One of the main reasons for revisiting this game after so many years was to find a completely new way to play a 2 handed Warrior and to basically make the mightiest heavy hitter that I possibly could, something I had always wanted to do since the game first came out (but never quite managed, until now). So after a lot of playing and micromanaging, I finally got to experience the most powerful version of the Warrior class that I have ever played in Dragon Age 2, and this guide will show you how you can too.
And I do know that writing a guide for a game that’s well over a decade old doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but here it is. And as I had already written a Mage guide and a Rogue guide for Dragon Age 2 before (albeit a long time ago), a Warrior guide now just brings it all to a full circle.
Ever since I first saw the Warrior class in action in the ‘Pre-story-Prologue’ in DA2, it instantly became my favourite class to play, although I could never create a build that would come even remotely close to that version. Instead, all of the previous Warrior builds that I had played always ended up hitting a wall in terms of damage output and made the gameplay a lot more struggling and tedious in the long run.
But after two new playthroughs and much experimenting, I can emphatically state that I’ve finally been able to build a version of Warrior that not only far surpasses that ‘Varric-exaggerated’ version, it also makes the entire game unbelievably easy and a constant delight to play through. In fact I had to bump up the difficulty to ‘Hard’ just cause how ridiculously easy this build had turned the ‘Normal’ difficulty into. And this guide will show you how you can have the same amount of fun playing this uber-powerful Warrior that can turn even the ‘Hard’ difficulty into an unbelievably easy experience.
Attribute Allocation:
Unlike most Warrior builds that I’ve played in the past where generally I had put stat points in Strength, Willpower and Constitution, and always ended up hitting a ceiling in terms of the total damage output, this particular build turns things around greatly by focusing on Critical Damage instead as that’s the easiest way to rack up your damage values significantly. So the main focus of this build is to have high Strength (as is the standard principle for all Warrior builds) while also having a high degree of Critical Chance, for those quick bursts of massive spike damage that can really turn the tide of any encounter.
To achieve this, you need to put points in both Strength and Dexterity in a 2 to 1 ratio in each level your character gains. Don’t bother about Stamina as it can be easily covered through equipments and Abilities instead, and you won’t need more than 18 points in Constitution for this build so your focus should be purely on STR and DEX.
Also focus on maximizing your Critical Chance through equipments as much as you can as that’s going to be crucial for getting the sort of sky-high barrage of damages we’re going for. Using this strategy, I was able to get a total of 72 Strength and a whopping 70% Critical Chance (from a combination of Dexterity and +Critical Chance items).
These are the attribute values of this particular Warrior build at level 24:
Strength—72
Dexterity—36 (Critical Chance 70%)
Willpower—15
Constitution—20.
And these are the list of Equipments I had for this build:
Bloom with a Rune of Striking (6% Critical Chance) and the Primeval Lyrium Rune for raining down the Crit damages at supersonic speed (when combined with Haste, of course).
Gauntlets of the Fallen (+1% Critical Chance).
Proving Battle Tunic (6% Critical Chance).
Avvarian War Boots (2% Critical Chance).
Enchanted Silverite Chain Belt (+1 to all attributes).
Urzara’s Tooth (+1 to all attributes).
Etched Ring of the Twins (+2% Strength, +4% Critical Chance, +9% Critical Damage).
Ring of the Seven Watchers (+2% Critical Chance, +4% Critical Damage).
You don’t need to equip these exact same items, you might find even better ones especially if you have some of the story DLC’s (which I didn’t), this is only to show you that your priority should be to get your Critical Chances as high as possible through equipments. Which combined with a high enough DEX, your Warrior should easily cross at least 60%+ Critical chance in the game.
Talents and Abilities: The first Talent tree that needs to be maxed out for this build is the Vanguard tree which has some of the most powerful abilities for a Warrior along with passives that greatly benefit Criticals. Get Cleave (upgrade to Claymore) as soon as you can with Assail and everything else in that tree. Keep ‘Might’ on at all times, which combined with ‘Cleave’ + ‘Assail’ + ‘Heroic Aura’ will give you a colossal 105% extra damage for a short time. I always start any fight with this combo along with Haste for raining down Supermassive damage at warp speeds, which really makes short work of most encounters in the game, even at Hard difficulty. And the reason is that High Strength + High Critical chance that’s working under it all, providing the base for the inordinately massive damage boost to soar through.
As we’re not putting any points to Willpower, you’ll need Bolster and Deep Reserves from the ‘Battlemaster’ tree, which along with the stamina regen passive from the Berserker tree (the very first ability) should cover all your stamina needs. One of the great things about this build is that you don’t really need much of the ‘Activated’ abilities, as you’ll be doing insane amounts of damage without them anyway, which practically minimizes the need for any extra stamina.
As for Specialization, Reaver is what we’re going for with this build so maximize that skill tree in due time. But know that we won’t be needing ‘Aura of Pain’ at all (I didn’t use it in my playthrough anyway) so I don’t recommend doing that. You can use ‘Sacrificial Frenzy’ but do keep an eye on your health as this build doesn’t have a lot of Constitution so I recommend having Anders in your team as a must, simply for his healing spells which you’ll be needing frequently.
Squadmates:
Anders (a must for this build)
Aveline (as the tank and to draw most of enemy aggro)
The last team member is totally up to you.
And that’s all there is to this build, which I hope you find at least as enjoyable and fun to play as I did. To sum it all up, playing as the Critical Warrior has been one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had in Dragon Age 2 and I wish it turns out the same for you. Happy gaming.
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