26 réponses à ce sujet

[capn233]

If only you could actually dodge attacks by moving out of range.

 

Started a rogue solo, no DLC weapons/gear.  Dalish elf, so probably not the best choice.  Also my attribute leveling has not been that great since I wasted a point or two in Cunning that I shouldn't have.  This meant that by Level 4 I couldn't both get Momentum (24 dex) and equip Ser Garlen's sword (13 strength) since I was short a point.

 

Anyway, to the point.  Number of health pots used so far:

 

Origin: 0

 

All hostiles in Korcari Wilds (except Gazarath): 0

 

Gazarath: 2 Health, 15 Lesser Health

 

Which incidentally was all of the ones I had.  Also used an Acid Flask and Soulrot bomb.

 

I did get impatient at one point which resulted in a flame blast and a slam, costing a health and a lesser.  So maybe I could have saved a couple.

 

Did this by running 1000 laps around a fallen tree trunk.  Dual Weapon Sweep only for damage.

 

I thought killing him with the DW warrior was bad, but this was harder.  At the very least I guess I have killed him with a warrior, rogue, and mage without hiding somewhere he can't get me.

 

Will probably continue on even though my pots are wiped out.  Ishal might be interesting that way, as will the dog encounter, if I can't pick up a bunch more grenades.

[Mike3207]

What did your other talent points go toward and is using traps a option?

[capn233]

What did your other talent points go toward and is using traps a option?

 

I didn't take traps as a skill, I suppose that may have helped but I doubt I would have had any money or resources to craft the traps anyway.

 

The talents went:

 

Dual Weapon Training, Dual Weapon Sweep

Flurry

Dual Weapon Finesse

Momentum

 

I am not so sure there is much talent wise to be done.  Dirty Fighting doesn't do anything to him, and I don't know of any knockdown I could get.

 

It would have helped if I had the 13 strength to get Ser Garlen's sword in mainhand so that Sweep would have done a lot more damage.  Good rolls on sweep with enchanted dagger and dar'misu were a whole 20 basically, which is a problem with his regen.  Would need to go way back to the origin or restart the character to fix that attribute investment though.  I should not have invested 2 points in Cunning this early.

[Mike3207]

Punisher is a knockdown, but you need 28 Dex and Master Combat Training and may not be possible that early in the game. Still, it might be an option to go for that line first. Dual Striking is a useful sustain, and Riposte/Cripple/Punisher are all useful active abilities. The rogues I run into in Lothering all seem to have Cripple at minimum.

 

did you plan dex rogue, cunning rogue , or combination? Cunning increases damage, but Dex/Str increase to hit chance and attack.

 

Cripple/Punisher use Strength resistance check, and Riposte uses Cunning resistance check. Str rogue is option as well, but it means more stats to split points among, given you usually need 22 cun/28-36 dex for talents.

[capn233]

It is going to be dex.  I go cunning for team games and on Leliana, but I want high defense and hit rate.

 

Unless I missed something obvious, I don't see how an early game character is going to really be able to make use of melee sustains against Gazarath.  Although maybe I should reload and just see how far autoattacking with Momentum will get me.  Fire resist would make that less of an issue.  I am nearly done with Lothering though, so it would be an academic.

 

The main thing I am trying to decide is if I should spend the 2 gold on Thorn of the Dead Gods or just try Enchanted + Oathkeeper for the Circle.  I have just enough that I could buy a Physical Technique tome from Bodahn before his inventory resets, but I also want to go to the Dalish Camp and update my ridiculous bikini armor.

[Dai Grepher]

You have others in your party.

My main Hero is a dual weapon warrior, but he wasn't the main target anyway. I just had Alistair and Ser Jory trade Gazarath while my PC and Daveth DPS'd him to death with poison-coated weapons.

I also cycled through the rooting abilities to stun Gazarath at certain times.

You should also have acquired some good gear by now, especially the hidden cache.

[capn233]

You have others in your party.

 

Doing a rogue solo.

[Dai Grepher]

Oh. Well in that case he isn't a cheater, he's just more powerful than you are. You should probably just bypass him.

[capn233]

I think my main problem was poorly thought out attribute investment.  My DW Sweep just did too little damage which prolonged the fight.  I should have went heavier into strength earlier so I would have had a sword in mainhand.  Even at the time I was thinking that it was taking a lot longer than with my DW warrior, who did it in a relatively similar manner.

 

FWIW I loaded it up just to see how many potions it would take if I just stood attacking him without much micro.  I ended up dying to a flame - then knockdown combo as I was taking DOT on the ground and couldn't heal.  Of course I was damaging him significantly faster, but potion consumption was also faster from more flame blasts.

[dainbramage]

Yeah gazarath is a massive pain. I always cheesed him behind the chest in my solos

[capn233]

Yeah gazarath is a massive pain. I always cheesed him behind the chest in my solos

 

Yeah.  I did that with my SnS, and will probably do that in the future if soloing again.  I was motivated to do it this way just because of the old threads talking about killing him like that, and I wanted to compare to my DW Warrior.  Probably isn't worth doing this way, especially with no DLC gear.

 

I am going to save the forum from overly long posts on this solo, but I will mention that I did buy Thorn of the Dead Gods and am running that offhand with Oathkeeper mainhand.  From Lothering I went to the Dalish Camp to get higher tier bikini armor.  From there I decided I would try the Circle Tower.  Got the Desolate Highway (wolves / traps) encounter.  Used a Conc Deathroot, Acid Flask and 4 Lesser HP.  This was to keep health >50%.

 

Have to say I am not impressed at all with my rogue in the Tower this early.  I probably should have gone to Denerim to make money and buy maybe even more grenades if I could find them.  I did not fight the Revenant or Shah Ward yet, but I did clear all the other enemies up to the Fade portion.  Low on grenades sadly.

[capn233]

Fade was pretty easy, the rest of the tower was pretty annoying.

 

I don't know what I should aim to get gear wise first.  I mean to tide me over.  Felon's doesn't unlock until late game, and in the meantime I think I need something better than bikini armor.  Thinking maybe I should get Shadow of the Empire.

[dainbramage]

Pretty sure I used bikini armour until Felon's.

 

Shadow of the Empire is pretty meh. With lethality 2 strength is only +1 attack, and rogues don't use much stamina so the regen isn't all that. It has +1 dex compared to Dalish and is probably higher tier, but you lose out on the +5 defence set bonus.

[capn233]

^Yeah I didn't end up getting it.  Went Rose's Thorn instead (that was after Honnleath, Denerim, some side quests including Precious Metals).  Figured it would be hard to beat the defense bonus of the dalish set.  I also switched into Archon robe if I needed to regen in stealth (although I would often get impatient and just go with a health pot).

 

Mages are still annoying, even if I can usually kill a single one without too much issue (did Refugees and the boss level Emissary was a real pain).  I am not sure there is a realistic way to get to 100% spell resist on an elf.  Knew that going in but I didn't want to play a dwarf.

[capn233]

I feel poor as this character.  Looking at total money accumulated, I must have wasted a bit too much on salves/bombs.

 

Also I wish I could get my money back for rock salve recipe and the rock salves I bought.  I don't really see much value in these.  Critter overwhelms don't seem to even happen if your health is >50.  Theoretically it would have been nice to use it when the Drakes overwhelmed, but this pretty much didn't happen unless they had used Rake or Roar to knockdown or stun my character anyway, and so I couldn't use one.  But it also turned out I could survive them if I had enough health with the gear I had anyway (level 3/4 dalish armor set, Helm of Honnleath, Rose's, Lifegiver).

 

Otherwise, spent ~52g just on tomes, which I probably shouldn't have bought the most recent one, not sure that it was hugely beneficial in the Urn quest.

 

All of this said, most everything after leaving the Circle Tower was pretty smooth.  Did take a lot of tries to save all the militia, and actually also required SS (and needed to buy the recipe to get some of them).  Combat / Master Stealth sort of breaks the AI in a lot of ways, I honestly never really paid much attention to stealth before in full party runs.

[capn233]

So sadly nobody but Cesar wanted to help me out with a Grandmaster Dweomer rune.  So "spell resistance" gear set is 92%.  Granted, the first time I actually used it was in the Dead Trenches around Hespith in the spot with 2 emissaries and several spiders.  I played the Calandrius fight a couple times to see if he would drop one, but he didn't.  Of course the only spot where it probably matters now is maybe the Drakon steps / entrance.  Oh and against Gaxkang of course.

 

I thought about trying to dupe or console in another GM dweomer rune but I suppose it isn't entirely necessary.  Killed most mages in this game with 0% spell resist.

 

Oh and something odd happened in one of the attempts against Calandrius.  The last couple of his soldiers were hit with Virulent Walking Bomb.  I don't see how he managed to hit them with it, and I didn't recall seeing him cast it.

[Mike3207]

Kolgrim will drop Grandmaster Dwemer rune, but it's a very rare drop. Master Dwemer runes are much easier to come by. You can get one from Dagna after you help her with her quest.

[capn233]

Kolgrim will drop Grandmaster Dwemer rune, but it's a very rare drop. Master Dwemer runes are much easier to come by. You can get one from Dagna after you help her with her quest.

 

Yeah, I got the one from Dagna and one from Genitivi.  The third I bought from Wonders.  GM from Cesar and two 6%ers to round it out.  Wiki lists Calandrius as a potential drop for GM dweomer as well.

 

92% ended up being sufficient for the most part.  Gaxkang managed to get through with one Winter's Grasp (one of the first things he cast), and I don't think any other mage hit me with anything worthwhile while I was in the spell resist gear.

 

I managed to catch spells in Denerim from "reinforcement" mages I didn't expect though.

 

Anyway this character is finished, and this was actually the first one where it even said 100% party damage with 0 FF damage.

 

[capn233]

This was the build order in case it is interesting to anybody.

 

1 - Dirty Fighting, Dual Weapon Training, Dual Weapon Sweep
2 - Flurry
3 - Dual Weapon Finesse
4 - Momentum
5 - Stealth, Deft Hands
6 - Stealthy Item Use
7 - Duelist Spec - Dueling
8 - Combat Stealth
9 - Improved Tools
10 - Mechanical Expertise
11 - Dual Striking, Riposte (tome)
12 - Combat Movement
13 - Upset Balance
14 - Assassin spec - Keen Defense, Master Stealth (tome)
15 - Coup de Grace
16 - Dual Weapon Expert
17 - Mark Of Death
18 - Bellow the Belt
19 - Deadly Strike
20 - Lethality
21 - Exploit Weakness
22 - Pinpoint Strike, Whirlwind (landsmeet), Lacerate (Tome)
23 - Dual Weapon Mastery

 

As far as explanations, I wanted to be able to take care of traps and unlock crates more or less on my own.  I was going predominantly Dex, so needed the points to go for the deft hands line.  If I had more gold after Lothering I might have been able to buy Bodahn's camp tome twice and would have probably maxed the line, but for the most part I was fine with only being able to get "level 50" traps and crates.  There isn't much that requires 60 anyway.  I was able to get those late game though.

 

I was done with the Fade at Level 9 and actually saved that talent point until after I killed Uldred.  I wanted to use that on Improved Tools but if I had problems killing Uldred I was going to take DWE there.  More on this in a bit.*

 

I also wanted to save all the militia in Redcliffe, and wanted to knock that out at Level 12.  That is why I tried to have Riposte by then for a second stun option, and I got Combat Movement to make it easier to backstab the corpses.

 

By the mid teens, I had been accumulating paralysis runes, so had two offhand and one in main hand for Coup de Grace in addition to using Deathroot poison on stunnable elites.  I ended up with a dragonbone Crow Dagger after Urn which was loaded up with 3 paralysis runes to go with one in mainhand to deal with the last half of Nature of the Beast (dragon to Lair to Zathrien).

 

Lethality was late because for a large portion of the game my Cunning was only like 4 points higher than strength and I didn't want to have to spend the 2 talent points on the prereqs when there were other things to get.  I think it works out fine like this since by the late teens your dex and defense is high enough that you can flip over to basically pure cunning investment as Lethality is obtained.

 

Whirlwind was taken just to help one-shot clumps of darkspawn in the Battle of Denerim.  Pinpoint was helpful against some yellow elites there and the annoying Assassin boss.  I never took Punisher because I didn't want to spend the points mid-game, and I didn't really have enough stamina to use it most likely.

 

*I have the Rules and dain's fix packs. The fixes giveth and they taketh away.  So DWE bug was fixed.  Of course a bunch of DW enemies apply this dot to you as well.  Lacerate fix is in dain's pack.

 

Final stats with my main gear:

 

Str 26 (20+6)
Dex 85 (67+18)
Will 29 (18+11)
Mag 20 (14+6)
Cun 43 (37+6)
Con 28 (12+16)

 

Has two extra attribute points from Tomes of the Mortal Ripoff.  Dex and defense was noticeably lower with my "spell resist" set because most of the time that didn't have Rose's, and it also didn't have nice dex or defense bonuses like Felon's and Dalish Boots or Bard's.  I swapped 3 dweomer runes into Rose's for Caravan Down and also for Gaxkang though.

[capn233]

Some random thoughts:

 

Circle Tower - this mission was pretty painful with this character.  My warriors felt a lot stronger.  The room that was most unexpectedly hard was the ambush by the greater rage and all the shades.  That is until Stealth and Luring came to the rescue.  DD's were tricky of course.  The Fade was actually really smooth although I had to fight Sloth twice since I botched fighting his Arcane form the first time and caught a Crushing Prison.

 

Kitty - Stealth allowed me to cheese this encounter by retreating to the stairs, then uncloaking at which point Kitty came into melee range and the rage demons stood around.  She disabled me multiple times, but without her minions I won the war of attrition.

 

Redcliffe - I wanted to save the militia.  This was part of why I bought Rose's Thorn first, and part of why I did pieces of other quest-lines to help get gold and level.  Getting to the point, I needed to be Level 12 (so they have Scattershot) and also have Swift Salves (to run down the hill and give me more DPS) in order to save them all.  I also had some traps, but they typically weren't practical.  Takes too long to set them up.  This was one of the biggest PITAs of the whole run since it somewhat depends on how stupid the militia gets and depends on how well you can keep track of the threats and assess which corpses need to go.

 

Kolgrim - Mentioning him because his encounter has 2 mages at once... stealth kill first mage after Dirty Fighting then stealth and kill second after Riposte.  Kill Kolgrim's lackeys next.

 

Wolf Lair - Put a bunch of traps in the first room by the door.  Sadly they didn't work as well as I hoped.  Mostly mentioning because I used a rock salve here the second attempt.  Interestingly, I got through the first room and the overwhelms without one the first time, but then screwed up in the next room and didn't hit a health pot when I should have.  But anyway it probably made the second attempt a little easier.  In any case, I crafted zero of them and ended the game with 6 or so.  So I don't think I am buying the recipe ever again.

 

Zathrien - So with 0 spell resist, I just hit Stealth and then went behind him to use Dirty Fighting, deathroot and stab.  Paralysis runes obviously help.

 

Denerim Blood Mages, Thy Brother's Keeper - both have areas with multiple mages but with 0 spell resist I used stealth to break them up.

 

High Dragon - Flemmeth - Paralysis Runes, Swift Salve, stab.  Needed some health pots though

 

Jarvia - This fight was fun with this character just hit and run with stealth.  Annoying that Jarvia seems immune to dirty fighting, and also annoying that I can never detect the level 5 traps at the top of the stairs until I am behind them.

 

Corrupted Spider Queen - I never used the cheese method, so attempted that.  I think it ended up taking longer for me to get that right than if I had played it "straight up" although it was likely cheaper.

 

Branka - Amusing fight, although I reloaded after she went straight for Oghren and hit him the first time.

 

Howe - Stealthed at the beginning and took out the first mage.  The second was too stupid to help the rest out at that point, and I stabbed everyone else.  Howe is a much worse rogue than me.

 

Cauthrien - Killed her in the room the first attempt with 0 health pots.  My "Warden Sense" told me to hit Swift Salve and Incense of Awareness (gave me defense 164) before triggering the cutscene.  I was apparently fast enough to run to the nook before the scattershots went off.  At that point I started on the mage, then threw Acid, Fire and Soulrot on the clump of enemies.  Only Cauthrien could hit me until Incense wore off.  Concentrated Deathroot and paralysis runes for her.  After she was gone, Stealth worked.  Used another Conc DR, Acid Flask and a Lightning coating to finish off the archers.

 

Alienage - I already sort of mentioned Calandrius, but wanted to mention the encounter before the warehouse, and then Devera.  Both of those were pretty hard with SnS, but Rogue makes it simpler since you can stealth.

 

Palace District / Fort Drakon steps - I managed to get killed in the palace district when a mage I didn't expect showed up to reinforce the area.  Likewise, an extra mage showed up on the Drakon steps after I killed the first two which was annoying.  That time I was able to just stealth and then go back to spell resist.

[capn233]

Oh and with respect to money...

 

Before Rescue the Queen this character had about 77g with 798g spent, for 875g accumulated.  My DN at the same point had 1071g accumulated. 

 

After the Alienage, the rogue had 1032g accumulated whereas the DN SnS had 1369g.

 

One thing I did notice though was that money refunded from Slim doesn't come off the spent tally, so the total accumulated may not be quite accurate, although it should be off by essentially the same amount for both.  Also my rogue had stolen from more people, and the DN did not take the bribe, so it wasn't max possible.

 

Anyway, this should provide a very rough estimate of how much Gorim and loot factor into gold accumulation.  Neither character glitched merchants or crafted lyrium potions.

[Mike3207]

It bears out what I heard in the past-you get more money via soloing-or you are able to better use that money only spending for yourself.

[capn233]

It bears out what I heard in the past-you get more money via soloing-or you are able to better use that money only spending for yourself.

 

It is definitely cheaper to just buy for one party member.  Of course I am pretty "thrifty" in the team games and don't really buy much for the party either.  With the possible exception of a staff or two (since they affect spellpower).

 

You can potentially save some money on pots with only one character (my health pot guzzling v Gazarath notwithstanding), as you usually are fighting in places where only a couple units can hit you back and the character is getting all the best gear you have found or could buy. 

 

Buying mundane things like lesser pots, resistance balms/salves, grenades, recipes, can drain a surprising amount of gold.

[Mike3207]

Grenades do  a fixed amount of damage-a lot at the start-but less effective vs. foes as you level. Not seeing the need to buy any past the start of the game.

 

I'll craft more than I spend for lesser pots and lyrium potions. I'll craft a lot for the Circle tower, then not bother with potions much after that after I get Wynne.

 

Recipes are another matter-buying them-especially the better ones can be expensive.

 

Salves-I'll use them for the High Dragon, the Archdemon, and a limited number of other boss fights. I come across enough that I usually don't buy many.

[capn233]

Right, it makes more sense to buy grenades early than late.  Of course that is also when the expenditure is the most painful if you go by cost vs accumulated money at time of purchase.  Also the merchants have a relatively small stock of grenades anyway so you probably couldn't buy into late game if you wanted to do so.

 

Lesser health pots cost the same as flasks so I buy them when I see them early game.

 

I was just trying to list some things that drain my money, at least in a solo, and make it seem like I haven't accumulated as much gold as I have.