Introduction to Abilities

There are hundreds of different talents and spells to learn in Dragon Age II.To help you make the right decisions, this section offers analysis on all talent trees, offering targeted advice on which abilities might offer the best results for Hawke and his companions.

For those completely new to Dragon Age II, the following general guidelines will also be of assistance.

• Activated abilities last for a limited time and incur an immediate cost in stamina or mana. After you use them, there is generally a short Cooldown period before you can use them again. During the Prologue and early hours of Act 1, it can pay to prioritize activated abilities. The more you have, the better your party will perform in combat.

• Sustained Abilities remain constantly active until you disable them. These reserve a fixed percentage of the character’s mana or stamina pool until you deactivate them.
• Passive abilities are permanent perks that do not consume stamina or mana.

• Upgrades are not abilities in themselves but instead improve an existing ability, usually in a very significant way. With precious few exceptions, all talents or spells that have upgrades are essentially restrained versions until you acquire the bolt-ons that augment their overall effect. Without Despair contributing huge spirit damage, Horror is just a temporary stun; on its own, Elemental Shield is just a moderately useful buff for a frail mage but, with Arcane Wall and Arcane Shield, it becomes a party-wide enhancement of great utility. For key abilities, we suggest that you acquire upgrades as soon as they become available. This is especially true with skills that set up cross-class combo opportunities.

• Hawke can learn one specialization upon reaching level 7 and another at level 14. Three specializations are available for each class. Each grants a unique bonus and unlocks a new group of powerful talents or spells. Hawke’s companions cannot learn specializations, but their personal ability trees include talents or spells that are related to the same specializations available to Hawke.

Don’t focus too exclusively on abilities that offer heavy damage. While these are certainly worthwhile, passive perks and skills that contribute a strategic edge can be equally efficient. For example, many players might completely overlook the Sabotage tree common to all rogues. This would be a mistake: the talents it contains will enable a more tactically minded player to have entire groups of dangerous opponents reeling with the effects of its debuffs, incapable of striking back and ripe for cross-class combo finishes.

If you have access to the Black Emporium (see dragonage.com/da2/addons for details), you can buy a Maker’s Sigh to reallocate every last ability point acquired during your adventure so far. This is great for those classic “buyer’s remorse” moments where, on reflection, you may have approached the leveling process in a very different way.

Though it is of marginal importance until approximately midway through Act 1, especially on a first playthrough, we suggest that you experiment with the in-game Tactics system to fine-tune the way in which Hawke’s companions make use of their abilities.