Well OP was probably in one of his first runs, so who knows what attribute investment would have been. My first character had a whole bunch of points in Con, and then I never did that again afterwards. Alistair probably didn't have enough strength since Pummel wouldn't stun Loghain, which could indicate too many points in will, dex or con.
Now getting to dex and cunning, a DW character's defense score is more or less irrelevant to fighting targets one on one at this stage of the game, especially against elites.
The first reason is that if you run any of the stun poisons (listed earlier in the thread) and paralysis runes with Momentum, the elite is going to be stunned / paralyzed fairly frequently. It doesn't make sense not to do this on rogue with Coup de Grace, and basically any rogue build should have this by the Landsmeet. If the target is stunned it obviously has a 0% chance of hitting you. Incidentally it will also have basically 0 defense itself.
The other reason is that elite targets won't put up with missing for very long and will just turn on Perfect Striking to get over 200 attack.




