How to Beat 'The Mother' in Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Expansion

Written by: Bill Fulks • Edited by: Michael Hartman
Published Jun 2, 2010 • Related Guides: Dragon Age | Role Playing Game

A strategy and tactics guide for how to defeat the end-game boss in the Dragon Age: Origins expansion called Awakening.

Dragon Age: Awakening Mother Battle

Dragon Age: Awakening is the first big expansion pack to the Dragon Age: Origins role playing game for PC and consoles. I have played through the entire expansion and completed nearly every side quest along with the main quest. Fortunately, I had no problem getting past the end boss in the game, but I’ve found that some people need help. In this article, I’ll describe how I was able to win the Dragon Age: Awakening Mother battle on the first try.

Get Extra Help from Crystals and The Architect

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Be sure to search all the bodies as well as the flesh pods along the way because you will find a bunch of crystals that you can use to activate powers that will help you defeat The Mother. As you descend into her underground lair, you’ll come upon three different socketed circles where you need to place the crystals. They are found at the bottom of the giant spiral stairs. If you have enough crystals, click on each socket to place them. Four crystals are needed to activate the power of this magic circle. You may have to back track a little to activate some circles, but it’s worth the benefits you gain.

Take your time to gather up all the crystals to activate the magic circles, and this will help during the battle. You’ll get a little diagram that appears in the upper right corner of the screen, and this is used to activate the powers granted by the magic circles. One of them launches a huge firestorm down on The Mother and her minions. Another heals up your whole party at once, and you’ll definitely need that as the fight goes on. The third lets you stun everything in the area, and this you can use when there gets to be too many at once.

At some point, The Architect will offer to help you defeat The Mother, and you should accept its offer. With its help, you will get one more giant fire spell that does even more damage.

Defeat The Mother

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The actual fight against The Mother is pretty simple. She launches out a bunch of tentacles and you should be able to take them down after a couple of minutes if you do them one at a time. What you have to watch out for are all the hatchlings that surround you. Be sure to have some health potions ready to go, and it helps for a spellcaster to have Cleansing Aura cast to help heal everyone nearby. It also helps to keep an archer on hand for steadily hitting The Mother and disrupting her spellcasting.

What I did was to first activate the firestorm that damaged The Mother as well as the tentacles and some of the Hatchlings. Be sure to get your party out of the way when you do this, because it can hurt them, too. I then kept fighting off tentacles and hatchlings until they were gone, and I did so by moving down toward the bottom of the map. When I found a brief lull in the onslaught, I started attacking The Mother and used The Architect’s help with the fire column.

The key thing to remember here is that the battle ends when The Mother dies, so you don’t have to keep killing off Hatchlings unless they are doing too much damage. This is where the Stun circle power comes in to buy you time. Just keep hitting The Mother will spells and arrows while having a couple of melee fighters pound on her with various weapons, and it doesn’t take too long to bring her down. Personally, I thought the Dragon Age: Awakening Mother fight was a little too easy for a final boss, but maybe that’s because my characters were so powerful from doing almost every quest.