34 réponses à ce sujet

[Diamaht]

Use the toolset to put all of Lel's points in archery.  I'm going to make her a ranger this time around.

For stats is it better to go with mostly cunning or should I go mostly dex?  I've heard people say it both ways one this forum.

[Rainen89]

Depends if you have the dex fix. Pure strength/cunning does not scale well. You can do it, but your damage will be less than melee.

[Dagorgil]

Well.. you could always use the skill that makes the damage mod use Cunning instead of Str, and not worry about Str except for armor.

[Morvayn]

Dex 30-35 and rest in cunning is awesome for Leliana if you have lethality and plan to use her for song of courage and lockpicking/stealing.

But if you don't care about bardish and roguish stuff, maxing dex will make her more efficient with a bow.

[Diamaht]

Basicly I'll have her as a ranger for the pet and get all the archery skills. Yes i'll be doing lockpicking and stealing with her but I'm wondering about the best route to take for combat.



Also I don't want to use any mods to change game mechanics.



Seems the debate is between going with all dex or all cunning. Was wondering which seems to be more effective.

[Muse011]

From my understanding, Longbow's damage is determined by Strength vs a Shortbow's Dex.



Because of this, it's generally better to go Cunning (especially as a Bard) and get the Lethality talent. You'll get more damage and higher range vs a Dex build with a shortbow.



You'll take more damage, but that's what combat stealth is for.

[Jayjay67]

Q. Why only 34 Dex?

A. Any thing over 30 is a waste, 34 is needed for Dragonthorn bows and you will receive equipment that will boost your dex attribute.



Q. Why crazy high cunning and only 19 strength?

A. Well with the talent "Lethality" your cunning score effects your ranged damage, also 20 strength is needed Felon's Coat/Red Jenny's Seekers/Tackmasters Boots. Your strength should be over 22 with equipment.

[Sarevok Anchev]

Be careful with your Attack Rating, if you go All Cunning.

[Muse011]

Duelist helps for that as a secondary.

[Sarevok Anchev]

Muse011 wrote...

Duelist helps for that as a secondary.

Yes, but if he is talking about Leliana style, this means Bard+Ranger, so its more of a supporting role.
Its important to get your Attack Rating from somewhere else.

But its true, the sustain gives good AR and Def...

[Muse011]

Yeah, he wants to use Ranger and that's fine. I was just stating that Duelist overcomes the attack rating problem (not completely, but it helps by a good amount).

[Lord Niah]

All bows split damage between dex and strength and the same for attack rating.



Cunning only adds damage and requires you spend three talent points



Attack rating is a big deal for bows, especially without archery mods. If you do not have a good attack rating, prepare yourself to be constantly missing targets.



The best way to go for a rogue archer is to pump strength to 20 for light armors, cunning to about 30 for opening all locks, and then the rest into dexterity.



for specializations, the best one is duelist for the +10 to attack from dueling. For your second, pick whatever you want.

[Muse011]

Sorry Niah I have to disagree with you.



Cunning adds more than just bow damage. It also affects your Bard song (3rd one, forget its name atm) which gives you a huge DPS boost. That alone makes up for it. It also allows you to go with less points in lockpicking and coercion in favor of other more useful abilities/skills.



If you go Duelist as well, it adds a nice bonus to your attack rating making it rather painless. I play on hard difficulty with two Archers (myself and Leliana) and completely roll everything.



You're correct about the Strength requirement though.

[Sarevok Anchev]

Muse011 wrote...

Yeah, he wants to use Ranger and that's fine. I was just stating that Duelist overcomes the attack rating problem (not completely, but it helps by a good amount).

Can you tell me how high is the Defense bonus with the passive upgrade/ does it scale?

[sinosleep]

Muse011 wrote...

Sorry Niah I have to disagree with you.

Cunning
adds more than just bow damage. It also affects your Bard song (3rd
one, forget its name atm) which gives you a huge DPS boost. That alone
makes up for it. It also allows you to go with less points in
lockpicking and coercion in favor of other more useful abilities/skills.

If
you go Duelist as well, it adds a nice bonus to your attack rating
making it rather painless. I play on hard difficulty with two Archers
(myself and Leliana) and completely roll everything.

You're correct about the Strength requirement though.

That depends on how long you're willing to be gimped until your stats make up for the lack of lock picking, trap disarming, hitrate, and coersion. I seriously don't see how you guys do it considering there are plenty of traps, chests, and persuasion checks before you get your cunning up past the 40 points that your going to miss from not taking said talents/skills. Same goes for attack rate and relying on song of courage (3rd tier) and damage and relying on lethality (3rd tier, though I plan on using it any way). I know for me, it's just not feasable. I've played mostly melee characters, so I'm used to having 90%+ hitrates by level 10 just by pumping strength and using precise striking. With the few bow wielding characters I've tried so far (and counting Leliana on non bow playthroughs) even pumping dex they're still hitting in the 70s to low 80s around that level.

I've started another bow weilding character today so I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do, but I'm more than likely going the dex route.

p.s. Just thought I would post the quote I was talking about earlier

Siven80 wrote...

Song
of Courage: gains 3 attack (+ 10% of cunning modifier ) , 2 Damage(+5%
cunning modifier), Crit chance 3% (+10% cunning modifier).

So remember a modifer is the stat -10.
So 70 cunning Song of Courage would give you 9 Attack, 5 Damage and 9% Crit.
40 Cunning would give you 6 Attack, 3.5 Damage and 6%Crit.

IMO
30 cunning differnce isnt a huge increase, whereas putting those 30
into Dex will give an extra 15 attack (0.5attack per point) while only
losing 1.5 damage from the song only, 3% crit from the song and ArPen
fom cunning loss.

Depends what you want to gain really. Me, i will be going dex after so much Cunning.

Found the bonuses from the tooltip project http://social.biowar...t/1117/#details . They seem acurate looking at numbers ingame.

--

The
topic about the extra cunning saving you skill and talent points, well
in theory yes but are you going to leave persuasion and lockpicking at
lvl1 till the end game when you have enough cunning to open chests etc
and backtrack everywhere to open them?

In practise id rather
level the skills and talents up so i can pick locks and pass persuasion
checks when i want too. Again pesonal preference tbh.

From those numbers, seems to me you'd be better off going with dex. I know I seriously can't stand seeing all thos miss alerts going up all the time.

Modifié par sinosleep, 18 décembre 2009 - 10:06 .

[Fleapants]

I'd say it's largely up to your group composition and the synergies you can achieve.
Tank, 1 mage, 1 physical dps - go Cun with Bard + Ranger for Song of Courage.
Tank, 2 mages - go Dex with Ranger + Duelist.

edit:
If you go Cun, have your mage learn Heroic Offense and use a Tactics to have it up on your archer all the time.

Modifié par Fleapants, 18 décembre 2009 - 10:12 .

[Sarevok Anchev]

Fleapants wrote...

I'd say it's largely up to your group composition and the synergies you can achieve.
Tank, 1 mage, 1 physical dps - go Cun with Bard + Ranger for Song of Courage.
Tank, 2 mages - go Dex with Ranger + Duelist.

edit:
If you go Cun, have your mage learn Heroic Offense and use a Tactics to have it up on your archer all the time.

^this

@sinosleep: I agree with you about this mid-late game calculation. Still the game is about fun and power gaming is more then mathematics.

But i agree with Fleapants even more because of the Bard-Song: I most times prefer to play with 2 Warriors 1 Rogue 1 Mage.

So 3 Characters will get the bonus of the Song. With -like you stated- 70 Cunning this would give a flat 25-30 damage, 15 Attack and 15-20 %Crit.
Thats really nice.

DEX ofc has the other bonus of boosting your Defense. But nothing compares to a good ol' Teamslaughter:bandit:

[Siven80]

Dex.

Dex is THE key stat for archers. Even Bard archers. Archery is in the same league as 2Handers when you talk about missing as they both need a good Attack rating. Anyone who says minimum Dex for archery must like to miss a lot. FACT.

Dex grants you dmg AND attack(Hit). You will pick up Lethality as your cunning score will be higher than Str so you will gain more dmg. Str take to a max of 20 (or 18 if you use a 2str, 2dex ring)for best light armor.

For Leliana stop at 22 cunning unbuffed, then her plot cunning bonus and her bow will give over 30 cunn meaning you will need rank 4 lockpicking to pick all locks , and all other stat point go to Dex.

Song of Courage will still be a great pick for archers even with lower cunning than dex (as seen above) as the actual bonus for cunning the song is fairly small,so that the points in dex are the better option. It also applies to all group members and even if you had 0 cunning, a minimum of 3 attack, 2 dmg and 3% crit is good.

Talent wise for Leliana i always get rank4 lockpicking first, then lethality, SoC, then head to arrow of slaying. Other talents i havent really found that great or needed for Leliana.

The 2nd Spec i have been going for Assasin. Why you ask, its simple. As a bard Leliana will always have SoC running which is 50stam reserve. If you go ranger the pet is another 50 which leaves you with Very low stam for anything else. Duelist is only 30 stam for 10 attack which is good yes, but i go for Mark of Death from the assasin tree. 20% more dmg from everyone for 10 or 20 secs (im out of game and cant remember) is not to be sniffed at, and lets be honest, party members wont fill out 2 spec trees. Even as you main character its a good pick.

Yes its short range but quite often you'll be shooting at short range and you will see those elites-bosses go down alot quicker with it.

For Main character Archer you could head for 40 cunning as you will get more stat points, so you would only need rank3 lockpicking.

For a DW rogue its the opposite in stats. high Cunn, Min(30-40)Dex.

Modifié par Siven80, 18 décembre 2009 - 10:55 .

[arrrasdgaehjskmszkm]

mmm critical enhance of assasins dont work on ranged weapons. And mark of death is short-ranged. To my opinion it offers poor sinergy with archers, compared to the other three classes.

In my experience i found much more dex-enhancing equipment than cunning.

[sinosleep]

Sarevok Anchev wrote...

@sinosleep: I agree with you about this mid-late game calculation. Still the game is about fun and power gaming is more then mathematics.

But i agree with Fleapants even more because of the Bard-Song: I most times prefer to play with 2 Warriors 1 Rogue 1 Mage.

So 3 Characters will get the bonus of the Song. With -like you stated- 70 Cunning this would give a flat 25-30 damage, 15 Attack and 15-20 %Crit.
Thats really nice.

DEX ofc has the other bonus of boosting your Defense. But nothing compares to a good ol' Teamslaughter:bandit:

I wasn't recommending not using the bard songs, what I was saying is that the difference between 40 cunning and 70 cunning is MUCH smaller than the difference between 70 dex and 40 dex. I plan on running the song, cunning just isn't going to be my main stat, dex is. Having a low hitrate really, really, irritates me.

Also, from my posts you should be able to see that I'm NOT one of the guys advocating a build that will only be good 20 levels into the game. I specifically stated that even if at the end of the day cunning was 100% better, I'd go dex for the hitrate at the early levels and I'd still put points into coercion and lockpicking because until you get your cunning above 50 your still going to be failing at picking all those locks, disarming all those traps, and persuading anyone to do anything. Each point in coercion is worh 25 cunning, good luck getting that many extra points in cunning before you have a persuade check you want to pass. Traps and locks are similar, sure at the end game you can pass all those checks, unlock, and disarm everything, but what are you supposed to do in the mean time? 

Modifié par sinosleep, 19 décembre 2009 - 01:46 .

[Kaigen42]

Interestingly enough, I'm playing a Cun archer, and I discovered that my Cunning would top 40 before I even hit level 12 and that's without doing Circle first for the stat boosts, so there's at least one talent point I can save on device mastery (and one skill point on Coercion, since you don't hit any difficult persuade checks right away) without losing a thing. Even if you don't go the "leave coercion and lockpicking at 1" route, the cunning build saves you points if you're paying attention.

[sinosleep]

Off the top of my head you miss the 2nd persuade check on the bandits in lothering to get more money, you miss the check on Bodhan to get more money, you miss the check to get the green sword for free (at least if you go to redcliffe fairly early), you can't disarm annoying flimsly leg traps until later, your hit rate has to be garbage since mine is and I did it the other way around pumping dex first and MY hitrate is garbage, and I'm sure I can think of more. Some might not think those things are a big deal since the dollar amounts are pretty low and the green sword isn't the greatest thing on earth, but at early levels I'll take every last copper I can get.

Modifié par sinosleep, 19 décembre 2009 - 05:13 .

[Sarevok Anchev]

sinosleep wrote...

Off the top of my head you miss the 2nd persuade check on the bandits in lothering to get more money, you miss the check on Bodhan to get more money, you miss the check to get the green sword for free (at least if you go to redcliffe fairly early), you can't disarm annoying flimsly leg traps until later, your hit rate has to be garbage since mine is and I did it the other way around pumping dex first, and I'm sure I can think of more. Some might not think those things are a big deal since the dollar amounts are pretty low and the green sword isn't the greatest thing on earth, but at early levels I'll take every last copper I can get.

^This 

[Pendulous]

I'm playing a CUN Dag/Dag rogue on 360 (Idont know if there was a patch with the dex fix for xbox yet?) and I have just hit level 12 and done Circle Tower.My character had to take one level of deft hands and 2 levels of coercion early on to get everything.



I havn't failed a persuasion check and I have opened everything, the only thing I couldnt open immediatly was the chest in the cirle tower just before the fade. But after picking up the 5 CUN in the fade and levelling up again soon after (before Uldred) I was able to pop back and open it (Id hardly consider that backtracking).



DEX I have taken only far enough for momentum at ostagar and I got all 4 in the fade so its 28 unbuffed.



STR I havnt touched AT ALL. If you are a human noble rogue you dont need to to equip the best gear. Fade and buffs from items have boostded my STR to 24 at the moment.



My hit rate is fine and I dont ahve duelist or bard spec (I took ranger first) as I have Wynne casting heroic offence on me constantly.



Its a very good build and when it helps I can hit well with a bow too as item buffs have boosted my DEX to 36 and Im not even wearing Felons Coat or Red Jenny Seekers yet.



If any one wants to ask about the build feel free. For the purposes of this thread Im illustrating that with a CUN build it is possible to open everything and pass all persuasion checks without maxing either skill/talent and my hitrate even with a bow is fine. (my attack is 90 pre heroic offence and 103 with it)

[sinosleep]

I'm not saying you have to max deft hands or coercion, I'm saying that there's a whole group of people saying you don't have to put any points into either, and frankly if you go down that route you will be missing a lot of things early on.

Also, Pendulous how often are you using the bow? I'm telling you hit rate has to be calculated COMPLETELY differently on bows than on melee weapons. For instance, I use bows exclusively and my lvl 10 rogue has 20 str, 43 dex, and 36 cun at the moment. I have an 87 attack rating, my hit rate is now at 80% but it's been as low as 67% and I suspect it's been bump in an unwarranted fashion from the much higher hitrate I had in the fade in the different forms. Sten has 43 str, 17 dex, 96 attack rating and 87% hitrate, it was NEVER below 80%. Alistair has 32 str and 20 dex for 86 attack power so he's one lower than me, yet he has an 87% hitrate and like Sten was NEVER below 80%. On my melee PCs I'm pushin 90% and up by level 10, not just getting into the 80s.

Modifié par sinosleep, 19 décembre 2009 - 06:43 .