About Rogues

nobody writing about rogues so...

what is the best way to distribute my stats as a rogue???

[zenga]

dex

[Kerrlahg]

If you are Rogue, then Piercing will most likely be your weapon of choice due to the high minimum damage. When using Piercing weapons, you will want all your Melee points put into Dex. If you need additional energy (maybe for poison gems since there is a class bonus for that), just use Invigorate Gems (Green Magic) to replenish energy during a fight. There are also additional skills available at higher levels to improve your max energy.

In Magic you will probably only want MSt, and then you can use multiple Sylvain Restoration gem (Green Magic) for intensive healing. You may potentially want some Cnc so more spells will land on the enemy, but I don't regret not utilizing it at all for poisons.

With Defense you will ideally want your Agi and Cnt equal to at 100 + the level of mob you are fighting. If you are currently fighting level 25 creatures, then you will want 125 Agi and 125 Cnt. You can survive with less Agi and Cnt, but you will take more damage from physical and magic attacks accordingly. Once Agi and Cnt is adequate, put the rest into Dur.

And finally, in Recovery you will want to balance the stats based on your build. If you have a lot of Dur, then put more into Reg. If you end up with a lot of MSt, then put some in to Mre. The goal with Recovery is to balance them to achieve the least amount of downtime between battles. If you keep a low PSt, then PRe will not be important.

In short, my recommended point distributions per level are as follows:

• Melee: Str +0, Dex +3, and Pst +0
• Magic: Int +0, Cnc +0, and MSt +3
• Defense: Agi +1, Cnt +1, and Dur +1
• Recovery: PRe +0, MRe +1, Reg +2

This recommendation makes the assumption that you are leveling all stats evenly (which is something you should do until you get to at least level 60). Boosting your melee or defense far beyond your character's level at a low level (<60) is a wasteful. Once you do reach cap or get close to, then you can worry about maxing out your Melee and Defense and deleveling Magic and Recovery to suit your needs.

There are also a handful of gems you may want to consider putting in your gem pouch:

• Sylvain Restoration (Green Magic) <- Eternal heal [Uses Mana]
• Antigenesis (Green Magic) <- This is your poison, a DoT (Damage over Time) gem [Uses Energy and Mana]
• Invigorate (Green Magic) <- Energy replenishing gem [Uses Mana]
• Manaburst (Blue Magic) <- Mana replenishing gem [Uses Energy]
• Mana Cantrip (Blue Magic) <- Replenishes a small amount of Mana and immediately draws another gem.
• Gaia's Blessing (Green Magic) <- Eternal heal [Uses no Mana or Energy]
• Damaging Cantrip (Blue Magic) <- A weak DD (Direct Damage) gem which will immediately draw another gem. Perfect for filling an empty spot in your pouch. [Uses Mana and Energy, but in very low quantities]

It may take a few tries to get Invigorate and Manaburst gems in the right ratio and quantity, but once you do you won't have to worry about running out of Mana or Energy. There are a lot more gems which may be as or more useful, just take some time to look over all the available gems.

Also, be sure to place Aura gems in slots 2, 3 and 4 (slots are counted from the top-left) in your gem pouch. Each level in Gem Handling will allow a 1% chance of starting with gems from each of those slots given they are Auras.

[zenga]

Excellent guide ker, but i disagree with 1 thing:

Originally Posted by Kerrlahg

This recommendation makes the assumption that you are leveling all stats evenly (which is something you should do until you get to at least level 60). Boosting your melee or defense far beyond your character's level at a low level (<60) is a wasteful.

As a melee fighter, combat trophies is what you need. The famous skeleton coast is a zone with only 1 level of mob (36) and they drop 100% combat trophies. Besides that this is a zone where the epic swans will drop. As you can imagine this is a very good place to catch up with all your weapon/defensive/Archery skills and meanwhile boost melee and defense skills above your level.

In general I believe that as a fighter having at least 10 levels more in melee/defense than your player level is the way to go. This will result in faster killing and less taken damage.

Why not a rouge poison DoT mage? Staves have a nice minimum damage for the rogue bonus, and the ability to stack poison DoTs would be nice too. Later, the level 20 skill would even help with that.

Melee: Str Dex (lv 66)
Magic: Cnc Pst (lv 80)
Def: Agi Cnt Dur (lv 80)
Reg: Pre Reg (lv 54)

Nice, even stat skills for easy levelling. One slot can be taken up by a balance gem to even out the green poison DoT and away you go....

Only issue is that only 8 out of your 50 gems would be poison DoTs. The rest would have to be taken up by other DoTs and cantrips for churn.

[Kerrlahg]

Originally Posted by Necrox

Why not a rouge poison DoT mage? Staves have a nice minimum damage for the rogue bonus, and the ability to stack poison DoTs would be nice too. Later, the level 20 skill would even help with that.

Melee: Str Dex (lv 66)
Magic: Cnc Pst (lv 80)
Def: Agi Cnt Dur (lv 80)
Reg: Pre Reg (lv 54)

Nice, even stat skills for easy levelling. One slot can be taken up by a balance gem to even out the green poison DoT and away you go....

Only issue is that only 8 out of your 50 gems would be poison DoTs. The rest would have to be taken up by other DoTs and cantrips for churn.

First, PSt is a melee stat. Staves deal crushing damage, so you will want to focus on Str, and not Dex.

I have no idea what the min damage on staves usually is, but I imagine piercing is still substantially more. If you are going to use a class with a bonus to min damage, then you will most certainly want to use a weapon type which is known to have the highest min damage. This rings even truer when the min damage bonus isn't very substantial compared to other class bonuses, so it's worth trying to get every bit of advantage from it that you can.

I'm not going to take my time looking over all the classes, but I'm almost positive I could choose a handful which would be a lot closer to optimal for this type of build. Given enough thought, most classes can be well adapted to many builds. I am just looking to give my overview of a classic build for the Rogue class.

Thanks for the feedback Zenga, but I will have to disagree with maintaining both Melee and Defense above the character level with this class. I can understand keeping Melee a few levels above the character level as it's easier with the +20% bonus to melee. On the other hand, Defense is a lot more time consuming to continuously maintain above your own level due to a debilitating -20% bonus to Defense experience gains.

Skeleton coast is a good place to stop leveling and allow your weaponry and protection skills to catch up a bit if you are routinely having trouble killing +3 mobs, at the same time you can also work on CE and CS.

Conversely, I deeply disagree with stopping to farm lower levels epics with the purpose of using them. Selling them off is one thing, but farming with the intent of equipping an epic you will only use temporarily is a waste. All the lower level epics are a money pit. I go by the philosophy that you should level up as quickly as possible and then spend time fixing your character once you reach cap. As a higher level you get more experience per kill, more valuable trophies, and item drops are worth more money. Farming as a higher level is much more time efficient and worth leveling up as quickly as possible for.

Unless you plan on going PK at a lower level (stupidest thing ever) or participating in DMs (or potentially taking part in clan wars, depending of how that will work), having a buffed-up lower level character is a waste of time and resources.

At lower levels, it is much more efficient to just level up as quickly as possible and do whatever it takes to speed up the process. Epic equipment will often help you kill quicker and spend less time regenerating, but you should be able to get by just fine without most of it and have saved a ton of gold or TCs in the process.

You won't need 2 swans if you stock your gem bag to provide lots of healing. At the same time you might be getting Swans, you could switch to attack pets until you get your hands on Seals or Bear Cubs. With attack pets you will be doing more DPS and as such, killing quicker. The extra recovering you will need to do can be covered by eternal heals, mana bursts and invigorates.

Epic suiting is the worst offender, I see so many lower levels clamoring over getting full suits. Is the cost of all these armors truly worth the small amount of extra AC and the minor bonuses? How many hours of use are you going to get out of a suit of 25 armor? It's a waste of money. Only important epic armor is the highest set you get. The rest will just be discarded along the way. Conversely, some of the epic weapons are worth the price and worth using if you find one. One worthwhile is the epic lvl 33 2h piercer. You can usually buy this from the AH at near the price you'd get for selling it to the store. By definition it has a very low cost of ownership and is an ideal epic to expedite the leveling process.

If I have helped just one person avoid pouring all there money into full epics for their level 36 character then typing this has been worth it. It's idiotic.

[zenga]

Originally Posted by Kerrlahg

Thanks for the feedback Zenga, but I will have to disagree with maintaining both Melee and Defense above the character level with this class. I can understand keeping Melee a few levels above the character level as it's easier with the +20% bonus to melee. On the other hand, Defense is a lot more time consuming to continuously maintain above your own level due to a debilitating -20% bonus to Defense experience gains.

You are right there, my bad that i confused the - for defense with another class (and didn't check it).

On the epics for lower levels i tend to agree: it's not worth it to spend fortunes on epics if you plan to level up quickly. However, i've seen quite a lot of people who take their time to level up. They spend the same amount of time, but enjoy the game at their own pace. The best place to do that is skeleton coast, combats + swans drop. This is not a requirement, but its a damn nice bonus if you have 2 swans at lvl 36

For the epic suit, the only thing that I want (but fail to do on most chars) is equipping 2 arms for the extra hit chance, and a chest when their is a heal bonus.

If you correct your build half way in skeleton coast and you grind lets say 1 week there, then you'll win that week back while leveling up to 70: faster fights, less damage.

But again, that depends on what a player enjoy and how fast he/she wants to go.

ty for the advice guys