Dragon Age The Veilguard: Worst Warrior Skills

Key Takeaways

• Spectral Bulwark and Staying Power are underwhelming Warrior skills due to limited effectiveness and niche use.
• Battlefield Awareness and Conditional Surrender are seen as overly situational, making them less valuable in gameplay.
• Skills like Perfect Throw and Cleaving Strike are outclassed by other abilities in the Warrior’s skill tree, making them not worth investing in.

With a host of in-depth, enjoyable factions and a great story that brings together some long-standing plot elements, Dragon Age: Veilguard is sure to be remembered as a fantastic title that will bring new fans to the legendary series of games while also restoring longtime players’ faith in a series that had been dormant for going on ten years. This game absolutely nails the ARPG combat it’s been trying to perfect since Dragon Age 2.

But when looking at the skill trees for each of the three archetypes, Warrior, Rogue, and Mage, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. What passives should you take? What branching skills should you invest in? The fact that players can re-specialize on a whim definitely helps, but another factor aiding in deciding what skills to take is that some are simply not worth the effort. For warriors, here are some skills that can safely be ignored, or only taken to get to a neighboring node of the skill tree.

7 Spectral Bulwark

This Defensive Ability Is Underwhelming

• Type: Smash, Duration
• Damage: 375 Necrotic
• Effect: A minor thorns effect on use

The Reaper synergizes with some of the best armors in the game, already begging the question of why one of the view purely defensive abilities in the skill tree needs to align with this archetype, but beyond this, Spectral Bulwark just isn’t very good.

The damaging effect from enemies striking you occurs once and is not nearly explosive enough of a response to justify the shields immediately disappearing. In a class built for pure offense (as all classes are in this game really) this single defensive skill seems undercooked.

6 Battlefield Awareness

A Highly Situational Passive

• Effect: When you interrupt an enemy in the middle of an attack with a Control Ability, you deal 15% bonus damage.

This highly situational ability really doesn’t present itself as a tactical solution. The combat in this game is very fast-paced, and it will be more of a matter of luck if players launch this control ability in time with an enemy ability.

Sometimes enemy abilities are just that, but later on in the game attacks with large wind-ups or projectiles are still considered ‘basic’ attacks and not classed as abilities, so half the time players won’t even really know when to time this one.

5 Downfall

Utilizes An Incredibly Niche Combat Factor

• Effect: Jump attacks guarantee Critical hits if the target is Knocked Down.

Besides not being very easy to knock enemies down, with few Warrior skills including such an effect, the specifics of landing a jump attack on a knocked-down target is just too finicky for its own good.

Many will end up getting this because it gates more of the skill tree, but players should refund Downfall if they’re not using it once the skill tree is linked up elsewhere to put that point somewhere better.

4 Perfect Throw

Requires Perfect Timing For An Imperfect Payoff

• Effect: Release Shield Toss the moment a new Charge level is attained to gain bonus damage and bounces.

The exact moment that is considered a ‘perfect’ shield toss might sound like a great boon to shield toss builds, but in truth players will take more damage trying to perfect the exact moment a shield is charged than they’ll dish out by actually landing it.

This skill is luckily a fairly distant node on one specific specialization, so players can pretty much just pretend it doesn’t exist.

3 Staying Power

Relies On Often Diminishing Duration Abilities

• Effect: For each active Duration Ability’s effect, you take 5% less damage from all sources.

Duration abilities are not the strong suit of the Warrior. One duration ability of the Warrior’s is also already on this list, so… go figure. The issue is that the duration of ‘Duration’ abilities don’t usually matter because, like Spectral Bulwark, there’s usually some condition they’re set to fulfill before disappearing on their own anyway.

The way rage generation works, players can only really have two or so duration abilities up at a time. A 10% damage reduction is definitely strong, but it’s not worth the three or four points of rage sunk into duration abilities just to get use out of this one passive.

2 Conditional Surrender

Affects Primers And Detonations In Negligible Ways

• Effect: Primers applied by Control Abilities last 20% longer. Detonations triggered by Control Abilities deal 20% more damage.

This ability plays off the interplay between primers and detonations, which are vital for companion combos. The primer duration doesn’t matter, as players will usually ‘detonate’ a primer as soon as it appears.

The damage boost is more reasonable, but combos, while powerful, won’t appear as often as players might think, as skill cooldowns are fairly lengthy in this game. It’s another ability that just gets outclassed by less situational ones.

1 Cleaving Strike

A Skill Outclassed By Many Others

• Type: Area, Strike
• Damage: 468
• Physical Effect: A damaging wave that sweeps across the battlefield.

Cleaving Strike has a unique feature not seen with many other skills in the game, where the projectile builds up damage as it travels. Unfortunately, the projectile really doesn’t have that much range – this is certainly not the Warrior’s answer to Rogue bow abilities or Mage spells.

Other skills earlier on the Skill Tree play far more to the Warrior’s strengths, repositioning them or controlling the battlefield in ways that this skill simply can’t replicate. It’s best to leave this corner of the skill tree untouched.