The Rogue's Gallery

[Concillian]

You'd be surprised how much I Crit. My Crit rating on-screen is around ~15% (just slightly under). By boosting Dagger Specialization, I can get that up to 20% easily, and that's at level 25 with mediocre gear. I have 35 more levels to gain Agility and better gear to help boost my crit rating - I can see it hitting 25% easily, or at least 22% - 23%.

It doesn't matter how much you crit. Dual weild will give more damage, more consistently than dagger spec.

It's tough to keep up your crit rate. It increases at a rate of 1% crit per clvl/2 AGI. At lvl 60 150 AGI is only 5% crit. But it doesn't matter. Your crit rate without dagger spec will be exactly 5% lower than with. In other words you will crit at the same rate as you do now with a dagger if you weild a sword or mace. That translates to 5% damage on average. Dual weild spec translates to 16% damage on average 16 > 5.

I may try equipping a Sword (I don't think I've trained Maces yet - I forget where I can :P), but who knows. For now, I like my twin daggers. :D The thought of switching weapons has been on my mind, though.

Try it. Seriously.

Again, I think you're under-estimating my damage potential with Poisons. I can watch them go off as much as 6 or 8 times in any given fight, sometimes less, occasionally more in a longer / tougher fight.

I know how much damage poisons do. But the utility of crippling and mind numbing posions cannot be measured by damage alone. Not having mobs run around into other mobs getting me into a situation I can't handle (without vanish) is something I like to avoid. Crippling poison is your only snare as a rogue, and it's a GOOD one.

I do have ONE thought as to a big possible change, something I didn't give ANY consideration to due to minimal experience in my earlier levels: Expose Armor, and more specifically, Improved Expose Armor. I used this skill very little in my early levels, as most fights (like now) didn't last long enough for me to 1) notice any significant difference in damage output (probably due to my low-damage Daggers; hrmmm, maybe I was right to forgoe this skill?), and 2) didn't allow me to get up to 5 combo points fast enough to measure much of anything.

Improved Expose Armor is of zero use solo and against normal mobs. It comes into play on elite bosses that have large amounts of armor. Armor is the kind of thing that is on a diminishing returns scale, as you can see here:
http://www.merciless-gilde.com/index.php...ols&tool=1

When reducing armor this kind of scale works to your advantage. Every extra bit you add to removing armor adds more damage than the last bit.

Take for example a lvl 60 elite boss that has 7000 armor (I don't know how much they have, this is a total guess). 7000 = 56% damage reduction. The warrior spams his 5 sunders on the target, reducing 2250. Now the target is at 4750 and ~46% damage reduction. Stack 5CP Expose Armor on top of that and armor is 3050 and reduction is about 36%. If you had Improved Expose armor and you have a further 735 reduction for 2285 armor. Now he has a damage reduction of 29%. Note that 1700 adds 10% but only 45% more defense reduction with Imp. EA gives 7%. It's not la linear benefit. It's one of the few things in the game that small extra amounts give you LARGE returns.

In that example if the warrior also had improved sunder, it would give an additional 675 armor reduction. This translates to an additional 7% also.


Without the benefit of the sunders Imp. EA would have only bought you less than a 4% bonus to damage. It's the kind of thing you use in a group where there is a hunter and a warrior doing physical damage so you are all getting the benefit of the Expose Armor.