Dragon Age: The Veilguard ice mage build guide

Key skills

• Breathing Room: The radius of area abilities (like Frost Nova) is increased by 50%.
• Zone of Destruction: Hitting three or more enemies with an area ability enhances the damage.
• Block Mastery: Reduces block mana cost by 30%.
• Frost Shield: Enemies who inflict damage on you are chilled.
• Absorb: When you defend against an attack, staff energy is charged by 25%.
• Bolt Volley: Tap x/square then tap again as the bolt shoots from your staff to spawn an additional bolt.
• Supercharged: Projectile abilities deal 75% more damage vs. barriers.

Abilities

• Frost Nova: Freeze your enemies in a wide area, dealing 126 damage. Increase its effectiveness with the Breathing Room and Zone of Destruction skills
• Ice Blast: Hurls shards of ice while also applying weakened for your companion to detonate.
• Death Squall: Projects a burst of entropic energy to knock targets back and also detonate sundered.
• Vortex of Shadow: Your ultimate ability deals 4,320 cold damage and creates a vortex of dark energy in front of you, doing damage to anyone caught in it.

Armor

• Frozen Facade: When the frozen effect ends, it shatters, blasting enemies with 150 cold damage. You can get this with our Dragon Age: The Veilguard – The Heart of Corruption walkthrough.
• Arlathan’s Fall: This armor has no base defense but does 100+ ability damage. Purchase this from the vendor at Arlathan Forest after ranking them up to level 4.

Talismans/rings

• Glorious Ultimatum: +25 ultimate recharge rate at a cost of potion healing. In other words, potions will no longer heal you, but they will recharge your ultimate. Also, using an ultimate heals you to full.
• All Mother’s Copse: 20+ blast ability damage, 25+ blast ability damage vs barriers, gain 25 mana when a blast ability deals critical damage.
• Maw of the Black City: Your ability damage is always a critical hit. Find this with our guide to the Dragon Age: The Veilguard unique items locations.
• Essence Vortex: Abilities now cost +50 mana to activate and do 30+ ability damage. Abilities also now heal you.

Weapons

• Chilled Grasp: This elemental orb does 341 cold damage at +9 upgrade level, and also offers +25 cold resistance.
• Coral tip: A unique mageknife dealing 60+ added cold damage. Also, triggering an arcane bomb also applies frozen.
• Glacial Rod: Does 338 cold damage, and heavy attacks apply an additional chilled stack when you have full staff energy.

Companions

• Davrin: His Death From Above ability detonates weakened, which pairs well with your Ice Blast ability. 
• Harding: Her Shred ability applies sundered, which pairs well with your Dark Squall ability. Also, she can heal you with Soothing Potion, which is handy since your own potions no longer heal you.

Runes

• Glaciate: When activated, all of your weapons do +20 cold damage for 20 seconds.