Low level Rogue Armor not very good

[Think0028]

I feel like the Rogue armors aren’t good enough.

Bladedancer in particular already has to deal with the 15% dualwielding damage penalty for most of their cool skills, and I find that even when I’m geared up decently for an area (which I’m not, since I don’t hop to the gambler every time and the blacksmith rarely has enough and drops are always a crapshoot) I cap out at like 18-19% armor damage reduction versus something like Sentinel’s 22% before skills. It sounds small, but that’s a 5% increase in damage taken, and combined with the 15% damage penalty comes out to around 20% increased damage taken.

In addition, most of Rogue/Bladedancer’s early defensive passives are all probabilistic - chance to dodge, chance to get shrouds to give chance to dodge, chance to glancing blow. etc etc. This would work fine if the main threat from mobs was tons of little attacks, which in many areas are the threat. But every once in a while there’ll be mobs that just hit hard every hit - Ruins of Welryn, the Wengari Fortress, etc. And when it’s a few, powerful hits, probabilistic stuff results in either dying or passing with a breeze, and dying makes me very frustrated.

The only deterministic defenses they get early are:

• Agility (less damage taken while moving, not really reliable outside of Dancing Blows and I have my suspicions it’s not working right with that either)
• Sapping Blades (gains health on using 0 mana cost skill, which doesn’t work with Dancing Blows!)
• Skiasynthesis (gains health on shadow creation, which does work quite well if you are specifically specced into using Synchronized Strike and is otherwise not very good at all)

Eventually they can do things like spec into Apostasy and the Health on Glancing Blow node to recover health on every hit, which granted is very very powerful! But unless they’ve gotten a ton of dodge on their gear they can’t hit 100% right away on every pack without Smoke Bomb and careful manuevering, and the skill investment on that is incredibly intense, requiring you to invest another 13 points into the base rogue tree instead of Bladedancer, which cuts back your cool damage passives so that you still get Apostasy and makes it even harder to get 100% glancing blow since they can’t use the two swords->glancing blow chance node until much later. (Maybe I’m missing something that gives a ton of dodge rating really easily?)

Acolyte and Mage have low armor as well, but get extremely reliable defensive benefits to go with it. Lich Acolyte gets a ton of leech right off the bat, Necromancer Acolyte has minions so they can run around and still do damage, both Mages can stack a bunch of ward.

Obviously at high levels basically all these issues go away - you have the points to spare to get 100% glancing blow & health on glancing blow and without apostasy if you’re going two swords, you have way more dodge so the odds of being 2 or 3 shot quickly is much lower, your melee damage is much higher and you have leech boosters, more of your gear will be crafted to be just right, etc etc. And when playing non-solo it’s very easy to use previously farmed affixes to cover most of this right up. I play solo, mainly, so this is something that’s nagging me personally.

For me, personally, a lot of these issues were handily covered by the fact Decoy could get me out of any trouble situation. Now that the cooldown is longer, unless I’m patiently sitting and waiting between packs, I do not have it every pack, and that creates opportunities for me to die and get pissy.

Can Rogues get something on their low level armor so that it isn’t just worse than the other two mostly-melee classes? Innate dodge rating, more armor, something like that? I’d also accept Bladedancer getting an Armor passive node, the leech or health on glancing blow nodes being moved lower in their trees, or me being told I’m full of shit and Rogue is great at low levels actually. (My dream for my particular obsession is that the melee leech node gets expanded to also give throwing damage leech, because Shuriken Blade Armor has outdamaged every other melee skill I’ve tried.)

Sorry if this looks like a diatribe - it’s mostly me just getting all my thoughts out at once.

[Macknum]

Uhm what? Decoy solves your “problems pretty fast”. Leech or Health on hit Flurry = facetank all early game content… naked besides a weapon. Your post sounds like tunnelvision without keeping every toy in mind the Rogue has to offer. I don’t want to be mean but it just makes me scratch my head and I even doubble checked but yeah… 0 issues from my point of view and I need to watch out more with almost every other toon I have :).

Is there a specific level range you have in mind you consider “low level”? Maybe I missed something.

[Think0028]

I’ve never tried Flurry - I have the issues when I tried Puncture, Dancing Strikes, and Cinder Strike. Like I said, could be full of shit, but it’s been a persistent issue every time I’ve tried Rogue, and maybe it’s not just me? I’d love to be able to level with things that aren’t just one specific skill for my autoattack though.

For the low level I mainly mean from 15-45ish - once I’m in ch8 things tend to even out.

Also I literally mentioned Decoy already, haha. The cooldown is too long to save me reliably, plus I don’t have perfect knowledge of “okay this pack needs it”.

[Llama8]

RNg-based defences are always going to feel bad when you don’t have a decent % chance (dodge caps at 85% BTW, not 100%). But even on a Sentinel, if you put flat & % dodge on every piece of gear you can get hold of you can get above 50% for a while.

Bladedancer also gets a lot of flat & % dodgefrom their passive tree & side effects from skills which should keep you alive while you wait for life on melee hit/leech/life on glancing blow/life on dodge to get you back to full hp.

That said, the Rogue is supposed to be a class where you should play carefully rather than just running in & dragging the entire zone to the exit before murdering them.

[Macknum]

Ah there are some viable informations :). The knowledge part is the biggest one :D. I releveled an acolythe these days because I wanted to test something and thought “Well this will be for sure better then harvest!” and played like a monkey… dead by lvl 12 :D.

Over time you know the tough spots and how to avoid them.

For skills… I often play skills I don’t want to max out or even specialise in because they offer the most bang for the bug in right that moment. Spellblades are the best example for me. Why should I not skill lightning blast even if I want to specialise in Mana Strike right from the spot? Makes my life easier and helps me clear stuff fastger to get to the point I want to be while respeccing lightning strike for flame ward or teleport because by then mana strike has enough points to do the job.

Druid for example is the worst case scenario from my point of view. Specialise in Swipe and rightclick away while you put points into Ice Thorns and Thorn Totem because you make use of this later? Nah I’m stuck in human form untill I have somewhat decent crit chane aka almost forever so I can skill leap for example and get another dmg and steroid skill. I spend my first points into Beastmaster for that damage reduction and still take frenzy totem with me because it helps along the way far more then using these points in Druid from the start.

I just throw out some random examples but I think you get my point :). Braindead life and HP on hit Flurry can carry you soooo far without any problems it’s worth a try :).

[Think0028]

Thanks a ton for the feedback! I wish Rogue was a little less brain intensive with non-Flurry setups while leveling, but I definitely have some ideas for next time now.

[Think0028]

Just tried it out - this is so much better than every other version I’ve tried so far holy hell! I hadn’t fully parsed it was life on hit, not on use. Thank you so much for the tip!

And yeah, I’m really not a fan generally of builds where I have to level differently than I end up going - that may be causing some tunnel vision to make me miss cool things like this. I do hope the other ones get buffed, but my goal was to find a Rogue build I liked leveling with, and this seems very promising.

EDIT: Oh dear god I’ve never seen channeled Flurry before.

[Think0028]

And now I have my first first try Majasa clear.

Well, that certainly changed my opinions!

[Macknum]

Glad it worked out for you and even better you seem to have a lot of fun ^^.

[Think0028]

I really am!! Thank you so much

[Llama8]

Out of curiosity, is there any low level armour that you think is good? Rogues should be able to get into the 60s-70s% dodge chance without too much difficulty which will provide quite a decent amount of DR, in addition to the small amount of armour they also get.

Low level armour is usually kinda crap, perhaps it’s just the RNG nature of dodge that you don’t like?

[Think0028]

It’s the RNG nature of dodge I don’t like at low levels, yep. I like Sentinel/Primalist armor because it actually had armor, and I feel like Acolyte/Mage have much more relevant combat buffs. Hell, Sentinel’s Shadow Plate gives a massive damage buff for VK and has good innate defense!

Just went to dounle check and Rogue gets innates like Lightning Resist and Increased Dodge%. The increased dodge% I really wish was instead flat dodge rating.