Tips for Playing Dragon Age: Inquisition – Rifts, War Council, Status Effects

Find out how to quickly close rifts, setup a good party, understand status effects and earn rewards from the war council.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a huge game with a lot of different elements. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand what to do or even the best way to accomplish things. With that in mind, we compiled a few tips to help you get started in Dragon Age and earn quick rewards while getting the most from every fight and quest.

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Rifts

One common occurrence as you progress through Dragon Age: Inquisition are rifts. There are multiple rifts in virtually every area in the game, and closing them awards you with important power level points. If you don’t have a mage in your party, get one. While your main character can seal the rift without the help of a mage, only a mage can cast Dispel, which makes closing rifts considerably easier.

Whenever you see the green glow coming from cracks around rifts, that means more enemies are about to appear. With a mage, you can cast Dispel on these areas and stop the new enemies from appearing. With multiple mages in your party, you can dispel almost every incoming enemy to close the rift much faster than you’d be able to with the assistance of a mage.

Party Configuration

How you setup your party has a huge impact on how you should play the game. There are a wide variety of party configurations that work well in almost any situation, but some are better than others and a few classes are as close to essential as you can get in this game. If you look at it from a traditional RPG perspective, you need a tank, healer and two DPS classes. That translates into a warrior, mage and then two classes of your choosing.

Your warrior can use two-handed weapons or a sword and shield, but if you want him or her to tank, it’s best to go with the sword and shield warrior (Paladin Warrior). With only one mage in your party, it’s almost a necessity to have a Barrier Mage that focuses almost exclusively on Barrier spells and keeping your party protected instead of inflicting massive damage. For your two DPS classes, you can choose pretty much anything. Every class can dish out big damage with the right skill set, but mages are the easiest classes for the AI to control in most situations.

War Council

There are a plethora of side quests and activities to do in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Under most circumstances you need to partake in the activities to reap the rewards. However, if you send members of the Inquisition on missions via the war council table, you can earn rewards without participating in the mission.

There are three members of the Inquisition who can be sent out on war table missions: Cullen, Josephine and Leliana. Select a mission from the war table, and if all three advisors are available to take part in the missions, you’ll have three options with varying completion times. You’ll gain rewards from almost any option you select, but the reward may vary depending on the advisor selected for the mission.

It’s important to have all three advisors doing missions as often as possible. Many of the missions take a considerable amount of real time (some even take a few hours), so the faster you assign these missions the faster you’ll earn rewards from them. Since you do not have to personally partake in the missions, you can set the advisors in motion and go on to another quest or whatever else you wish to do.

Status Effects

There are a number of status effects in the game, so it’s important to know what each status effect does. If you use the tactical camera, you can even see what enemies are weak to and which status effects will not work. This is especially useful against bosses.

Asleep: Target will not move or attack for a short period of time. Any damage dealt to the target will cancel the status effect.

Burning/Poisoned: Target takes damage over time (generally every second) for a the duration of the effect.

Chilled/Snared: Target’s physical movement speed is reduced by 25 percent for the duration of the effect.

Fear or Panicked: Target flees and is unable to attack for a short time. After 1.5 seconds the any damage inflicted upon the target will cancel the effect.

Paralyzed: Target is stunned and cannot move or attack for a short time.

Shocked: Lowers a target’s elemental resistances (lightning, fire, ice) by 20 percent for the duration of the effect.

Sundered: Lowers a target’s armor by 20 percent for the duration of the effect.

Taunted: The target is forced to attack the character who used the Taunt ability.

Weakened: Lowers a target’s damage output by 15 percent for the duration of the effect.

Return to the Dragon Age: Inquisition Walkthrough.


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Author
Bryan Dawson
Bryan Dawson has an extensive background in the gaming industry, having worked as a journalist for various publications for nearly 20 years and participating in a multitude of competitive fighting game events. He has authored over a dozen strategy guides for Prima Games, worked as a consultant on numerous gaming-related TV and web shows and was the Operations Manager for the fighting game division of the IGN Pro League.