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Character Building Tips - Rogue Archer


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#1
Guest_Gurrock_*

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 Posted ImageBuilding a successful character in Dragon Age 2 is about knowing which trees to build upon. While specialization skills are obviously important, Rogues also need to be aware of moves like Stealth, which can help them escape from a battle if need be.

Here's a look at the first seven levels of a Rogue Archer, which is capped with the acquisition of the first sub-specialization tree. Take note of the way the points are spread and try to apply to your own characters.

Stat Distribution

A Rogue Archer's other two important stats are Dexterity and Cunning. Dexterity improves attack power while Cunning increases the chance of a Critical Hit (in addition to making it possible to unlock more complex treasure chests).
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Dexterity and Cunning are a Rogue's best friends.
Other stats that should be taken into account include Willpower and Constitution. While they aren't as critical as Dexterity or Cunning, they shouldn't be ignored. A good rule of thumb is to put a point in Dexterity and a point in Cunning while switching off between Willpower and Constitution.

Abilities

Level 2: Pinning Shot

Always begin by putting a point into the specialization you want to focus on. In this case, the Archer begins with the skill: Pinning Shot.
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Pinning Shot does solid damage and has the potential to incur knockback, making it a great first move.
Pinning Shot is an all-around great move that can be used on both bosses and enemies. It can take off a large chunk of life and knock back an opponent, giving you a few extra seconds with which to fill them with arrows.

Level 3: Bursting Arrow

Your next point should be spent on an area attack. This will help you manage the large crowds of enemies that pop up throughout Dragon Age 2. Bursting Arrow is great against small packs of three or four enemies. While it does decent damage of its own, it also adds a small amount of fire damage; it recharges much more quickly than Hail of Arrows and can be your main area attack.

Level 4: Hail of Arrows

Bursting Arrow will give you access to the even more powerful Hail of Arrows for your next level. This attack can devastate an entire room full of enemies.
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Hail of Arrows can crush an entire room full of enemies while incurring additional bleeding damage.
The only disadvantage of Hail of Arrows is that it has a long windup time. Ideally, your tank will already be engaged with a group of foes when you use this attack. This attack does a fair amount of damage over the course of a few seconds and causes additional bleeding damage.

Level 5: Stealth

Now it's time to start on another tech tree. Use this opportunity to find a skill that fills hole in your current skill lineup. For us, we used Stealth.
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It is imperative that you add Stealth to your collection of skills so you can get out of a tight spot.
Stealth is ideal due to its quick and easy accessibility. This move makes it possible to become invisible and easily evade a large group of enemies. As an archer, this is invaluable for those moments when your are surrounded and cannot escape. Use it to get to a corner or the high ground and rain down some destruction on your foes.

Level 6: Precision

It's important to get a booster of some sort for your character, and now is the ideal time to do so. Archers can choose between Speed (shoot faster), Precision (better attack) or Power (higher knockback chance). The choice between Precision and Speed is a difficult one, but it's tough to pass up the 20 Percent Attack and 10 Percent Critical increases.

Level 7: Mark of Death

Level 7 has your first Specialization Point. As a Rogue, spend your first sub-specialization point on Assassin and grab the "Mark of Death" ability. The Mark greatly adds to the damage a party member can do to an enemy, making it useful against bosses. It will also put you on the road toward obtaining the very power "Assassination" skill (instant death or heavy critical on one enemy), which is about the best skill a Rogue can obtain.

Character Progression

You will want to focus on building up the Assassin tree so that you can obtain "Assassination" as quickly as possible.
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Target the Shadow tree with your second sub-specialization point.
At Level 14, jump over to the Shadow Tree and grab the very useful "Pinpoint Precision," which kicks the chance of a critical hit up 25 percent. Once you have Assassination, spend the rest of your time filling out the archer specialization tree to complete your character.

#2
PoisonDagger

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Nice build, it just pissed me off real bad that...*wow...forgot his name varric?* could not use other bows and was restricted to his own. It was a letdown from the start i figured that i had no use for archery as a rouge because of him and all the nice bows i have seen.

#3
IN1

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Couldn't disagree with your build more (investing any points at all into Archery tree; getting Precision over Speed; grabbing Assassin instead of a much more logical choice: going Shadow at 7, then respecializing to Assassin at 10) :) That said, it's always nice to see people giving archery a try.

Modifié par IN1, 22 mars 2011 - 01:00 .


#4
FoxholeHunter

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The "Assassination" skill is what you want to get to as fast as possible and fully upgrade, I agree.

You can then pretty much one-hit kill or very quickly dispose of the biggest threat in a fight (Mage healing/protecting group, Rage Demo, Gollum etc) and then take down the mob easilly. Its a must have skill.

I picked speed over precision though as my buff.

#5
enudrom

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Assassination is indeed awesome. I found it indispensable for instantly killing any brittled lieutenant or any regular mage, (pesky saraabas lightning.)

The archery tree abilities seemed pretty meh to me, and although I used them I think the points would be better spent in the Specialist tree or a utility tree. Speed for regular enemies, Precision for bosses. I think it is extremely important to at least have a set of gear + buffs that can come close to maxing your +attack vs bosses, because glancing blows suck and most of your dmg vs bosses will come from auto attacks.

Also, I highly recommend Pinpoint Strikes + Haste (Anders,) and the fire damage bow from the High Dragon.

#6
kotli

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All good just one thing your Stats info is wrong for Dexterity and Cunning. Dex increases rogues damage hit chance and Crit chance, whereas Cunning increases crit damage and your defense.

Other than that a good guide IMO, as for what better out of Speed and Pinpoint buffs really comes down to your party and stats along with are you fighting a boss? (attack penities etc here).

Modifié par kotli, 22 mars 2011 - 01:41 .


#7
Arkalezth

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Is there anything worth taking in the archery tree for Nightmare? I guess both of the AoE talents cause friendly fire, and Pining and Lance don't sound much better than auto-attacking.

#8
mokponobi

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The archery tree is nice for casual or normal, it is not very useful on nightmare as you are much better off using focused fire techniques and CCC to get maximum damage and turn fights your way.

#9
termokanden

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Gurrock wrote...

 At Level 14, jump over to the Shadow Tree and grab the very useful "Pinpoint Precision," which kicks the chance of a critical hit up 25 percent.

 
It increases critical damage by 25%, not critical chance.

Depending on the difficulty, you could modify this build a lot. If you are not playing on the hard difficulties, you definitely do not need extra constitution. Willpower is also very much debatable. A little bit is nice, but with Bloodlust you really don't need to have all that much. I made it through fine without spending points on that.

Finally, you have not mentioned Blindside. This is a must-have talent for any rogue.


The archery tree is nice for casual or normal, it is not very useful on nightmare as you are much better off using focused fire techniques and CCC to get maximum damage and turn fights your way.

You can focus fire just fine with archery. Punishing Lance also happens to one-shot many enemies. I don't see how that's not useful on higher difficulties. But I can certainly see why you might want to skip something like Hail of Arrows.

Couldn't disagree with your build more (investing any points at all into Archery tree; getting Precision over Speed; grabbing Assassin instead of a much more logical choice: going Shadow at 7, then respecializing to Assassin at 10) :) That said, it's always nice to see people giving archery a try.

Archery is worth it for Punishing Lance mainly. Assassin is superior to Shadow at all levels. Early it's because of Bloodlust but later on you also have Devious Harm and Assassinate.

Modifié par termokanden, 22 mars 2011 - 02:43 .


#10
Arkalezth

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termokanden wrote...

You can focus fire just fine with archery. Punishing Lance also happens to one-shot many enemies. I don't see how that's not useful on higher difficulties. But I can certainly see why you might want to skip something like Hail of Arrows.

Archery is worth it for Punishing Lance mainly. Assassin is superior to Shadow at all levels. Early it's because of Bloodlust but later on you also have Devious Harm and Assassinate.

I haven't played an archer, so I'm not sure how some things work. I asked because Punishing Lance:

1) It's a 4 point investment. Ok, you shouldn't have many problems to take everything needed, but it still needs 2 dubious value talents as prerequisites. There's an increase in damage, but it doesn't seem so great.

2) "Kills weaker opponents". What does "weaker" exactly mean? The weakest enemies should be dead in 1-2 shots already, and I don't think it insta-kills elites.

3) Does it damage several lined oponents (as in Varric's cutscene)? If so, is there a max number of enemies? This doesn't look very useful to me, enemies rarely come in a straight line.

#11
enudrom

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Archer's Lance is decent only versus stunned/brittled targets, because of how the ability works:

It takes about 1 second or so to cast and will shoot a projectile at the center of where the target was at the start of the cast. It seems to only hit targets if the projectile passes through very near the center of their "circle." So if a target moves even a little, it will often miss the target and do nothing. That said, it does do a ton of dmg, especially vs brittled targets, but I think the points may be worth spending elsewhere. It's a shame that bioware will likely not do any rebalance patches, because I think the Archery tree is pretty weak as it stands. A lot of the other trees are good though, so it's not a huge deal, I suppose.

#12
IN1

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Archery is worth it for Punishing Lance mainly.

No. It's a weirdass hitbox talent with low damage factor requiring a lot of investment into an ultimately useless tree.

Assassin is superior to Shadow at all levels.

Not really.

Early it's because of Bloodlust but later on you also have Devious Harm and Assassinate.

That's exactly why I suggest respecializing at 10 (as soon as you can invest a point into Assassinate). Pinpoint Precision's +25 CriticalRange passive bonus is significantly more useful early game than Bloodlust (do you really use talents with your archer that much at 7-9?) or non-upgraded Pinpoint Strikes.

#13
hextatic

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I'm going to chime in in agreement with the archery tree being something that an archer might want to consider avoiding. At the early levels, you can really lay out the damage if you build around stuns, sorta like this:
http://biowarefans.c...0nbH1a0JE1V0tDs
(I'm not sure how much building out power makes sense there- but it looks interesting without testing)

later on, you can respec into the assassinate tree for the end of act 1, where it might be important to lay out damage on single unstunnable targets.
http://biowarefans.c...0nbH1mt0J1elBFD

finally, at the end of the game, when you are able to naturally have a high critical %, you could opt for something like this:
biowarefans.com/dragon-age-2-talent-builder/#rHX1YcaVQtelBFDHkRrwu0t1ih0EDeC

These aren't *archery* builds per se, but they work well with a bow. They work by focusing on making the standard attack effective. That final build has the additional bonus of doling out disorients very rapidly for the rest of your team to take advantage of.

Modifié par hextatic, 22 mars 2011 - 11:56 .


#14
Silver Direwolf

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Awesome, thanks for the guide

EDIT: Oh by the way, Hail of Arrows isn't available till level 5. So I guess take Stealth at 4 and then take it at 5

Modifié par Silver Direwolf, 22 mars 2011 - 11:51 .


#15
termokanden

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IN1 wrote...

Archery is worth it for Punishing Lance mainly.

No. It's a weirdass hitbox talent with low damage factor requiring a lot of investment into an ultimately useless tree.


It's not weird. It hits where you aim it. It's obviously harder to use on Nightmare, but below that it can one-shot a lot of enemies with no risk. Not just the weakest type either.

That said, I found Hail of Arrows and Pinning Shot useless at higher levels. Bursting Arrow is alright if you can hit multiple brittle targets, but it still isn't all that impressive.


That's exactly why I suggest respecializing at 10 (as soon as you can invest a point into Assassinate). Pinpoint Precision's +25 CriticalRange passive bonus is significantly more useful early game than Bloodlust (do you really use talents with your archer that much at 7-9?) or non-upgraded Pinpoint Strikes.


I did. I don't think you're right in saying the Archery talents are all useless. But in any case I would get bored out of my mind autoattacking through those levels. Pinpoint Precision really isn't all that big of a buff either. I just don't see the point in going out of your way to get it early.

Modifié par termokanden, 23 mars 2011 - 11:37 .


#16
Ganen

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I did. I don't think you're right in saying the Archery talents are all useless. But in any case I would get bored out of my mind autoattacking through those levels. Pinpoint Precision really isn't all that big of a buff either. I just don't see the point in going out of your way to get it early.


lol pinpoint percision not that big of a buff? Im sorry what class you talking again? :D

while I agree that for first spec its not worth going into shadow because of the incredible dps boost and assassinate, but as second spec? and a 1 point spent only? its basolutly uncontestable that pinpoint percision is am ust have dps talent...
by the time you get to a second spec you will have incredile critical hit rates...
imagine that through base stats buff normally used as well as abilities that give you on demand crits you have around 80% active critical rate, a flat increase of 25% critical damage is a flat increase of 20% or so in all your damage...

not to mention to awesome survivability tools shadow gives you... like decoy <3

assassination > shadow >>>>> duelist

Modifié par Ganen, 23 mars 2011 - 12:49 .


#17
termokanden

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Ganen wrote...

lol pinpoint percision not that big of a buff? Im sorry what class you talking again?

while I agree that for first spec its not worth going into shadow because of the incredible dps boost and assassinate, but as second spec? and a 1 point spent only? its basolutly uncontestable that pinpoint percision is am ust have dps talent...
by the time you get to a second spec you will have incredile critical hit rates...


You completely missed the point of my post. I didn't say there was anything wrong with Shadow. But if I have to choose between having stamina all the time and getting a 25% crit damage increase early in the game, I'm going to choose stamina.

#18
Ganen

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termokanden wrote...

Ganen wrote...

lol pinpoint percision not that big of a buff? Im sorry what class you talking again?

while I agree that for first spec its not worth going into shadow because of the incredible dps boost and assassinate, but as second spec? and a 1 point spent only? its basolutly uncontestable that pinpoint percision is am ust have dps talent...
by the time you get to a second spec you will have incredile critical hit rates...


You completely missed the point of my post. I didn't say there was anything wrong with Shadow. But if I have to choose between having stamina all the time and getting a 25% crit damage increase early in the game, I'm going to choose stamina.


oh yeah most definetly, when picking first specialization assassination is always the better option

#19
Arkalezth

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So...about this...

Punishing Lance "kills weaker opponents". What does "weaker" exactly mean? The weakest enemies should be dead in 1-2 shots already, and I don't think it insta-kills elites.



#20
termokanden

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It's a good question. No idea. I remember killing two minibosses in one shot, but that was on normal difficulty. And yes they were at full health before.

#21
pyre

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I assume it means the skill has a "deathblow" effect which it is just a instakill regardless of health. There is gear w the same effect.

#22
SkeletonDance43

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My first playthrough i did archer. Picked Assassin as my first spec, Shadow for my second. never looked back. =D