What are the best talent build, skills, specializations, and gear to make Alistair the best sword-and-board tank?
Note: I am playing the Dragon Age: Origins – Ultimate Edition. So I have all the DLC and Awakening.
dragon-age-origins
What are the best talent build, skills, specializations, and gear to make Alistair the best sword-and-board tank?
Note: I am playing the Dragon Age: Origins – Ultimate Edition. So I have all the DLC and Awakening.
Best Answer
I'm playing through Dragon Age: Origins again with this specific goal in mind, so I'll outline what I've done:
Overview
I've found letting Alistair run on auto-pilot works really well. The aggressive behavior, combined with the tactics loadout described below, makes the AI pretty smart and hands-off. However, you really need to make sure you have a good Spirit Healer (like Wynne) backing him up.
So I've built him around me not having to do anything with him: prioritizing his tactics load-out and passive skills.
Build
Obviously, Alistair is going to be a warrior. You're locked in with the relatively useless Templar specialization, but once you reach 14 and can choose a second, definitely pick Champion.
Leveling Priority
Alistair starts with:
I then chose the following as I leveled:
This should take you to level 20-ish. Note you don't need Master Combat Training until you get Shield Mastery, so spend your skill points on Combat Tactics to make sure you can use your abilities.
Tactics
As mentioned above, I didn't want to micromanage Alistair, so I used the following to handle pretty much every encounter. Note because of my reliance on a dedicated healer, Alistair does not use any sustainability/survival abilities.
Equipment
Equipment choice is not particularly difficult, and I've found you don't need to worry about min/maxing to make him effective, so I'm not going to bother with a mostly unnecessary list of exact gear you need to have. Generally:
Final Thoughts
It's really hard to unintentionally mess up building Alistair: there are so few "tanking" choices in the game that you'll eventually get everything you need by level 15-ish anyway.
Ultimately, it comes either micromanaging Alistair as your de-facto main (which takes practice), or a decent tactics load out (specified above) if that's not your thing.
Finally, I can't stress enough how much a sword and board tank like Alistair needs a good healer. If you're not interested in giving up a slot for a dedicated healer, it's going to be very difficult to keep Alistair effective.
Acknowledgements
The above is an amalgamation of various different guides I've found, notably:
I've confirmed the viability and effectiveness of this advice by using it myself.