Upgrading your Dragon Age Veilguard weapons can be done in a few ways, but you'll want to focus on using the Lighthouse Workshop. The Caretaker's tools allow you to bolster your weapons, armor, and other gear, mainly through spending all those resources you’ve been gathering as you've journeyed across Thedas in Dragon Age Veilguard. But there are a few other ways to enhance your gear later in the game, and some of these methods aren't all that obvious, so here's everything you need to know about upgrading your weapons, armor, and more in Dragon Age Veilguard.
How to upgrade your Dragon Age Veilguard weapons and armor
You'll get a steady stream of new gear in Dragon Age Veilguard, but not all of it will be better than what you're already using, particularly as you start to craft a more specialized build. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to not only get better gear but also upgrade the weapons and armor you already have, which are as follows:
- Find better gear: An obvious option, but you'll come across better gear to enhance your combat prowess just by fighting enemies, completing quests, and generally playing the game. Particularly in the early stages of the game, it's a good idea to scavenge or buy improved gear and equip whatever has the highest stats.
- Upgrade gear via the Lighthouse workshop: When you return to the Lighthouse after completing "The Singing Blade" quest, you can access the Caretaker's Workshop in the outside courtyard, letting you use your foraged materials, such as Heartwood and Imperial Weave, to improve your gear. Doing so boosts all main stats on the item, such as damage, stagger power, or defense, and adds a "+X" notation at the end of the item's name. Increasing the workshop's rank lets you increase the power of your gear even more. Don't forget to do this for you Dragon Age Veilguard companions too!
- Find or buy duplicates: Acquiring a duplicate item automatically combines it with the original you've already got, improving both its stats and rarity. This can also unlock additional modifiers that add extra improvements to the item, so it's well worth keeping an eye out for duplicates when you go shopping, which you should be doing often as our Dragon Age Veilguard tips suggest.
- Applying Enchantments: Unlocked once you've started the "Completing the Veilguard" quest, you can apply one Enchantment to each piece of equipped gear via the Caretaker's Workshop to gain a useful stat boost. Note that you can use each Enchantment only once across all your gear, so you can't double up. However, you can freely swap Enchantments around at the workshop and applying them is always free.
- Increasing the rank of the Caretaker's Workshop: While simply upgrading the workshop doesn't directly improve your gear, increasing its rank does provide an overall behind-the-scenes power level boost to the gear you can find and buy out in Thedas. At certain ranks, you'll also gain access to more Enchantments, which may be useful for adding just the right stat boost for your Dragon Age Veilguard class build.
How to upgrade the Caretaker's Workshop in Dragon Age Veilguard
Increasing the Workshop's rank is done through finding Mementos as you explore the regions of Thedas. There's no guaranteed method for finding these as they're lore collectibles that are scattered all over the place – explore thoroughly and you're bound to find quite a few. Each one you collect provides an amount of Caretaker Power, which is effectively a reputation measure for the workshop. Gather enough Caretaker Power to meet the workshop's rank requirement and you can improve it by following the "Rank Up" button prompt, up to the maximum of rank 10.
Since you need to manually upgrade the workshop – it doesn't just automatically improve when you have enough Caretaker Power – make sure you visit the workshop frequently between quests to check you've not been sitting on a rank increase that you could have unlocked sooner. That way you can upgrade your gear to a new power level, find and buy better gear, and apply new enchantments as soon as possible.
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