Gear progression plays a big part in Dragon Age: The Veilguard's core gameplay. Not only will players get new equipment as they progress through the story, but they'll also be able to upgrade their gear through a variety of ways. Item traits (or perks, as some would have it) provide significant bonuses, but players will have to work to get them.
A fully-traited weapon is often enough to be the main piece of a build for any class in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but unlocking all of an item's stats isn't easy. Here's a quick guide to help get those perfect pieces of equipment.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Trophy/Achievement Guide
Sometimes it helps to have a guide and/or checklist to make sure you have not missed anything important.
How to Unlock Item Traits in Dragon Age: The Veilguard
In order to unlock gear traits, players need to find exact copies of the piece of gear they want to improve. This happens automatically as soon as you pick up a duplicate item, and the process will result in the item's rarity getting upgraded by one tier as well.
Apart from getting the benefits of the newly-unlocked traits, your equipment will enjoy a small base stat bump. If you want to improve its stats even more, you'll need to take it back to the Caretaker's Workshop at the Lighthouse and upgrade it from there. However, you need to increase the Caretaker's level if you want to boost your gear further.
Where to Get Duplicate Items in Dragon Age: The Veilguard
The tricky part about getting gear perks is actually finding duplicates of the things you want to upgrade. Weapons, armor, and trinkets are mainly obtained as quest rewards or loot from chests. They can also drop as loot from powerful enemies. However, these sources are unreliable since one can't really know what item will drop from where.
We strongly recommend doing sidequests, as they usually have chests and boss enemies that drop potentially high-rarity equipment.
One of the best ways to get copies of items is to buy from faction merchants. There's a good chance that the items they have on stock are the same as the ones you get while questing, so make sure to check them out. Unfortunately, once you buy an item, it goes out of stock, so you won't be able to fully unlock all traits on a piece of gear just from one merchant alone.
Also, it's very likely that you won't be able to purchase everything that a faction merchant has to offer until you level them up. To upgrade a merchant, you need Gold and a specific type of resource. Additionally, you must reach a specific Faction Strength threshold.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
- Released
- October 31, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ // Blood, Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
- BioWare
- Publisher(s)
- Electronic Arts
- Engine
- Frostbite
- Franchise
- Dragon Age
- PC Release Date
- October 31, 2024
- Xbox Series X|S Release Date
- October 31, 2024
- PS5 Release Date
- October 31, 2024
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X
- Genre(s)
- RPG
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
