The best faction in Dragon Age The Veilguard for you

Factions inhaling political intrigue Dragon Age: The Veil Guardand you join one while creating a new character. While you can change things like your appearance later, you can’t change your faction once you choose one.

Which faction you choose largely comes down to the dialogue options available to you, but there are also a handful of meaningful gameplay effects.

Us Dragon Age: The Veil Guard guide tells you everything you need to know about the game’s factions, as well as advice on how to choose the best faction for you.

Once you’re done choosing a faction, here’s how to choose the best class for you.

How important are factions in Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

There are six factions in it Dragon Age: The Veil Guardand you must align yourself with one of them when creating characters. At a glance these are:

All six factions have unique, sometimes contrasting motivations (Grey Wardens exist solely to purge darkspawn, while the Antivan Crows are essentially Renaissance Italian assassins), who The Veil Guard summarizes during the character creator and continues at length throughout the story. Each faction is mainly active in one of The Veil Guard‘s main hubs, so how often you interact with a faction depends on where you are geographically.

When it comes to choosing a faction, there are some gameplay consequences to consider. The faction you choose determines which outfit you wear by default in The Lighthouse, your hub between missions. (You can see these outfits on a generic elf in the gallery above.) Six of your seven companions are associated with a faction and will naturally advance that faction’s interests in dialogue. Finally, depending on which faction you choose, you will also automatically receive two passive perks that will benefit you in battle.

The table below shows which region, companion and perks are associated with each faction.

How to choose the best faction Dragon Age: The Veil Guard for you

Just like choosing a class, there isn’t one best faction to choose from Dragon Age: The Veil Guard. You can battle your way through the game regardless of which faction you have chosen.

That said, purely based on gameplay, your choice of faction may be determined by the class you play in:

If none of these benefits are of interest to you, you can’t go wrong with joining the Antivan Crows. Being able to take an extra drink with you is useful in almost all circumstances. Additionally, the Antaam are common enemies in Treviso, a Venice-inspired city where you’ll spend a lot of time during the early game. The small damage boost against them certainly helps. Moreover, they are by far the most stylish (see above).

In addition to the gameplay, there are also some narrative aspects to consider when making your choice. For starters, if you’ve done your research and find yourself more attracted to one companion than another, just go with the faction they’re affiliated with (see the chart above for reference). You get extra opportunities in dialogue trees to build a bond with them.

Joining the Shadow Dragons or the Antivan Crows raises the stakes for the first act. One of your first big “yes, this is a BioWare game” decisions is choosing to help the Shadow Dragons or the Antivan crows. According to our tests, if you’re affiliated with one faction or the other, you may get a more emotionally charged cutscene than you would otherwise (although there are no obvious gameplay differences). If you want to increase the stakes on that first choice, choose one of these two.

And again, the extra drink really helps a lot.