Arcane Warrior

Arcane Warriors in Thedas
The Arcane Warriors once widely existed amongst the ancient Elves. However, after their fall, the art of the Arcane Warriors is seemingly all but lost.

Mechanics and Tactics
In all cases having an Arcane Warrior in your group gives you a lot of added flexibility, and removes to a certain extent the need to have a second warrior character with you for the purposes of soaking damage when fighting large groups of enemies. The key to Arcane Warrior mechanics lies in two trade offs, one defensive between armor and fatigue, the other offensive between sword or staff, and mana managing.

Defensive
For the first, having the ability to wear the armor, which you acquire as soon as you get the Combat Magic ability, does not remove the associated fatigue increases on the mana cost of spells, and so heavy armor limits how many spells your character can use. Note that fatigue penalties also cause potions to become less useful, and you will lose significant amounts of combat time and so damage output by relying on them.

Offensive
The second tradeoff is offensive, between sword, the preferred weapon for close-up combat, and staff; this affects which spells you can cast. Going the sword route is possible, but if you try to cast spells for which the sword must be sheathed, your character will sheathe the sword, then cast. This causes a mid-combat delay which can cause a significant amount of trouble. By pausing the game and using the weapon-switch ability you can avoid the time penalty (weapon switch becomes instant in this case) and so micromanage your way around this. You can also add the weapon set to a hot key and swap your weapon set that way. That is also instant and has the added benefit that you can map you spells to the weapons you have in hand. So with your sword and shield, you will have drawn spells in your quick keys, but with your staff you will have your empty hand spells. This give you a total of 10 spells across both weapons slots. However that requires a significant amount of player involvement if you use the radial dial. See Arcane Warrior Spellcasting for a complete list of spells that can be cast with a sword in hand.

Sustained Abilities and Mana
Arcane Warriors can use their sustained abilities to get very high levels of defense/armor/spell resistance. This can be powerful, but can limit what the Arcane Warrior can do to basically being an auto-attacking machine with decent damage and great defense. The various sustained Arcane Warrior abilities tend to have very heavy mana cost, and so a common tactic is to leave them off until you are low on mana. This allows you to open a fight with heavy area damage like Fireball and expensive crowd-control spells, and since casting a sustained ability does not cost you mana if your max mana is low enough, it is essentially free. At what point you switch is down to personal preference - the longer you leave it, the more flexible your casting options are. Nevertheless the Arcane Warrior as melee-fighter is a good way to extend a fight, giving you a little extra durability when you need it (much like Shapeshifting's Bear form ability). The small delay while you turn on your abilities does not usually matter much.

Play Styles
Players have adopted three main styles for Arcane Warriors: Mage, Tank, & Hybrid.

Mage Style
The Mage-style Arcane Warrior remains primarily a ranged attacker with a decent mana pool; they rely primarily on lighter armor (fatigue < 15%) for defense and a staff as a weapon. Since they are more robust than standard mages, they can lead from the front or double as an alternate tank; however, they are not meant to be a warrior replacement. Since Shimmering Shield does not require Combat Magic to be active, they can stick with standard Mage Armor, along with mana regen gear, and use Shimmering for the resistances and armor bonus. (Reminder: be careful not to boost resistances unnecessarily high: elemental resistances cap at 75%; mental & physical resistances max at 100.)

Tank Style
Arcane Warriors can be setup to tank every bit as well as a warrior, if not better. The ability to wear heavy armor makes and manage fatigue makes this caster extremely tough, at the expense of a weaker mana pool. This also makes it tougher to maintain aggro on opponents, as it's hard to keep dealing damage after when mana runs out in 4-5 spells. With the Combat Magic spell active, melee weapons use Magic instead of Strength to determine damage, so hits can pack some real punch. The downside is that a typical Mage character usually has an undeveloped Constitution and can not take a whole lot of damage. Take advantage of the specialization's strong defensive spells to make up for this.

Hybrid Style
The hybrid style attempts to combine the best of the Mage and Tank styles. The Arcane Warrior primarily relies on getting close to the enemy and using short-range spells to help manage opponents, especially Cone of Cold and other snares. The primary weapon is a sword; keep in mind which spells work best with this type of weapon and swap in a staff during combat when sensible.

Blood Mage
A is a popular second specialization choice for an Arcane Warrior - it can help to offset the disadvantages of a low mana pool at the cost of health, since it allows the Arcane Warrior to cast Blood Magic spells using health as mana. Presumably the heavy armor will give the Arcane Warrior enough headroom on health to do this, although a reasonable constitution would be highly recommended. The effective Blood Wound spell can also be acquired, which is an ideal choice for a more offensive Arcane Warrior. This would be the recommended combination for the 'gish' build mentioned above.

Spirit Healer
The other main choice, producing a mixed character with offensive and defensive magic and good durability. This combination works best with no more than medium armor, since a decent amount of mana is needed to power the high-level healing spells. Also worth noting is that Cleansing Aura can draw as much aggro as a Warrior with Threaten.

Shapeshifter
An interesting combination but unpopular choice with Arcane Warrior. There is a fair bit of redundant overlap between the two, as they both offer exclusive options in melee, but a foremost Shapeshifter with Secondary Arcane Warrior can use massive armor and Bear Shape and be incredibly hard to kill with weapons. The main problem with this is the fact that Shapeshifter overall does very poor damage because of the fact that, unlike what the tooltip for Shapeshifting says, it does not actually use magic to calculate damage.

Weapons
Currently there is only one Arcane Warrior Specialization specific item in the game:


 * Spellweaver

Equipment
Carefully kit your Arcane Warrior with appropriate bonuses, especially mana and/or stamina regeneration.
 * Stamina: Executioner's Helm, Eamon's Shield (can swap these in/out for instant boosts)
 * If you are playing on the Xbox version, it IS possible to completely offset Shimmering Shield's -10 penalty to Combat Mana Regeneration if you choose the correct equipment. Combine any of Wade's Superior Dragon Armor Sets (+4 regen) and Andruil's Blessing (+2 regen) with either a combination of Spellweaver (+2 regen) and Dead Coat of Arms / Duncan's Shield (both +2 regen) or Staff of the Magister Lord (+4 regen). Note that in the PC version, the same pieces of equipment hold much lower Mana/Stamina Combat Regen values, so this trick will not work. This equipment set is untested on the PS3.

Reference
Dragon Age: Origins - PRIMA Official Strategy Guide.

Links
Hollowness' Guide on the Arcane Warrior