Advanced Tactics & Tips

Don't neglect your Knife throwing ability!

Not only does it impress the ladies, but it can save your life in certain situations.

Rogues do their colossal damage via their skills while stealthed. But, there are a few things to be aware of. First, we use fast piercing weapons so our strength bonus gets penalized. Our dex is usually maxed, which gives us a hefty bonus not only to criticals but also to ranged weapons. Consider that at the maximum skill with good throwing knives a rogue can typically do ~3x the damage as with dual wielding in autoattack (Kocoa (mid 30's) does ~400/hit dual wielding daggers and ~1000/hit throwing knives).

Rogues depend on that first strike, so ranged weapons should almost never be used; but sadly some rogues completely ignore them.

When stealth gets blown and you're down to a straight up fight throwing daggers can be just the ticket. Arc of Daggers is on a different timer then the Ranged skill. What this means is (if you can get a little range between you and your target either with Clout, a Snare flechette, or by tossing flash powder in their face) you can throw a dagger about every second alternating between skills. For my Character that's about half the damage caused by Visicious Strike every second (for Kocoa its about ~800 dps). Not even a bard can kite like that.

Of course, it's not quite so simple since if anything else is around your target Arc of Daggers will hit them too. Running backwards and throwing Snare flechettes is also highly dangerous since you could easily back into something else and get even more aggro.

This is a cool effect that becomes available when your poison skill hits 350 which is suppose to cause the target to take damage each time they hit you (It seems bugged for now in that it seems to heal you a bit each time the target hits). It has to be thrown before you enter combat and does not break stealth or gain aggro.

But what's really cool is can you can put it at the top of your initial strike Macro (so you don't forget to do it). For example, Kocoa's first-strike macro's is:

/itemuse "Water of Life Dart I"
/cast "Ravage IV"
/cast "Pickpocket"
/lootall
/cast "Lacerate V"