[b43] Rogue guide and prodigy analysis

[Salo]

I've just finished the game with a rogue and decided to write a "here's how a rogue can win the game" guide in the rogue metaclass forum rather than write a "here's how I won the game" character report in the character report subforum. Those 2 would have been basically the same, but I feel it might be more useful in this subforum for future reference.

So, credentials and history: I've had 2 rogues in this b43 while playing online and quite a few in previous beta's while playing offline. The second one is a cornac rogue, who just beat the end bosses and can be found here: http://te4.org/characters/21602/tome/bb ... 2ac9005848. The main thing I'll remember from this guy is how prodigies can turn a decent character into a true murder machine.

Disclaimer: there are many ways to play a rogue. I've always played them as a glass cannon that stays in stealth and kills things as fast as possible and as such my guide will explain how to do so. There are probably other ways of playing this class though.

Race
Things you should certainly keep in mind while picking your race:
- Rogues start with 3 locked skilltrees: combat veteran, combat techniques and poison. In addition, rogues benefit a lot from upgrading stealth and unlocking some of the generic trees you can get from escorts. As such, think in advance about how you'll spend your category points while making sure you have enough infusion slots. Chances are your conclusion will be that cornac is the way to go.
- Rogues don't need many generic points, so either you should make sure you can spend a category point on a generic tree or you should pick a race that benefits a lot from maxing many of their race talents.
- The rewards you get from betraying escorts to zigur are way better than the normal rewards (as a rogue), so the races that prevent you from doing so start with this significant drawback.
- Long fights are lost fights. Because of the glass cannon nature of the class, you'll want to make sure that the fights last a very short time, if necessary by hit-and-run tactics. As such, abilities that increase your effectiveness for a small period become even more useful, so resilience of the dwarves, grace of the eternals and luck of the little folk are pretty awesome (the other abilities like that require willpower which you don't have).
- Rogues lategame will doge everything and crit everytime regardless, so the (halfling) abilities that make either of those happen more often will eventually become overkill.

As such, optimal are Cornac, Thalore and Halfling (unless you want to get an optimal lategame character). Also worthwhile options are Shalores, Dwarfs and Skeletons. The other races are in my opinion less worthwhile. I got cornac because it enabled me to upgrade stealth and unlock 2 talent trees (mobility early on and combat veteran later) while still getting 5 infusion slots.

Stat points
Put everything into cunning, dexterity and constitution (don't forget constitution). Get 18 in strength when you find a great item that needs a point it armour mastery (I only got it when I found garkul's helmet).

Talents
Things you should certainly keep in mind while spending your class talents:
- All passives besides backstab are awesome. You'll want to maximise Dual Weapon Training, Dual Weapon Defense, Stealth, and Unseen Actions very early on. Afterwards max Shadowstrike and Lethality as well.
- The attack talents from the Dual Techniques tree are pretty great as well, but don't need many skill points early on. Gt 1/1/1/1 while maxing your passives, afterwards put some extra points into flurry and whirlwind.
- Obviously focus on dagger mastery and thick skin for your generic points. The nimble movement skill is great and should be maxed as soon as possible as well.
- Don't get traps. Note that at lvl 1 you can rightclick the trap skill to get your class point back and spent it elsewhere.
- Heightened sense is nice, but you may encounter a thief escort so don't worry about it before you did Old Forest.
- Evasion is useful for a while but rapidly becomes overkill and costs a turn to use, get misdirection instead and nothing will ever hit you lategame.
- Poison is awesome. It does nice damage, has no costprice whatsoever, greatly lowers the damage of your enemies (you want the numbing/crippling poison) and venomous strike makes unlocking marauders really easy. However, I still didn't unlock it. Simply because eventually, once you're around lvl 25 and got decent daggers, you'll start killing enemies too fast for poison to work. The strength of a lategame rogue is the ability to kill everything in one turn (with an attack talent if it's an elite) and as such at that point poison becomes useless. Basically, before dreadfell it's awesome, during dreadfell it's useless because undeath is immune to poison and after dreadfell it's only useful against bosses.
- Combat veteran is something you may consider unlocking at lvl 30 (or with wyrm bile) for the spell shield and at the very end it allows you to get a certain game breaking prodigy I'll talk about later.
- Combat techniques gives you rush, which is really useful but you could also try finding an item that lets you rush (or use rushing claws) without investing a category point if you find you need it.
- As above, both lacerating strikes and scoundrel strategies are unnecessary. (I only got lacerating strikes to lvl 2 when I was lvl 48 and had nothing else to put my point in)

So, at a certain point you'll reach a situation that you put enough points in all your good skills and are free to do whatever. This is once you got:
Dual Weapons: 5/5/1/0
Dual Techniques: 1/4/1/1
Stealth: 5/5/1/5
Dirty Fighting: 1/0/0/0
Lethality: 5/0/0/0

Combat Training: 5/1/3/0/5
Survival: 1/1/1/0
Scoundrel: 1/1/5/0
(total: 39 class points and 24 generic points)

Useful talents left, that don't require an unlock include: misdirection (makes you harder to hit and as such harder to kill), willful combat (fights are short, so things that make you more effective for a short while are worth it, but you only need 1~2 point(s)), switch place (one point wonder that might save your life), cripple (for against bosses), and upgrading whirlwind. The lure and sticky smoke talents from the trap skill tree may or may not be useful, I never tried them.
Talents that look useful to level up but aren't: Snap (costs a turn to use, you shouldn't have any cooldown problems), Evasion (costs a turn to use, overkill), and backstab (too many enemies are immune to stun).
There's also momentum. Advantages: you can kill an enemy in half a turn instead of in one turn or a stationary boss in 2~3 turns instead of in 3~5 turns and stamina isn't really an issue anyway. Disadvantages: it takes a turn to activate and again to disactivate and doesn't solve any problems you have since it just makes you even better at killing stationary things. Get it if you want, it's a pretty great ability, I just don't like it on a rogue.

As seen above you'll have too many generic talent points unless your race talent require a lot (and even then). So you should consider unlocking an extra generic tree, good options are:
- Mobility (betray a Sun paladin). This is what I did with my cornac and it was awesome, although probably a bit overkill since it stacks with misdirection. At the end I had 100 defense all the time. If more than 10% melee attacks hit me after I maxed those 2 I'll be surprised. Hack'n Back is also nice to reactivate Stealth.
- Vitality (Warrior escort). This is what my cornac would have unlocked if I hadn't betrayed a Sun paladin. Probably very useful since it helps against status effects and makes you harder to kill. I ran around with 2 wild infusions all the time, vitality might have let me get away with only using 1.
- Cursed Aura (by opening the coffins at celia). Curse of shrouds is awesome, certainly worth it to get 5/4/0/0 in this tree.
- Dreaming (betray Temporal Explorer). Dream Walk is by far the most useful skill you can get from an escort as a rogue. The tree is pretty awesome in general as well, but rogues probably don't have the mindpower to use it.
- Harmony. I did this with an earlier rogue and was unimpressed. Don't get me wrong, it's useful when you need it the most and gives nice bonuses, but I don't think it's optimal.

Prodigies or how to break the game and make the prides a walk in the park.
Things to certainly keep in mind when chosing/planning your first prodigy:
- Prodigies should be used to make the truly difficult situations easier, a prodigy that makes you even better at handling stuff you can already do isn't worth it. Even if it had been available (it wasn't because I didn't get strength), I'd still wouldn't have got flexible combat because damage on my melee attacks was something I had plenty of already.
- A typical example of a nightmare situation for a rogue is the entrance to the non-warrior prides. It contains 7+ spellcasters spread out over a small area with nowhere to hide. They'll either blanket the area in fire and water or summon tons of enemies. Currently, you'll either have to use nimble movements (or movement infusion) and lose your chasing ability and a prime escape mechanism or you'll have to try to use stealth and not get blasted apart by aoe effects and/or minions (by the way, minions are bad because they make the fight longer and long fight = lost fight). You need something to help with situations like this.
- By this point your defense is alrady sky high, so you should worry more about spellcasters than about warriors/archers. Extra armor or aoe disarm isn't that good anymore.
- Unless you got rush, you really need mobility. Even if you got rush, you probably still need mobility. Every turn moving is a turn wasted.
- Again, fights will be/must be short. Long cooldowns don't matter because even abilities with a short one are only useable once. Cooldowns in general are not an issue at all, so shortening the ones you have isn't helping much.
- You have very low health and should be using a heroism infusion to help with this. For reference, my lvl 50 rogue had 1200 health, but had a -700 health infusion. This means that draconic body is slightly less useful.
- If you want to get the prodigies that require "20 stamina talents" you'll need to prioritise such talents.

Really, my conclusion is that Giant Leap is by far the best prodigy to get at lvl 40. Simply because the truly hard situations for a rogue happen to also be the situations in which Giant Leap shines. For example, in the entrance area of the prides (the typical rogue nightmare scenario), Giant Leap solves the problem in turn 1 by killing 3 enemies at once despite them being quite far away. Ridiculous range, instant kill of everything in an aoe and unlike rush and nimble movements it lets you jump over things. I know many people will think it's just a slightly better rush, but it's really a world of difference because you can exactly chose your end destination so you can always hit several enemies in it's aoe and you don't need exact line of sight. Inititiation mechanism, aoe, chasing tool and emergency escape mechanism are all things a rogue really needs at that point of the game, so this is perfect.

Another option theoretically is Never Stop Running, but you either need some other ways to cross large gaps (rush and/or controlled phase doors in addition to nimble movements) or have great stamina control for it to be doable. Draconic Body is of course a great choice on every single character, but it just isn't anywhere near as game breaking as giant leap is at this point and suffers from the small healthpool. Windblade is neat but is harder to set up, so somewhat inferior to Giant Leap. Wordly Knowledge shouldn't be necessary.

Things to certainly keep in mind when chosing your second prodigy (assuming you got Giant Leap):
- All of the things above, most importantly the point about "pick something that solves your weaknesses". Rogues at this point still have the following weaknesses: fragility to magic and status effects and lack of chasing power.
- You want something that gives you an extra edge against the few hard moments left: the bosses on each floor of high peak and the end bosses themselves.
- Plan for it in advance. It should now be doable to get a willpower or strength prodigy if you plan for it.

It was honestly a hard choice between Draconic Will and Never Stop Running.

I eventually went with Never Stop Running after spending some of my class points in combat veteran (I truly had too many class points at this point so this sounds less of a disadvantage than it was). For reference, with that prodigy instead of spending a turn to move you lose 20 stamina. Stamina isn't an issue (never ran out when I needed it) as long as you use Giant Leap and nimble movement to bridge large gaps. In practice, you just use it to completely remove the problem of things running away from you, or to get in the perfect position for whirlwind, or to pretend like you have the passive Set up and kill one enemy each turn despite there being some room between them. It's a really neat ability and perfect for rogues that already have at least a few ways to bridge the large gaps. It has some utility beside the obvious ones, like allowing to reactivate stealth midcombat without losing a turn, as a foolproof scouting mechanism and as an escape mechanism.

Draconic Will would have been my second choice and would certainly have been extremely useful as well, but I still like my decision for Never Stop Running.

General guidelines
- A Heroism infusion is invaluable on a rogue, because the fights are so short and because you have such a small health pool. It lets you postpone wasting a turn using a regeneration/healing infusion and at the same time greatly increases your damage and defense. It's really ridiculous and while I haven't been below zero health often at all, I have often stayed in a fight while below 20% health (instead of trying to heal up or teleport away) because my heroism infusion guaranteed I'd still have time to heal up after I killed a particular hard enemy/boss.
- Make sure you have some way to teleport/jump away in case a hard fight starts going too long. The "enemies lose track of you" part of hidden in action is also insanely useful (jump behind a wall and use it immedately).
- Plan your fights a bit, plan which enemies you'll kill first (ie. skeleton mages), check wether you can kill a group at once with whirlwind, etc.
- Base damage is much more important than any on hit effects your weapon you might have.

[lukep]

Well done, have you considered Lucky day as one of your prodigies? Luck isn't well documented, but one of its effects is increasing the chance to stay in Stealth by 0.2% per point. If you had talent level 7.5 in Unseen actions, going from 50 (normal) to 90 Luck would change your chance to break stealth from 22.5% to 14.5% per action.

[darkgod]

Nice! And good thinking on your choice of prodigies

[Salo]

Well done, have you considered Lucky day as one of your prodigies? Luck isn't well documented, but one of its effects is increasing the chance to stay in Stealth by 0.2% per point. If you had talent level 7.5 in Unseen actions, going from 50 (normal) to 90 Luck would change your chance to break stealth from 22.5% to 14.5% per action.

I didn't know that at all, but I also didn't meet the criteria. Obviously I couldn't take it yet at lvl 40 because at that point I didn't have enough willpower yet, but if I had known the effect on unseen action I'd certainly have considered it at lvl 50 if I had found a way to get +5 luck despite the luck penalties on cursed aura. Not sure if it'd be worth it, if only because I don't know which other relevant effects +40 luck has. That said, the boost to unseen actions might be too late anyway, since the final bosses have insane stealth detection anyway (didn't check it for the 2 end bosses, but the worm that walks boss on the last lvl of high peak had about 220 stealth detection while my stealth only had 120 power).

[Wahaha]

I haven't gotten a rogue to high levels before but what is the reason for not putting points in hide in plain sight? Seems like a good skill.

[eliotn]

I haven't gotten a rogue to high levels before but what is the reason for not putting points in hide in plain sight? Seems like a good skill.

Its mostly useful for reseting the cooldown of stealth. And you can usually stealth when you need to, plus the percentage chance is good without points into it.

Good guide, I might play rogue sometime.

[SageAcrin]

Yeah, I find this a good guide too. I got my own clear ( http://te4.org/characters/10195/tome/f9 ... 62a42706a2 ) back in b41, and I pretty much agree with it when it's important.

Some things I find somewhat different, though...

-Stats. Dex/Cun is good, and I can see filling up on Con. In your particular case(Cornac) I strongly agree with that assessment.

With other races, like Halfling, Dwarf and Skeleton, you can afford some leniency on this, though. Strength is quite useful for the extra physical power, early on, I found. You should still build at least some Con though.

-Skeletons can be quite good due to the relatively low Generic sinks the class has, incidentally...but they're somewhat RNG heavy. You will not have good saves unless your equipment provides them. I got luckier than I realized on this, at the time. If you don't get good saves, expect some seriously hard times. (Even with good saves, I still boosted a ton of Con and got Unflinching Resolve on that Skeleton.)

I'm not sure I see the point of Shalore, meanwhile. Is Grace of the Eternals really enough to make it worthwhile? None of the other abilities are really synergistic, and the low HP is rough on a 0 HP class, though hardly undoable. (And with recent trunk changes, Thalore looks very good, providing large save and durability bonuses for large Generic invests-which these guys can float easy.)

-I've been told I seriously screwed up by not abusing Momentum. I can't speak for this, but just throwing it out there. I can believe it.

-Traps aren't actively bad(and Sticky Smoke is probably a decent disabler now after changes in the recent RCs.). Having said that, I agree with that assessment in spirit. They can't be the backbone of your gameplay, and at best are used for ranged weakening.

-Poisons is only a boss thing, later in the game, but I feel like it's a very good boss thing. Towards the end I was able to stack 30% talent failure rate with 30% damage reduction on my enemies-this meant an effective average damage of half. This meant that even the final bosses couldn't deal with it all that well, if I actually managed to land the combo-which was good, as I never, ever would have won that fight otherwise, myself.

-Your assessment on Never Stop Running is pretty fascinating, and it's made me stop thinking the skill needs buffs to be worthwhile. (Still kinda niche, but that's fine.)

-Yay, you're using Death's Embrace. Not Ungolmor, or the Spike, though. Oh well, I can't have everything.

[Salo]

Thanks for the comments. Agree with what you said really.

I'm not sure I see the point of Shalore, meanwhile. Is Grace of the Eternals really enough to make it worthwhile? None of the other abilities are really synergistic, and the low HP is rough on a 0 HP class, though hardly undoable. (And with recent trunk changes, Thalore looks very good, providing large save and durability bonuses for large Generic invests-which these guys can float easy.)

I'm going to update the guide to reflect that Thalore got buffed, they're certainly worthwhile.

Haven't truly tested a Shalore rogue myself, so I admit it's maybe not such a good idea.

-I've been told I seriously screwed up by not abusing Momentum. I can't speak for this, but just throwing it out there. I can believe it.

Yeah, I can believe it as well as it is certainly a great ability. If I ever do a marauder I'm pretty sure I'll make it an integral part of my build. But as rogue there just wasn't ever a point that I felt I needed it (same for poisons really).

-Your assessment on Never Stop Running is pretty fascinating, and it's made me stop thinking the skill needs buffs to be worthwhile. (Still kinda niche, but that's fine.)

In my experience around the time you get tier 4 daggers, in the difficult fights you end up spending very little time attacking in comparison with your time spent approaching enemies, chasing enemies, repositioning for whirlwind (you can't believe how useful this is), dodging projectiles, getting out of damage over time aoe effects and retreating to refresh the cooldowns. Because of this, I'm really convinced that the movement speed boost of Never Stops Running helps way more than the attack speed boost of Momentum ever could.

For example, in the final fight I needed I think about 7 turns to kill the mage. During that time, he stepped away twice and did a short teleport once which thanks to Never Stop Running simply meant he had 3 turns less to attack. If I hadn't had that prodigy, I'd have needed at least 7 turns just moving after him (used leap in the first turn to get from the stairs to next to him and needed nimble movement to get to the other boss after I killed him). Which meant I wouldn't have been able to kill him during heroism duration, which meant I would have had to use a turn healing before I killed him, etc. I also did a little "sidestep (instantly)-> hide in plain sight (instantly) -> reactivate stealth (instantly) -> step next to him (instantly) -> flurry" trick which did most of the damage (heroism and willful combat were up at the time). Granted, I had great lategame gear which made the whole fight easier than it usually is.

Either way, because I liked it so much I decided to make a berserker with the very explicit goal to get Never Stop Running at level 40 and it was awesome as well (and made the last fight once again quite easy). I do agree it's niche though.

[jenx]

Did you consider Eye of the Tiger prodigy?

[Salo]

Did you consider Eye of the Tiger prodigy?

Yep. I did more than just consider it even: I had a halfling rogue that got that prodigy and in fact he's still alive, but I felt it was quite useless and it was one of the mayor reasons why I made a new rogue (which ended up being that cornac winner).

I had a few problems with it. First of all, it doesn't help at all in the very first turns of the fight, which is when you need help the most. In my experience, the first turns are by far the most dangerous (since the hard hitting enemies are still alive and their spells are all off cooldown) and the most important (since rogues don't have the healing and/or staying power to keep fighting for long against spellcasters, you must kill them early). It's kinda the opposite of Giant Leap: whereas Giant Leap gives you a huge boost at turn 1 and does nothing for the next 19 turns, Eye of the Tiger does nothing for the first 5~10 turns and starts working afterwards.
Second, as a rogue you don't have cooldown problems that often and if you do you should just get Snap (which would in practice probably be more useful anyway).
Third, it's just too unrelieable and the "only works once a turn" is quite a downside.