Top 5 Dragon Age Origins and Awakening Builds

If you're an RPG fan and haven't been hiding under a rock in 2009 you've most certainly heard, and probably even played, the best RPG game of 2009 (reader's choice) called Dragon Age: Origins.

If you haven't played it yet, drop whatever you're doing and get it, it ranks up there with the classics like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. And even if you've finished it once, there's no excuse not to play it again while waiting for Dragon Age 2 to come out, especially with all the awesome DLC out there, the Awakening expansion and not to mention the MODs. But enough about that, let's get to my top 5 Dragon Age builds:

Before we begin though you should know a few things:

1. Besides your main class that you choose at start-up you get to choose 2 specializations in the Origins Campaign and an additional one in the Awakening Expansion
2. Each main class has a total of 6 specializations you can choose from making and each specialization gives you 4 extra skills you can learn
3. There are 4 specializations available in the original game for each class, and 2 more get added in the Awakening campaign
4. The game is relatively easy! That being said you can pretty much choose whatever you want and still eventually win, at least on normal difficulty.
   

Mage / Arcane Warrior / Blood Mage / Battlemage

This is like the cookie cutter end it all build for the powergamer out there. You can equip any armor, sword or shield. You can deal huge melee damage and take very little. You can use pretty much any spell in the game, though not as often as a real mage without draining your HP. Blood mage spells are overpowered. Battlemage spells are overpowered. It is boring! And you can't really hold aggro either, which can lead to some really nice wipes especially when fighting against those nasty High Dragons. Also your physical resistance, being a mage, will be quite low unless you turn on a special constant mana draining ability, so expect to get knocked down pretty often by regular enemies.

Mage / Arcane Warrior / Spirit Healer / Battlemage

Same as above except the blood mage part meaning you will cast less spells, and do less damage with magic as the other build. What you gain however is another character that can heal or revive fallen comrades, so if you don't like living on the edge, this is the "safer" over-powered build. Sword and shield or two handed is the way to go.

Warrior / Champion / Berserker / Spirit Warrior

A two-handed weapon build centered around wearing heavy armor and dealing lots of damage. You won't be such a great tank since you have only a few tools to hold aggro except your high damage but it sure is fun! You can buff your allies and yourself, and Spirit Warrior turns all your melee damage into spirit damage, which makes damage numbers over 100 a frequent sight. That and you have great AOE capability, enough even to be able to skip having a mage.

Rogue / Bard / Ranger / Legionnaire Scout

The ranged support build. You only really need the first spell from the bard specialization since that is the best, and feel free to go into the ranger tree as deep as you want. Obviously rogue will focus mostly on archery skills and the Legionnaire Scout offers some nice survival tricks and a hefty bonus to hit points and stamina. Support means splitting stats between dexterity and cunning for that very useful disable traps and open locks skill. Great damage comes later on at the price of stamina when using skills that automatically score a critical hit, and there's even some AOE capability and disables in there.

Rogue / Assassin / Duelist / Shadow

The melee DPS backstab build. All your stat points need to go into dexterity and talents will focus mainly on dual wield as well as the specialization talents you have. Be sure to learn to use poisons effectively and you will be a DPS powerhouse that's also hard to hit. There's some micromanagement needed for all that backstab action, but that only makes it even more fun!