles in action RPGs, and if you want a Captain America-esque character, then this path is for you.

Shield Toss builds are fairly flexible, and you can get one online fairly early on, and players should be able to get its most important parts up and running before they can even finish recruiting all of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s companions. Here’s a guide that covers the foundation of a good Shield Toss build while leaving space for build freedom for the endgame.

Veilguard Shield Toss Skill Build

The majority of the skills you need for this build are on the upper-right side of the skill tree. Here, you’ll find plenty of passives that improve Shield Toss, from giving it extra bounces, to improving the damage it deals against enemies. Incidentally, this path also leads to the Reaper Specialization for Warriors, which has a number of strong Shield Toss-related passives on top of massively improving Necrotic Damage.

The image above represents the core Shield Toss skills players need to get the baseline of this build operational. After getting all these skills, players can start investing in other active or passive abilities that suit their playstyle.

Active Skills

• Bloody Advance
• Spectral Bulwark
• Titan Stomp

Bloody Advance is a ranged ability that inflicts Sundered and Bleeding. If you use a Charged Shield Toss against an enemy affected by this skill, they explode, dealing AoE damage. Meanwhile, Spectral Bulwark can keep you safe when things start to get too hectic. This can also be upgraded into a damaging ability that applies Necrosis if you take the Lingering Decay skill.

Your third skill is mostly up to personal preference, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll be using Titan Stomp since it’s very close to our core passive skills. Use it to control the battlefield by knocking enemies down and applying Overwhelm, which increases the Stagger damage taken by enemies while knocking them down. If you don’t feel like using this ability, get Fury of the Forge instead.

Use Driving Kick or Titan Stomp until you get Bloody Advance.

Weapons and Equipment

Obviously, players will want to get a good shield. We recommend getting the Necropolis Defender Shield from the Necropolis Halls — it deals high Physical damage with some added Necrotic damage when upgraded. Unlocking Gear Traits in Dragon Age: The Veilguard can be tricky, however.

As for weapons, you can go with pretty much anything you prefer. Ones with high Necrotic damage would be ideal so you get more synergy with passive skills later on, but ultimately, they aren’t necessary. However, we recommend bringing a good sword for damaging health and a greataxe for breaking armor. You can also bring a maul instead of a greataxe so you can stagger enemies more quickly and open them up to Takedowns.

We only recommend stacking Necrotic damage if you’re planning on going down the Reaper route. Otherwise, look for items that boost Physical or Ranged damage. You can also enchant your gear at the Lighthouse so they can deal more damage versus barriers or armor.

Best Companions

Taash is a great teammate to have if you’re struggling with heavily-armored enemies like the Antaam. She has Fire-based abilities that deal bonus damage to armor, and if you stack her with anti-armor passives and gear, you’ll be able to focus on gearing up for dealing with regular red health or barriers.

Neve and Bellara are excellent choices if you’re looking for crowd control. They can both lock large groups of enemies in place, and they have skills that can detonate Sundered applied by Bloody Advance. If you’d rather just deal more damage, then bring Emmrich for his abilities.

Overall, who you bring mostly depends on the synergies you want to take advantage of. Status effects in Dragon Age: The Veilguard also play a big part in combat, so try to bring someone who can combo off of the effects you apply and vice versa. Although, you can bring anyone and still win, so don’t worry much about which companions to take.