History GameBreaker / DragonAge

* Much like Arcane Warrior before it, the Knight-Enchanter specialization for mages is hilariously broken. An Inquisitor and/or Vivienne with the proper build mix of the Knight-Enchanter and Spirit trees can cast a huge, damage soaking barrier that MUST be taken down before enemies can actually hurt you. Its mandatory for most mages since any other playstyle is a SquishyWizard, and Barrier is a much-needed safety net, but Knight-Enchanter gives you huge buffs to said barrier: it refills itself as you hack things with your Spirit Blade, decays more slowly, refreshes its own cooldown if it DOES go down, AND your mana regens much faster while you're near enemies. You can add other effects to it from other trees too: such as Mana Surge from the [[AnIcePerson Cold Tree]], which causes an icy explosion when your Barrier goes down. Your Barrier will never run out, and you never run out of the mana to fuel your Spirit Blade, which can reflect projectiles and does triple damage to enemies with Guard/Barriers of their own, making you a tank that can massacre other tanks. Oh, and you get a skill called Fade Cloak, which lets you become intangible for several seconds, allowing you to easily phase through telegraphed boss moves, and TeleFrag anyone you're standing inside when the cloak runs out. Videos of Knight-Enchanters easily solo-ing High Dragons with the rest of the party dead have already been made.

* Much like Arcane Warrior before it, the Knight-Enchanter specialization for mages is hilariously broken. An Inquisitor and/or Vivienne with the proper build mix of the Knight-Enchanter and Spirit trees can cast a huge, damage soaking barrier that MUST be taken down before enemies can actually hurt you. Its mandatory for most mages since any other playstyle is a SquishyWizard, and Barrier is a much-needed safety net, but Knight-Enchanter gives you huge buffs to said barrier: it refills itself as you hack things with your Spirit Blade, decays more slowly, refreshes its own cooldown if it DOES go down, AND your mana regens much faster while you're near enemies. You can add other effects to it from other trees too: such as Mana Surge from the [[AnIcePerson Cold Tree]], which causes an icy explosion when your Barrier goes down. Your Barrier will never run out, and you never run out of the mana to fuel your Spirit Blade, which can reflect projectiles and does triple damage to enemies with Guard/Barriers of their own, making you a tank that can massacre other tanks. Oh, and you get a skill called Fade Cloak, which lets you become intangible for several seconds, allowing you to easily phase through telegraphed boss moves. Videos of Knight-Enchanters easily solo-ing High Dragons with the rest of the party dead have already been made.

* Much like Arcane Warrior before it, the Knight-Enchanter specialization for mages is hilariously broken. An Inquisitor and/or Vivienne with the proper build mix of the Knight-Enchanter and Spirit trees can cast a huge, damage soaking barrier that MUST be taken down before enemies can actually hurt you. Its mandatory for most mages since any other playstyle is a SquishyWizard, and Barrier is a much-needed safety net, but Knight-Enchanter gives you huge buffs to said barrier: it refills itself as you hack things with your Spirit Blade, decays more slowly, refreshes its own cooldown if it DOES go down, AND you mana regens much faster while you're near enemies. Your Barrier will never run out, and you never run out of the mana to fuel your Spirit Blade, which can reflect projectiles and does triple damage to enemies with Guard/Barriers of their own, making you a tank that can massacre other tanks. Oh, and you get a skill called Fade Cloak, which lets you become intangible for several seconds, allowing you to easily phase through telegraphed boss moves. Videos of Knight-Enchanters easily solo-ing High Dragons with the rest of the party dead have already been made.

* Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from Templar, enchantments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land). For even more fun, give the tank a good dagger to take advantage of that high dexterity.

* The Gravitic Orb spell is fun to abuse. It will cause all foes within its wide range to move at a snail's pace, allowing you and your companions to pile blow after blow on them without fear of serious retaliation. Foes at the epicenter of the spell are so slow that they might as well be paralyzed. The spell turns almost any boss fight into a CurbStompBattle. For extra fun, you can clump all your foes at the center of Gravitic Orb using Pull of the Abyss, and take advantage of their inability to spread out from one another by finishing them all off with an area of effect attack, like Firestorm or Cone of Cold.

* One of the most effective ways to neutralize high-powered enemies as a Warrior - invest in the Templar talent that gives a 10% chance to silence them. Whoever Warrior!Hawke is attacking will never be use a single ability.

* Once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?

* The ingredients for making Potent Lyrium Potions are much cheaper than what you can sell them for, making this an extremely easy way to make money. Even better is that you can buy infinite amounts of three of the four ingredients from a single vendor.

---->"We were giving the treehumpers' own stinking weeds back to them, and for it they made us gods."

* There's a reason fandom refers to Mage Wardens as Easy Mode.

*** The bug with Shimmering Shield not draining mana like it was supposed to was patched, making Arcane Warrior tanks a little less ridiculous.
** The Mage spell Mana Clash drains enemy demon, abomination, or spellcasters' mana pools, and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to [[OneHitKill one shot]] even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell, especially when empowered by its prerequisite Spell Might. It can usually take out entire rooms full of opponents in a single shot, which basically allows you to walk through the Circle Tower quest (where about 90% of your opponents will be vulnerable to it). It also does more damage to the victim if they have larger mana reserves, which means it allows you to make mincemeat of magic-wielding bosses (sometimes you can even kill them with a single shot if you use the aforementioned Spell Might). The game itself seems to agree about how grossly unfair this spell is, seeing as enemy mages will never cast it on your party. A lot of missions in the game become much, much easier if you bring along a Mage who can cast Mana Clash.

** The room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard)
** Combine Tempest, Inferno, Blizzard and Earthquake and you'll see why you are just [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverKill overdoing it]].

*** Combine Blood Wound with Storm of the Century, and you're pretty much done.

** Long story short, there's a reason why, In-Universe, Magic Users ruled the world and [[RageAgainstTheHeavens tried to take on the Maker]].
* A more general GameBreaker is the Traps Are A Girl's Best Friend glitch, which lets you sell sets of spring traps (which require one extremely cheap item that is sold in infinite amounts at a nearby merchant) for a huge markup and gives you a hundred XP per sale. If you have the patience, you can easily fill out all your skills and abilities, as well as amping up your stats to ridiculous levels. Granted, the enemies level up with you, but the skills you gain more than make up the difference.
** In a similar vein, once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?

** Essentially, the best party in Origins was three Arcane Warriors and a Rogue. Why? Because three mages is the most you can get and Rogues have a couple minor non-combat abilities that Mages do not have spells to emulate. Otherwise, Arcane Warriors do more damage than Rogues (see the first seven or so points) and take less damage than Warriors.

[[/folder]]

* Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from templar, enchanments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land). For even more fun, give the tank a good dagger to take advantage of that high dexterity.

* In Awakening, Accuracy coupled with Aim, high dexterity and some rapid aim gear turns archery from the inferior rogue build (and rogues aren't that great to begin with) into having a crit rate of over 100% and tripling the damage you did before. What does this mean? You're oneshotting mooks at max attack speed with ''autoattack'' and are essentially untouchable. This allows you to even solo the hardest encounter in the game (The Harvester on Nightmare) with minimal difficulty. Which is good considering your allies for that mission are terrible and built wrong.

* Two-handed swordsmen are murder masters: in a game where enemies tend to cluster, a weapon with a nice wide swing is devastating, and the majority of the moves for a two handed sword user can be upgraded to do critical hits every time they connect, and strike a wide area. And with the skill Second Wind, you can speed up the cool down of your skills, and completely restore your stamina. And you can use it once a minute, or every 45 seconds once it's upgraded. With the proper build, the only reason you need a party with you is to heal you while you reduce every enemy in sight to red ruin.
** This is especially true once you go into the path of [[TheBerserker Berserker]] or [[BloodKnight Reaver]].
* A dual wielding rogue with the dual weapon and Assassin specialization trees maxed out can easily dispatch boss-rank characters in two or three hits.
** A properly-specced archer Rogue gets critical hits for 250% damage close to 70% of the time, knocks back enemies on hits, and will one-shot any non-boss enemies.
*** That's nothing. A properly built dual weapon rogue can score critical hits one hundred percent of the time. This is exactly as broken as it sounds.
** Even better: dual-specializing Assassin and Duelist. You may only focus on one enemy at a time, but that enemy, regardless of rank, is screwed.
* Two words: [[CombatMedic Spirit]] [[JackOfAllStats Healer]]. Max out the tree, and your character will have a [[HealingFactor one-hundred percent healing rate]], which basically means you regenerate health every second. Throw on a bunch of buffs like Rock Armor, Arcane Shield, and Heroic Aura, and your mage will be taking pitiful amounts of damage at ''best'', damage which will be healed completely moments later. Not only are you the best tank in the game, you can pretty much just turn on auto-attack and [[CherryTapping cherry-tap]] everything in the game to death. The cincher? This ability can be gained before Act I is done.
* Blood Magic is pretty broken as well if you invest some points into Constitution. After activating it, you can get a Heroic Aura and an Elemental Weapon buff for free. With Aveline, Fenris, and/or Carver hanging about, Improved Sacrifice recovers plenty of HP, and if you've got Anders in the fourth slot focusing on healing he's going to be keeping the tanks in good health as it stands. Grave Robber is a nice supplement for anyone who gets near. Built right, you may now endlessly spam a cycling of Cone of Cold, Firestorm, Tempest, and Fist of the Maker infinitely, taking advantage of the hitstun from Firestorm to Improved Sacrifice Aveline until you run out of enemies.

----

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See the separate GameBreaker entries for the individual installments of the franchise:

* GameBreaker/DragonAgeOrigins
* GameBreaker/DragonAgeII
----

* There's a reason fandom refers to Mage Wardens as Easy Mode.
** The Arcane Warrior is pretty much totally invincible once you have Shimmering Shield. You barely need a party on the hardest difficulty with this spec, even the hardest bosses can be easily worn down by yourself.
*** The bug with Shimmering Shield not draining mana like it was supposed to was patched, making Arcane Warrior tanks a little less ridiculous.
** The Mage spell Mana Clash drains enemy demon, abomination, or spellcasters' mana pools, and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to [[OneHitKill one shot]] even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell, especially when empowered by its prerequisite Spell Might. It can usually take out entire rooms full of opponents in a single shot, which basically allows you to walk through the Circle Tower quest (where about 90% of your opponents will be vulnerable to it). It also does more damage to the victim if they have larger mana reserves, which means it allows you to make mincemeat of magic-wielding bosses (sometimes you can even kill them with a single shot if you use the aforementioned Spell Might). The game itself seems to agree about how grossly unfair this spell is, seeing as enemy mages will never cast it on your party. A lot of missions in the game become much, much easier if you bring along a Mage who can cast Mana Clash.
** Crushing Prison stuns enemies while dealing damage (and you're free to deal plenty more from your next attack).
** The room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard)
** Combine Tempest, Inferno, Blizzard and Earthquake and you'll see why you are just [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverKill overdoing it]].
** The BloodMagic spell Blood Wound, which ''boils the blood'' of all nearby enemies, as well as paralyzing them for the duration of the spell. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise ''against'' spells like this, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.
*** Combine Blood Wound with Storm of the Century, and you're pretty much done.
** There's some even more devious spells that the game knows go together in a Game Breaking fashion, and even mention it in the spell descriptions. There's [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Sleep]], Horror and Waking Nightmare, Horror causing damage to enemies if they fail a resistance check, and Waking Nightmare causing, among other things, enemies to stop attacking you at least (whether through a fear effect or a temporary alignment change), and turning on each other at worst, also requiring a resistance check. However, if you successfully cast the Sleep on them first, they automatically fail the resistance check. At this point, your choices are, kill them immediately, or sit back and watch them turn on each other. PassThePopcorn, [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential please.]]
** Force Field. Basically you get a tank character (some warrior, Alistair or Shale usually), get them to spam aggro generating abilities (as well as use aggro "aura" effects such as Threaten and Stoneheart) and once they have the unbreakable attention of every enemy on the screen, put Force Field on them to make them invincible. So, while 10 skeletons beat on your invincible tank character, your party is free to proceed as they please with no resistance to speak of.
** Death Hex and Death Cloud, when combined, change from "Critical Hits For Others" or "Damage Over Time" to "[[GameBreaker Die]] [[ThisIsForEmphasisBitch Bitch]]".
** Long story short, there's a reason why, In-Universe, Magic Users ruled the world and [[RageAgainstTheHeavens tried to take on the Maker]].
* Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from templar, enchanments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land). For even more fun, give the tank a good dagger to take advantage of that high dexterity.
* A more general GameBreaker is the Traps Are A Girl's Best Friend glitch, which lets you sell sets of spring traps (which require one extremely cheap item that is sold in infinite amounts at a nearby merchant) for a huge markup and gives you a hundred XP per sale. If you have the patience, you can easily fill out all your skills and abilities, as well as amping up your stats to ridiculous levels. Granted, the enemies level up with you, but the skills you gain more than make up the difference.
** In a similar vein, once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?
---->"We were giving the treehumpers' own stinking weeds back to them, and for it they made us gods."
* In Awakening, Accuracy coupled with Aim, high dexterity and some rapid aim gear turns archery from the inferior rogue build (and rogues aren't that great to begin with) into having a crit rate of over 100% and tripling the damage you did before. What does this mean? You're oneshotting mooks at max attack speed with ''autoattack'' and are essentially untouchable. This allows you to even solo the hardest encounter in the game (The Harvester on Nightmare) with minimal difficulty. Which is good considering your allies for that mission are terrible and built wrong.
* From the Feastday Gifts DLC we have the Qunari Prayers for the Dead: an item that can be used over and over so long as Sten in your party and conscious. It's effect? Bringing any fallen party members back to life. Very handy in some of the tougher boss fights. The real game breaking element is that you're invincible during the cutscene, and if you watch it all, the party is restored to max health and mana, so as long as Sten is alive, your party is essentially immortal. This can be cheesed to astonishing effect.
* The ingredients for making Potent Lyrium Potions are much cheaper than what you can sell them for, making this an extremely easy way to make money. Even better is that you can buy infinite amounts of three of the four ingredients from a single vendor.
* It's quite easy, with the right build, for a Rogue to obtain a 95% chance to dodge. This is just as overpowered as it sounds, and makes most non-Mage enemies a joke.
** Essentially, the best party in Origins was three Arcane Warriors and a Rogue. Why? Because three mages is the most you can get and Rogues have a couple minor non-combat abilities that Mages do not have spells to emulate. Otherwise, Arcane Warriors do more damage than Rogues (see the first seven or so points) and take less damage than Warriors.

* Two-handed swordsmen are murder masters: in a game where enemies tend to cluster, a weapon with a nice wide swing is devastating, and the majority of the moves for a two handed sword user can be upgraded to do critical hits every time they connect, and strike a wide area. And with the skill Second Wind, you can speed up the cool down of your skills, and completely restore your stamina. And you can use it once a minute, or every 45 seconds once it's upgraded. With the proper build, the only reason you need a party with you is to heal you while you reduce every enemy in sight to red ruin.
** This is especially true once you go into the path of [[TheBerserker Berserker]] or [[BloodKnight Reaver]].
* A dual wielding rogue with the dual weapon and Assassin specialization trees maxed out can easily dispatch boss-rank characters in two or three hits.
** A properly-specced archer Rogue gets critical hits for 250% damage close to 70% of the time, knocks back enemies on hits, and will one-shot any non-boss enemies.
*** That's nothing. A properly built dual weapon rogue can score critical hits one hundred percent of the time. This is exactly as broken as it sounds.
** Even better: dual-specializing Assassin and Duelist. You may only focus on one enemy at a time, but that enemy, regardless of rank, is screwed.
* Two words: [[CombatMedic Spirit]] [[JackOfAllStats Healer]]. Max out the tree, and your character will have a [[HealingFactor one-hundred percent healing rate]], which basically means you regenerate health every second. Throw on a bunch of buffs like Rock Armor, Arcane Shield, and Heroic Aura, and your mage will be taking pitiful amounts of damage at ''best'', damage which will be healed completely moments later. Not only are you the best tank in the game, you can pretty much just turn on auto-attack and [[CherryTapping cherry-tap]] everything in the game to death. The cincher? This ability can be gained before Act I is done.
* Blood Magic is pretty broken as well if you invest some points into Constitution. After activating it, you can get a Heroic Aura and an Elemental Weapon buff for free. With Aveline, Fenris, and/or Carver hanging about, Improved Sacrifice recovers plenty of HP, and if you've got Anders in the fourth slot focusing on healing he's going to be keeping the tanks in good health as it stands. Grave Robber is a nice supplement for anyone who gets near. Built right, you may now endlessly spam a cycling of Cone of Cold, Firestorm, Tempest, and Fist of the Maker infinitely, taking advantage of the hitstun from Firestorm to Improved Sacrifice Aveline until you run out of enemies.

See the separate GameBreaker entries for the individual installments of the franchise:

* GameBreaker/DragonAgeOrigins
* GameBreaker/DragonAgeII

[[AC:[[VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins Dragon Age:Origins and Dragon Age:Origins - Awakening]]]]
* There's a reason fandom refers to Mage Wardens as Easy Mode.
** The Arcane Warrior is pretty much totally invincible once you have Shimmering Shield. You barely need a party on the hardest difficulty with this spec, even the hardest bosses can be easily worn down by yourself.
*** The bug with Shimmering Shield not draining mana like it was supposed to was patched, making Arcane Warrior tanks a little less ridiculous.
** The Mage spell Mana Clash drains enemy demon, abomination, or spellcasters' mana pools, and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to [[OneHitKill one shot]] even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell, especially when empowered by its prerequisite Spell Might. It can usually take out entire rooms full of opponents in a single shot, which basically allows you to walk through the Circle Tower quest (where about 90% of your opponents will be vulnerable to it). It also does more damage to the victim if they have larger mana reserves, which means it allows you to make mincemeat of magic-wielding bosses (sometimes you can even kill them with a single shot if you use the aforementioned Spell Might). The game itself seems to agree about how grossly unfair this spell is, seeing as enemy mages will never cast it on your party. A lot of missions in the game become much, much easier if you bring along a Mage who can cast Mana Clash.
** Crushing Prison stuns enemies while dealing damage (and you're free to deal plenty more from your next attack).
** The room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard)
** Combine Tempest, Inferno, Blizzard and Earthquake and you'll see why you are just [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverKill overdoing it]].
** The BloodMagic spell Blood Wound, which ''boils the blood'' of all nearby enemies, as well as paralyzing them for the duration of the spell. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise ''against'' spells like this, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.
*** Combine Blood Wound with Storm of the Century, and you're pretty much done.
** There's some even more devious spells that the game knows go together in a Game Breaking fashion, and even mention it in the spell descriptions. There's [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Sleep]], Horror and Waking Nightmare, Horror causing damage to enemies if they fail a resistance check, and Waking Nightmare causing, among other things, enemies to stop attacking you at least (whether through a fear effect or a temporary alignment change), and turning on each other at worst, also requiring a resistance check. However, if you successfully cast the Sleep on them first, they automatically fail the resistance check. At this point, your choices are, kill them immediately, or sit back and watch them turn on each other. PassThePopcorn, [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential please.]]
** Force Field. Basically you get a tank character (some warrior, Alistair or Shale usually), get them to spam aggro generating abilities (as well as use aggro "aura" effects such as Threaten and Stoneheart) and once they have the unbreakable attention of every enemy on the screen, put Force Field on them to make them invincible. So, while 10 skeletons beat on your invincible tank character, your party is free to proceed as they please with no resistance to speak of.
** Death Hex and Death Cloud, when combined, change from "Critical Hits For Others" or "Damage Over Time" to "[[GameBreaker Die]] [[JustAddBitch Bitch]]".
** Long story short, there's a reason why, In-Universe, Magic Users ruled the world and [[RageAgainstTheHeavens tried to take on the Maker]].
* Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from templar, enchanments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land).
* A more general GameBreaker is the Traps Are A Girl's Best Friend glitch, which lets you sell sets of spring traps (which require one extremely cheap item that is sold in infinite amounts at a nearby merchant) for a huge markup and gives you a hundred XP per sale. If you have the patience, you can easily fill out all your skills and abilities, as well as amping up your stats to ridiculous levels. Granted, the enemies level up with you, but the skills you gain more than make up the difference.
** In a similar vein, once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?
---->"We were giving the treehumpers' own stinking weeds back to them, and for it they made us gods."
* In Awakening, Accuracy coupled with Aim, high dexterity and some rapid aim gear turns archery from the inferior rogue build (and rogues aren't that great to begin with) into having a crit rate of over 100% and tripling the damage you did before. What does this mean? You're oneshotting mooks at max attack speed with ''autoattack'' and are essentially untouchable. This allows you to even solo the hardest encounter in the game (The Harvester on Nightmare) with minimal difficulty. Which is good considering your allies for that mission are terrible and built wrong.
* From the Feastday Gifts DLC we have the Qunari Prayers for the Dead: an item that can be used over and over so as Sten in your party and conscious. It's effect? Bringing any fallen party members back to life. Very handy in some of the tougher boss fights. The real game breaking element is that you're invincible during the cutscene, and if you watch it all, the party is restored to max health and mana, so as long as Sten is alive, your party is essentially immortal. This can be cheesed to astonishing effect.
* The ingredients for making Potent Lyrium Potions are much cheaper than what you can sell them for, making this an extremely easy way to make money. Even better is that you can buy infinite amounts of three of the four ingredients from a single vendor.
* It's quite easy, with the right build, for a Rogue to obtain a 95% chance to dodge. This is just as overpowered as it sounds, and makes most non-Mage enemies a joke.
** Essentially, the best party in Origins was three Arcane Warriors and a Rogue. Why? Because three mages is the most you can get and Rogues have a couple minor non-combat abilities that Mages do not have spells to emulate. Otherwise, Arcane Warriors do more damage than Rogues (see the first seven or so points) and take less damage than Warriors.

[[AC:[[VideoGame/DragonAgeII Dragon Age II]]]]
* Two-handed swordsmen are murder masters: in a game where enemies tend to cluster, a weapon with a nice wide swing is devastating, and the majority of the moves for a two handed sword user can be upgraded to do critical hits every time they connect, and strike a wide area. And with the skill Second Wind, you can speed up the cool down of your skills, and completely restore your stamina. And you can use it once a minute, or every 45 seconds once it's upgraded. With the proper build, the only reason you need a party with you is to heal you while you reduce every enemy in sight to red ruin.
** This is especially true once you go into the path of [[TheBerserker Berserker]] or [[BloodKnight Reaver]].
* A dual wielding rogue with the dual weapon and Assassin specialization trees maxed out can easily dispatch boss-rank characters in two or three hits.
** A properly-specced archer Rogue gets critical hits for 250% damage close to 70% of the time, knocks back enemies on hits, and will one-shot any non-boss enemies.
*** That's nothing. A properly built dual weapon rogue can score critical hits one hundred percent of the time. This is exactly as broken as it sounds.
* Two words: [[CombatMedic Spirit]] [[JackOfAllStats Healer]]. Max out the tree, and your character will have a [[HealingFactor one-hundred percent healing rate]], which basically means you regenerate health every second. Throw on a bunch of buffs like Rock Armor, Arcane Shield, and Heroic Aura, and your mage will be taking pitiful amounts of damage at ''best'', damage which will be healed completely moments later. Not only are you the best tank in the game, you can pretty much just turn on auto-attack and [[CherryTapping cherry-tap]] everything in the game to death. The cincher? This ability can be gained before Act I is done.
* Blood Magic is pretty broken as well if you invest some points into Constitution. After activating it, you can get a Heroic Aura and an Elemental Weapon buff for free. With Aveline, Fenris, and/or Carver hanging about, Improved Sacrifice recovers plenty of HP, and if you've got Anders in the fourth slot focusing on healing he's going to be keeping the tanks in good health as it stands. Grave Robber is a nice supplement for anyone who gets near. Built right, you may now endlessly spam a cycling of Cone of Cold, Firestorm, Tempest, and Fist of the Maker infinitely, taking advantage of the hitstun from Firestorm to Improved Sacrifice Aveline until you run out of enemies.

* Two words: [[CombatMedic Spirit]] [[JackOfAllStats Healer]]. Max out the tree, and your character will have a [[HealingFactor one-hundred percent healing rate]], which basically means you regenerate health every second. Throw on a bunch of buffs like Rock Armor, Arcane Shield, and Heroic Aura, and your mage will be taking pitiful amounts of damage at ''best'', damage which will be healed completely moments later. Not only are you the best tank in the game, you can pretty much just turn on auto-attack and [[CherryTapping cherry-tap]] everything in the game to death. The cincher? This ability can be gained before Act I is done.

[[AC:[[VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins Dragon Age:Origins and Dragon Age:Origns - Awakening]]]]

** The BloodMagic spell Blood Wound, which ''boils the blood'' of all nearby enemies. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise ''against'' spells like this, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.

*** That's nothing. A properly built dual weapon rogue can score critical hits one hundred percent of the time. This is exactly as broken as it sounds.

* The Arcane Warrior is pretty much totally invincible once you have Shimmering Shield. You barely need a party on the hardest difficulty with this spec, even the hardest bosses can be easily worn down by yourself.
* Mana Clash, which drains enemy mage, demon, or abomination's mana pools and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to [[OneHitKill one shot]] even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell, especially when empowered by its prerequisite Spell Might. It can usually take out entire rooms full of opponents in a single shot, which basically allows you to walk through the Circle Tower quest (where about 90% of your opponents will be vulnerable to it).
* Crushing Prison stuns enemies while dealing damage (and you're free to deal plenty more from your next attack).
* the room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard), and last but certainly not least, the BloodMagic spell Blood Wound, which ''boils the blood'' of all nearby enemies. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise ''against'' these spells, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.

** Long Story Short, There's a reason why, In-Universe, Magic Users ruled the world and tried to take on the Maker.
** Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from templar, enchanments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land).
** A more general GameBreaker is the Traps Are A Girl's Best Friend glitch, which lets you sell sets of spring traps (which require one extremely cheap item that is sold in infinite amounts at a nearby merchant) for a huge markup and gives you a hundred XP per sale. If you have the patience, you can easily fill out all your skills and abilities, as well as amping up your stats to ridiculous levels. Granted, the enemies level up with you, but the skills you gain more than make up the difference.
*** In a similar vein, once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?

** In Awakening, Accuracy coupled with Aim, high dexterity and some rapid aim gear turns archery from the inferior rogue build (and rogues aren't that great to begin with) into having a crit rate of over 100% and tripling the damage you did before. What does this mean? You're oneshotting mooks at max attack speed with ''autoattack'' and are essentially untouchable. This allows you to even solo the hardest encounter in the game (The Harvester on Nightmare) with minimal difficulty. Which is good considering your allies for that mission are terrible and built wrong.
** From the Feastday Gifts DLC we have the Qunari Prayers for the Dead: an item that can be used over and over so as Sten in your party and conscious. It's effect? Bringing any fallen party members back to life. Very handy in some of the tougher boss fights. The real game breaking element is that you're invincible during the cutscene, and if you watch it all, the party is restored to max health and mana, so as long as Sten is alive, your party is essentially immortal. This can be cheesed to astonishing effect.
** The ingredients for making Potent Lyrium Potions are much cheaper than what you can sell them for, making this an extremely easy way to make money. Even better is that you can buy infinite amounts of three of the four ingredients from a single vendor.
** It's quite easy, with the right build, for a Rogue to obtain a 95% chance to dodge. This is just as overpowered as it sounds, and makes most non-Mage enemies a joke.

** Two-handed swordsmen are murder masters: in a game where enemies tend to cluster, a weapon with a nice wide swing is devastating, and the majority of the moves for a two handed sword user can be upgraded to do critical hits every time they connect, and strike a wide area. And with the skill Second Wind, you can speed up the cool down of your skills, and completely restore your stamina. And you can use it once a minute, or every 45 seconds once it's upgraded. With the proper build, the only reason you need a party with you is to heal you while you reduce every enemy in sight to red ruin.
** A dual wielding rogue with the dual weapon and Assassin specialization trees maxed out can easily dispatch boss-rank characters in two or three hits.

* In ''DragonAge'' the Arcane Warrior is pretty much totally invincible once you have Shimmering Shield. You barely need a party on the hardest difficulty with this spec, even the hardest bosses can be easily worn down by yourself.
** The bug with Shimmering Shield not draining mana like it was supposed to was patched, making Arcane Warrior tanks a little less ridiculous. A far more blatant example of this trope at work is the Mage spell Mana Clash, which drains enemy spellcasters' mana pools and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to [[OneHitKill one shot]] even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell. The game itself seems to agree about how grossly unfair this spell is, seeing as enemy mages will never cast it on your party. There's a reason fandom refers to Mage Wardens as Easy Mode.
** Wanna talk about bitch-making Mage spells? Let's see...Crushing Prison which stuns enemies while dealing damage (and you're free to deal plenty more from your next attack), the room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard), and last but certainly not least, the BloodMagic spell Blood Wound, which ''boils the blood'' of all nearby enemies. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise ''against'' these spells, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.

** Essentially, the best party in Origins was three Arcane Warriors and a Rogue. Why? Because three mages is the most you can get and Rogues have a couple minor non-combat abilities that Mages do not have spells to emulate. Otherwise, Arcane Warriors do more damage than Rogues and take less damage than Warriors.
** It's quite easy, with the right build, for a Rogue to obtain a 95% chance to dodge. This is just as overpowered as it sounds, and makes most non-Mage enemies a joke.