When you start the Inquisition, your blacksmith has the ability to craft weapons and armor. Additionally, the smith can craft upgrades that fit into the appropriate slots on a weapon or piece of armor. It is not until the Inquisition moves to Skyhold that you can recruit Dagna, a dwarven arcanist whose skills allow her to make runes that add elemental damage types to various weapons.
Schematics for equipment fit into one of three tiers. Tier 1 schematics yield tier 1 gear, and so on. The higher the tier, the more powerful the item can potentially be, but that also means you will need to spend more crafting material per slot on the schematic to make the item. Tier 1 weapon and armor schematics typically have two slots for crafting materials, while tier 3 schematics have four slots for materials, allowing you to heavily customize the final product but generally costing more materials per slot. The exceptions to this are helmets and upgrades, which do not gain more slots on their schematics, just increased material requirements.
Weapon and Armor Crafting Material Slots
Most crafting materials used for weapons and armor have stats of their own that help determine the overall quality of the gear. These stats determine what that material will do for a given crafting slot on a schematic.
Primary Slot
This slot determines the base armor or attack value of crafted armor or weapons, and it can also determine the elemental damage of a staff. Materials can be rated as follows: low, medium, high, and very high armor/damage rating.
Utility Slot
This slot determines any core attribute upgrades to Strength, Dexterity, Magic, Cunning, Willpower, or Constitution. The higher the tier of a material, the higher each individual piece of the material can boost an attribute. For example, if a material provides two points of Strength and you use 20 of that item across multiple utility slots on a schematic, you’ll have 40 Strength added to your core attribute!
Offense Slot
Special offense-based effects are granted by crafting materials placed in this slot. You can give your weapons increased damage against barriers or guard, impart the ability to ignore a percentage of the enemy’s armor, cause bleeding effects, or have a chance to heal characters if they score a killing blow! When crafting any weapon, you can greatly increase its effectiveness if you stack the right offense slot effect across multiple schematic slots.
Defense Slot
Defense slot boosts include elemental and damage-type resistances. You can even cause enemies to start bleeding if they hit you with melee attacks! If you’re willing to make the effort, you can create specific armor sets that heavily mitigate a certain element, which is a good idea for high dragon hunts if their breath attacks are proving too much to handle.
Upgrade Crafting
Weapons and armor can have upgrade slots, and there are specific crafting schematics that allow you to make the upgrades that fit in these slots. Armor can have up to two upgrade slots. Weapons can have up to three. As with other forms of crafting, the materials used can greatly affect the quality of armor and weapon upgrades. The only exceptions to this are runes.
Rune Crafting
Unlike armor and weapon crafting, rune-crafting schematics are very straightforward. The quality of the materials does not affect the quality produced by a specific rune schematic. If you want a superb corrupting rune, you need the specific materials the schematic calls for.
Masterwork Crafting
Higher-tier weapon and armor schematics have a masterwork slot that can be filled by an optional masterwork crafting material. These materials provide special effects that no other crafting material can provide in any other slot. These can include a variety of chance-on-hit damage effects or chances to gain special buffs upon taking any damage. Additionally, there are special masterwork crafting materials that give you a 20–40 percent chance for critical crafting. Weapons and armor with critical crafting receive a 10 percent increase to all stats. Masterwork crafting allows you to make weapons and armor that give your parties a decisive advantage, so don’t neglect it!