My amateur attempt at live video recording. I made this video to demonstrate how the rogue plays. If you're looking for more general information about the skills, skip on over to the wiki page.

Protip: Make sure your bags have room before killing a boss.

Nice vid. I think I need to make the screen 1280x720 for natural HD recording.

Well done vid. Nice to see some rogue endgame, seems better than I expected.

I initially thought Rogue was junk in the early levels, and almost deleted him. They kinda suck at levels 1-20, but after level 30 they get BEASTLY.

My rogue is named Locke

I think his gear is pretty good for his level, and the great thing about Rogue is they're awesome at building high chains very quickly. They might very well be one of the best classes for that role.

I was originally going to use Shadow Knight in hell mode, then Wizard, but now I've decided to take Rogue due to their high DPS, high survivability and awesome chaining abilities.

Rogue is very durable because they can stack dodge, parry, riposte, shield block on top of armor & resists. And they can get high #s in all those. So lets say 22% dodge, 22% parry, 22% riposte combined with 24% shield block combined with 25-40% armor reduction and decent resists. That combined with all the ways Rogue has of avoiding getting hit. Throw in some life leech and you got a murderous rampaging beast chaining mobs like they're bowling pins with you being the bowling ball. The deadliest mobs in the game, spell spamming mages get wrecked by Rogue. They got multiple ways of stuffing mages, so chaining mages is no different than chaining anything else.

I'm not entirely sure what "5% chance to assassinate" is with regards to the 20 point bonus for Cold Blood, and if that's only active when cold blood is up, or if that 5% is for ALL attacks. If its the later, then I'm gonna respec my points for it. I assumed it couldn't be the later because that would be really OP because 5% will happen a lot for as fast as rogue attacks with 2 weapons with double hit and duel wield procs and moves like prowling gash.

Re: Cold Blood



Anyone have any idea how Cold Blood talent perk works yet? I'm wondering this also. Trying to
decide how to spec my rogue. 5% chance to assassinate, is that an instant kill? and only for the attack
with Cold Blood activated or for all attacks?

I think it does work but I don't honestly see that as a particularly good thing, especially for trying to keep chains going, but that's just how I see it.

I should probably change it. It's a fun, nostalgic talent reminiscent of Kunark-era's assassinate, but it's probably not a good mechanic for NG. At some point I am going to do a database query to discover which talents are underused and beef them all up or redesign them.

I can't wait for that. I love testing out talents and seeing what's optimal

I'm trying to successfully trigger an "Assassinate" and I feel like I'm doing something wrong.
Either not happening or I'm not noticing it. I'm assuming a proc means instant kill? If it's simply
a damage bonus I could be overlooking it.

Have not seen anything happen. Definitely not occurring from normal auto-attacks. Which leaves attacks
following activation of Cold Blood? After over a hundred times using CB + Backstab (full TP), still nothing.
Likewise with other skills, with or without using Cold Blood. On regular and elite creatures.

I feel like even with a five percent chance I should have seen something by now?

Is it something that is related to stealth (evade/hide) perhaps? Not sure how it worked in Everquest anyway.

Maybe it's totally broken. lol..

Praying for the rise of the ice wizards xD

If you're messing with talents, the snare effect from the 20pt stagger shot bonus probably needs to be changed now that mobs don't flee.

Yep, I need to adjust all of the skills/talents that affected run speed. They'll do something else instead.

I pull an extra mob, then flash powder it when I'm chaining, so if something dies really quick, I'm poised to pull another mob and smoke it quick with backstab if flash powder is down. For chaining I try to keep backstab and flash powder on different CDs. I use evade to either wait for a few secs for a CD, or to use the evade attack stun as another aggro suppressor. And stagger shot also. For the way I'm chaining a quick kill proc wouldn't affect it much.

I finally got an assassinate to proc.

I pulled a Frog and used Shadow Strike to start combat. It hit for 31,000 and killed it
in one hit.

I guess it just feels like it's not actually 5 percent chance to occur but it does work like
Hentai said above.

What sorta DPS should rogue be able to pull off with end game gear? I'm doing about 3500 sustained DPS in nightmare on my 65 rogue, and he's got pretty good gear. Including BiS daggers. I'm hoping rogue has considerably higher potential than this, or maybe someone can tell me if I'm doing something wrong here?

https://nevergrind.com/nevergrounds/ind ... cter=Locke

Your gear has a lot of room from improvement and those daggers aren't necessarily BiS.

At 97 with pretty end game gear I'm pulling 9k sustained on chains in Hell Nimgaul and 12-15k on bosses where I can blow all of my cooldowns at once. Better than some classes and well behind others.

Seems like the main problem is that so much of our damage is tied to finishers that are on long timers so you end up waiting for a finisher to kill each mob with champions requiring 2-3 finishers to kill. Shadow Strike, Lacerate, and melee spam is ~3.3k dps while the finishers on 12-25 second cooldowns make up the other 6k dps. It's very bursty, and god help you if you get blinded or miss on one of your big finishers.

Also, kind of strange, but the biggest damage dealers at high levels are Lobotomize and Stagger Shot. Backstabs hit 2x for ~10-15k each (maxed talents), Prowling Gash is ~30k (maxed talents), while Stagger Shot and Lobo are hitting for 40-60k (no talents). Unfortunately, those are both on long cooldowns and need to be used situationally as stuns/interrupts until you have the resists and life steal to survive without them. Your damage goes up quite a bit when you're able to use those more liberally.

It'd really help the class to either:

1. Reduce the cooldowns across the board.
2. Shift some of the damage from Lobo and Stagger Shot to Backstab and Prowling Gash (and reduce the cooldowns on both so that they can be used more frequently while chaining mobs)
3. Buff auto-attack. Maybe add a flurry component as a talent or a buff from one of our skills? We're one of (maybe) the only classes locked into duel wielding, it'd be nice to get some sort of benefit to offset that.

A combination of 2 and 3 to even out the auto-attack/finisher damage ratio a bit while also keeping Lobo and Stagger Shot as situational stuns/interrupts rather than damage dealers would be fantastic. It would result in a smoother and more interactive class.

The single target burst and lock-down focus of the class is great when you're dealing with single mobs but gets clunky when chain pulling or dealing with something that isn't killed by the initial burst (all end-game bosses/champions).

I can take some armor off my monk and put it on my rogue, but I haven't seen better DPS daggers than ragestrikers. If there are better ones, can you list them?



That's not too bad. Its better than Shadow Knights DPS.

I haven't seen anything better than the Ragestrikers but I haven't had a Nightfall or Baron's dagger drop yet so I haven't tested those. I also haven't tested other 1h weapons to see if any are worth the hit from switching away from daggers. Might be worth trying.



Ya the 9k sustained is pretty good. It seems like that would be a good target for the high end of single target sustained dps across the board.

The issue is how reliant that 9k is on long cooldowns. You basically spam Shadow Strike for 8-10 seconds while you wait for one of your finishers to come off cooldown then burst the mob down to 0 over and over. It feels weird to have maxed energy all of the time with nothing useful to use it on. Long term, it's a fix that would make the class more enjoyable to play but not necessary for the class to be viable now.

I haven't leveled my rogue too high yet but from everything I've seen auto attack and your attack ratio is less important than some other classes so I think Nightfall might actually end up being better than Ragestriker but I haven't tested it. I just said they aren't neccisarily BiS because there's not much info about it yet. I also think dagger MH and then either a 1HS or 1HB in the OH might be better as all the attacks that get a boost from daggers state "In your main hand", at least I think anyway. I was planning on leveling and testing my rogue after I did my warrior and druid so it'll probably be awhile before I investigate it further.

I'll definitely continue playing rogue, but I'm gonna get my monk to 99 first.

The key to rogue seems to be high agility.



Lobotomize does 15-20k damage too.

https://nevergrind.com/nevergrounds/ind ... cter=Locke

Its the 436 agility.

Also, the chaos flux attack on sonic strike is really good. It seems to do a % chunk of a mob's HP, which makes it great for bosses & champs. So rogue has a pretty good damage rotation.

Rogues have a good rotation in max gear but play very differently prior to getting that gear. Prior to max gear, you have to use stagger shot, lobo, and sonic strike (your biggest damage dealers) situationally to avoid damage or you get blown up by stun, blind, ambush, etc. It's a really harsh curve if you're not using gear farmed with another class since the rotation is so much more restricted. I haven't played other classes to hell yet (gotta get to 99 on the rogue!), is that typical for other classes?

For farming at high levels it seems like a balance of agi and str/dex is best because agi only affects finishers which results in a lot of overkill on normal mobs if its stacked super high (at the cost of str/dex) and either way you're taking 2-3 finishers to kill champions. Finding the right balance is a work in progress.

I went with a 500 agility setup:

https://nevergrind.com/nevergrounds/ind ... cter=Locke

I can do about 11-12k sustained now.

Skill damage with 0 TP:

Stagger shot = 31419-44883 damage.
Lobotomize = 27567-34458 damage.
Prowling Gash = 689-1378
Backstab = 4842-6040

I saw a DPS increase across the board by using a Bone Razor in my secondary. Has a lot to do with the agility and attack haste. But I saw a DPS cut when main handing a Bone Razor over rage striker.