Dragon Age Inquisition 8 Ability Slots

Posted By admin  On 14.05.21

No SpoilersIs there a mod for DA:I that lets you have more than 8 abilities? I was a bit disappointed to see that you can only have 8 abilities and 3 potions in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I loved having my main offensive abilities on the hot keys and being able to use the other abilities by clicking them in the ability tray with my.

Looking for effective DA: Inquisition warrior builds? You’ve come to the right place. All of these builds have been tested & played extensively on Nightmare difficulty and come with explanations on how to use the build, and which points to take as you level up.

I’m always adding more builds, and if you have your own ideas, be sure to let me know through the comments on the front page or the contact form.

Note: If you don’t have the Trespasser DLC’s skill upgrade toggles, just take the skill upgrades that are available.

Contents

Click to show/hide

This is a standard, all-around safe Two-Handed early game (level 1-12) warrior build for Nightmare difficulty. Although it may seem strange to pick up so many skills in Vanguard (a defensive tree), it is very important to have guard-generating abilities, as this will greatly improve your survivability before you have access to guard-on-hit masterworks and Tier 2/3 crafted gear.

After this build, you can safely transition into the Two-handed Reaver, Champion, or Templar build, and respec later on to slightly adjust your skill point placement.

Points Spent: 12+

Two-Handed Tree: Block and Slash / Flow of Battle / Mighty Blow / Easy Target / Shield-Breaker / Whirlwind / Clear a Path

Vanguard Tree: War Cry / Charging Bull / I’ll Cost You / Livid / Still Standing

Keep in mind, this build is not designed to act as a main tank for your party. However, you will be able to off-tank, and take a decent amount of damage without dying and chugging potions.

Key Ideas:

  • Good Single-target damage and control
  • Decent AOE damage with Whirlwind and Charging Bull
  • Ability to off-tank when necessary and pull enemies off your squishy party members
  • Decent Guard generation to survive

Click to show/hide

This is a basic tanking build that can be employed during the early portions of the game (levels 1-11, before you unlock Skyhold and your specialization). Afterwards, you can transition into any warrior specialization and continue playing as a tank/support, although the Champion spec would work best for pure tanking.

Points Spent: 11+

Vanguard: Challenge / War Cry / Battle Roar / Untouchable Defense / Trust the Steel / Cutting Words / Bodyguard / Over Here / It’ll Cost You / Livid / Still Standing / Throw the Gauntlet

Note that Charging Bull is an optional skill for this build. Although it is a great all-around skill, it’s not required for tanking, so it’s up to you if you want to get it. Personally, I would only take it if I’m going to be manually controlling the tank a lot.

Basic Gameplay:

  • If you’re playing this build on AI, set War Cry and Livid as preferred skills under Tactics
  • Start fights with a War Cry to get your guard up and taunt all enemies
  • Use Challenge mostly as a safety net for when a single enemy is attacking other party members
  • Livid is typically used after you lose most of the guard from War Cry
  • Bodyguard can either be used all the time, or only when you’re fighting enemies with lots of AOE attacks or your whole party is low on health

Click to show/hide


This build is designed for one thing, and one thing only – tanking on Nightmare difficulty. We are not going to take ANY skills from the Sword and Shield tree, because none of them really help us tank. Instead, we are going to almost completely max out the Vanguard and Champion trees, to create the beefiest tank possible who will never ever die or lose aggro.

Points Spent: 23

Vanguard Tree: Challenge / War Cry / Battle Roar / Untouchable Defense / Trust the Steel / Cutting Words / Bodyguard / Over Here / It’ll Cost You / Livid / Still Standing

Champion Tree: All Skills

This build is slightly stronger than before with recent changes to the Line in the Sand and Livid skills, as well as the new Trespasser skill toggles. Although I’m still not a fan of Line in the Sand, you have room for it on your skills bar so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.

Note: for the Walking Fortress and Line in the Sand skills, both the old and new skill upgrades are good, so you can use whichever one you prefer.

Key Ideas:

  • Very high survivability
  • Lots of taunt skills

Build Guide Video:


Dragon Age Inquisition Maps

Click to show/hide


This is probably the highest damage build available to warriors. It has changed a bit with the release of the Trespasser skill toggles, but is still viable without the DLC. The build is relatively easy to play, but does have gear requirements that other classes and specializations don’t have to worry about.

Points Spent: 20+

Two-Handed Weapon Tree: Mighty Blow / Shield-Breaker / Block and Slash / Flow of Battle / Pommel Strike / Guard-Smasher

Battlemaster Tree: Grappling Chain / Hamstring / Combat Roll / Coming Through / Deep Reserves

Reaver Tree: Ring of Pain / Painbringer / Blood Frenzy / Fervor / Scenting Blood / Devour / Lifeblood / Dragon Rage / Ravage

One thing to mention is that once you have access to all the reaver skills, the skills from the two-handed tree are no longer needed, since all of your damage will come from your reaver abilities. However, you should still have Pommel Strike and Block & Slash on your bar, because these two skills do have some situational uses. For example, Pommel Strike can be used to interrupt a dangerous spellcaster, while Block & Slash is great against shield-users, as they will often block your attacks and knock you down.

Basic Gameplay:

Dragon Age Inquisition 8 Ability Slots
  • If you’re fighting against smaller enemies, start out by using Grappling Chain, ideally on a mage or an archer
  • Use Combat Roll (Coming Through upgrade) , especially when enemies are grouped together – it deals a lot of damage!
  • Cast Ring of Pain (with Painbringer upgrade) and start using Dragon Rage non-stop; when your health gets really low, use Devour
  • Rinse and Repeat!

Important Notes:

  • guard-on-hit masterworks are necessary for Reaver warriors. Craft a weapon/armor with fade-touched Silverite for +5 guard on hit; if that’s not enough, you can add on a secondary guard-on-hit masterwork with +3 guard, as these will stack together.
  • If your Reaver is dying a lot, switch to the “Leashed Fury” Dragon Rage skill upgrade
  • For your Focus skill, you can use either Rampage (on Iron Bull) or Mark of the Rift (on Inquisitor)

Build Guide Video:


Click to show/hide


Credit for build idea goes to:Alren

This unconventional build is one of the most effective ways to solo the game without a party. As many other skill builds, the 2H Champion relies on one central skill interaction. That interaction is Walking Fortress, Flow of Battle, and Whirlwind.

Points Spent: 20+

Two-Handed Weapon Tree: Block and Slash / Flow of Battle / Mighty Blow / Easy Target / Shield-Breaker / Whirlwind / Vortex of Steel / Clear a Path

Champion: All skills except Line in the Sand upgrade and Counterstrike

Vanguard: War Cry / Charging Bull / Cutting Words

The basic way this build works is this: Flow of Battle reduces the cooldown of all your skills by 1 second whenever you score a critical hit. So when you pair it up with Whirlwind (skill with the highest number of hits available to a warrior) and high critical strike chance, you can reduce your cooldown times so quickly that you can use Walking Fortress with very little downtime.

Since Walking Fortress gives you complete damage invulnerability for 8 seconds, you can imagine how strong this skill combination is, especially for soloing the game. The other skills you get are just icing on top of the cake.

Early on (level 1-11) this build plays like a standard two-handed warrior, so you can choose to grab the 2 optional skills in the Two-Handed tree: Pommel Strike and Guard-Smasher. As soon as you unlock the Champion specialization you can respec and drop these, so you can reach your most important skills faster. If you’re having survivability issues at early levels, consider picking up Livid and the Still Standing upgrade ASAP.

Very late game, you can also try adding Livid (Vanguard skill) to your arsenal, as it works very well with this build by providing you with both damage and survivability.

Note: The most important requirement for this build is high critical strike chance; the more you crit, the more you reduce your cooldown times, which means the more you can use Walking Fortress.

The easiest way to increase your crit chance is to craft gear with leather or cloth offensive slots. Also, keep your eyes open for any dropped gear that either gives you Cunning or Crit Chance directly. Here are some particularly good item choices for raising your crit chance:

Dragon Age Inquisition Only 8 Skill Slots

Superb Amulet of Cunning, Mask of the Grand Duchess or a Vitaar with crit chance if you’re Qunari

Basic Gameplay:

  • Use Charging Bull to start fights, and whenever it’s not on cooldown – it’s great for damage, guard generation, and even CC
  • follow up with War Cry to get even more guard
  • Use Walking Fortress, and then immediately use Whirlwind
  • Against bosses and tough enemies like Pride Demons, use To the Death – this taunt increases the damage the enemy takes the longer its up, so this will allow you to solo powerful enemies quite effectively
  • Use Mighty Blow as your main single-target DPS skill
  • Block and Slash is used mostly against enemies with shields, as they will block a lot of your attacks and can knock you down frequently
  • Fill your 8th skill slot with either Mark of the Rift or Counterstrike

Click to show/hide


Despite my early thoughts on the Templar spec, it works far better with a two-handed weapon than with a shield and one-hander. With decent gear you can do some serious damage; not to mention Templars give the party 25% bonus damage, 10% damage resistance, a further 50% damage boost anytime your Templar is unconscious, and a team-oriented Focus skill (Rally).

Points Spent: 18+

Two-Handed Weapon: Mighty Blow / Easy Target / Shield-Breaker / Block and Slash / Flow of Battle / Pommel Strike / Guard-Smasher

Vanguard: Challenge / Charging Bull / Gore and Trample

Templar: Everything except Rally, Spell Purge upgrade, and Blessed Blades upgrade

Note: if you’re having survivability issues early on, consider picking up Livid and the Still Standing upgrade ASAP

The build is very simple, and also very fun to play thanks to your self-combo (Wrath of Heaven + Spell Purge). The build relies on the two-handed tree to provide you with DPS passives/skills, while the Templar tree gives you a high damage combo and your amazing buff/debuff skills.

For your 8th skill, grab either Rally or Mark of the Rift.

After you finish the core build, you can complete the Templar tree by taking the two skill upgrades, especially Annulment (Spell Purge upgrade) if you have Trespasser. You can also go down into the Vanguard tree to pick up Livid to give you more damage and survivability.

The Wrath of Heaven + Spell Purge combo in action

Basic Gameplay:

Dragon Age Inquisition 8 Ability Slots

Dragon Age Inquisition Cheats

  • Keep Blessed Blades up whenever it’s off cooldown
  • Start combat with Charging Bull (Gore and Trample upgrade) – this will knock down enemies, generate some guard, do some damage, and also make your next ability cost no stamina
  • With as many enemies near you, use Wrath of Heaven, and then immediately use Spell Purge for a damage combo – in my experience this is the HIGHEST damage combo in the game, and the best part is, you can cast it by yourself!
  • Use your 3 Two-handed skills while your damage combo is on cooldown – Mighty Blow (highest single target damage), Block and Slash (great against shield-users), and Pommel Strike
  • Keep using Charging Bull whenever you need guard, or when you’re low on stamina
  • Use your Focus skill (Rally) for difficult fights (like Dragons) when your whole party is dying

Sorry it's taken me so long, but I've finally gotten around to updating my dragon age inquisition: skill calculator to cater for the updates introduced in trespasser:

Please note that any previously exported builds will no longer be able to be imported by the tool. If you attempt to load a previously exported build then an error dialog will be presented stating as such. Apologies for the inconvenience. There were too many changes made in this DLC to allow backwards compatibility of my site to cater for old builds.

*UPDATE!: I have recently implemented backwards compatibility to allow previously exported builds prior to the release of the Trespasser DLC to be imported into the tool.

A 'Help & Usage' link is available on the site located above the reset buttons on the right hand side of the page that contains all of the following information and more.

Dragon Age Inquisition 8 Ability Slots Download

Creating a build / Assigning Points
Creating your build is as simple as selecting your class card, then assigning points to your skills trees. You can navigate trees for your class by clicking on the left and right arrows on the skill tree slider, or alternatively, clicking on the actual skill tree logo. Each class has four base trees and 3 specialization trees. Assigning points to a specialization tree (indicated by the 'star' over the skill tree logo) will lock in that specialization. This will mean that like in game, you can no longer assign points to a differing specialization, doing so will present an error message indicating as such. To chose a different specialization, clear all points out of the specialization tree (or use the handy reset tree button) which will then unlock your specialization for you to choose a different one. You can tell which specialization has been chosen (if any) as the 'star' icon will change color to highlight your choice, while the other specialization 'star' icons will become greyed out to indicate that they are not available for selection.
Dragon age inquisition 8 ability slots list
Action Slots
The action slots will automatically fill up as you allocate points to your build. However should you choose more active talents than available action skill slots then these will be put into a queue. You can now drag selected active skills from the skill tree down into the skill slots (if not yet already in the active skill slots), you can move action skill slots around, and you can clear active skills from slots by dragging them out of the area. When you drag an active skill slot out of the queue a new slot will become available. If there are any skills remaining in the queue, then they will be automatically added to the newly available slot. The tool will remember which skills you manually removed such that they are not automatically re-added when new skill slots become available. If at any time you are unhappy with your manually assigned action slots you can hit the 'Regenerate Active Skill Slots' button which will... you guessed it... regenerate your active skill slots (deceptive I know...).
Name your builds
You can name your skill build in two ways. The first is by clicking on the build name at the top of the screen, this will allow you to directly re-name the build directly on the page. The second method is available during the build export process. Here you can change the build name and it will automatically update the build name shown on the page. If the build name is not manually updated / changed, then the tool will automatically generate a build name based on the class and tree containing the most number of point's allocated. If two tree's have the same number of points allocated then the first tree will be chosen from left to right as the build name. I.e. If I had allocated 6 skill points in the Rogue - Archery tree and 5 skill points to Rogue - Sabotage tree, then the build name would be Rogue - Archery.
Exporting / Importing your builds

Dragon Age Inquisition Pc

To export a build, click the 'Export' button and then choose the relevant export link for linking in forums, html or direct link. Hit Ctrl+C to copy your link and use as required. The tool will automatically re-load your build containing all relevant information including build name, skill points allocated and action slots assigned when that link is followed.
Peace,
Koth