the streaker

OK, I ran two builds (attached pdf) around in the tavern, they're not optimized, but the best I could do off the top of my head. Both builds crit all the peasants, so my numbers are only crits. The druid just runs into the fray and kills things. The rogue is accompanied by cipher who runs in first and uses starting focus to eyestrike and bind everyone in an AoE = instant sneak + deathblows on everyone. I did about 30 attacks and averaged the damage. Rogue average swing damage is around 100. Too low, I have to look into what's not optimized, but that's for another time. Druid average swing damage is around 140, and that new lvl8 storm spell adds another 50 (Jesus... talk about a buff). So on a critical swing + storm strike, the latest druid spiritshifter is actually very impressive, I must admit. In regards to attack speed, rogue with full attacks/zero recovery enchants is at 1s/attack. Side note: I can get quite a bit higher DPS with enchanted stillettos, since they swing so much faster - and with zero recovery, DPS is all about swing speed. Didn't test fully. Druid is at 1.22s/attack, if info on this forum is correct. The final and hardest part is accounting for the massive difference in accuracy. Comparing to a target of equal defense to the druid's accuracy, the druid never actually crits, and only hits half the time (50%hit/35%graze/15%miss). The rogue's spread is more like 40%crit/40%hit/20%graze against the same target. Furthermore, rogue doesn't actually depend on crits as much, because it's only one of a long list of additive damage multipliers. Druid's base damage is very high, so the difference between a graze and a crit is massive. Using my very outdated and limited knowledge of graze/crit multipliers and how they combine with weapon+lash damage and other multipliers, I did some funny math and normalized both classes' DPS to account for grazes and hits, and believe it or not, the two classes are almost identical, with the rogue pulling ahead a bit (I bet you're rolling your eyes at that but my setup and data is there for you to interpret yourself). TL;DR: - Once per rest, for 13 seconds, a cat spiritshifter druid can go into cat flurry attack mode and wreck house. - For 24 seconds, a cat spiritshifter and a sneaky rogue are surprisingly close in single-target DPS against a respectable enemy defense, assuming the spiritshifter uses lvl 8 avenging storm spell, and the rogue can use deathblows. I find the rogue pulls ahead due to the higher accuracy and quicker swinging weapon. DW Stiletto rogue might be even better. - For fights lasting longer than 24 seconds, the rogue is the obvious winner. - If fighting trash under-levelled mobs that the druid can reliably crit, he is deadly. Other notes: - the special abilities you can get from equipment (especially the WM stuff) is insane, and the druid loses it all during combat. E.g. Purgatory + executioner's hood restores tons of endurance to the rogue, executioner's hoot also does passive AoE frightened, Gwyn's band can be used to daze. - Druid is easy and requires little setup. Go into beast mode and kill stuff. Rogue requires party support. - Rogue has much higher interrupt and concentration - Deflection and DR similar on both druid vs rogue.pdf

OK thanks for the advice, might take a while regardless. In the meantime, here's a pic of my new lvl 4 rogue with generic fine sabres doing 73dmg on his first crit

Thanks for the links guys, and happy new year! I'm on a fresh install so I'll have to replay through the whole game with WM1+2 to figure out the new skills, and do some test runs with results to convince you (and myself ) that rogue is still king. It's not that I'm stubborn, I see the videos of druids doing 100+ dmg per swing. Druids are simple - you turn on beast mode, and left click an enemy (apologies in advance for the long post, but I feel the rogue has gone out of style and his full abilities ignored on this board as of late). Rogues are complicated, but I'm a math guy and I love seeing how the numbers add up. Higher base accuracy, better +accuracy talents, higher perception (int is a dump stat, on druid it's vital), sabres enchanted with +accuracy and +crit, meaning crit chance sky-high. Sabre base damage of approx. 25, increased by crit (+1x), sneak (+0.5x), deathblows (+1x), savage (+0.2x), strength (conservatively +0.3x), for a total of about 3x base damage. Now add on the weapon lash damage + heart of the storm (or equivalent) + slaying mod on to the base weapon damage. I don't remember enough about the game to work that out, so let's say it's total 40 base weapon damage x 3 = 120 on a crit (roughly, some gurus are going to bust me on some details here). Now you use the numerous rogue activated abilities that use "full attack" aka swing both weapons, as well as adding 25% to 50% additional damage boost. "Full attack" doesn't quite double your DPS, but it's damn close. Note I'm not including any other specific boosts and buffs you can accumulate, cause it's too long of a list, but you bet I'll use them all to achieve the max damage per hit. And by the way, you start out in stealth with another +150% backstab damage boost. Then after you've broken stealth, you just pop back into invisibility instantly, and attack right after for another +150% backstab damage bonus. Do that a few more times. Now add up all the damage you've done over the time it took you to do it... the DPS number is insane. And, needless to say, with bosses that are below "injured" it's obvious what happens when you put a rogue on him... 1000 dmg hits x 4. I know eventually you'll run out of these activated abilities, but they'll last you enough to outperform the ~20s that the druid is doing basic attacks in shapeshift form. In the meantime you're constantly losing aggro due to invisibility, so you can actually stand and fight instead of getting boned by enemy attacks and spells. I also realize this is a lot of effort spent on one character, but the rogue needs to be the star of the party in order to shine, otherwise don't bother with her. She's like a racecar - no good for going to work and back everyday, but she can do the 1/4 mile in record time

As Boeroer says, if you do a 1700 finishing blow against an enemy with, say, 100 endurance remaining, you've actually only really don't 100 damage. At that point you needn't even bother dividing by 2.5, as you could have done that 100 damage without finishing blow anyway. This has been tested. People aren't just talking hypothetically here, there was an entire thread where someone claimed that a spiritshift druid was (when build correctly) amazing at single target damage. Other people (including Boeroer at the time iirc) were sceptical, but after testing it turned out that no, the spiritshift druid really was ridiculously good at single target damage. Lucky crit doesn't refer to the idea that crits are uncommon, it refers to getting a crit, that is also a high damage roll, and which benefits from any other non-guaranteed damage bonuses a class might have access to. Your first part is a bit misleading. A lot of enemies have more than 100 endurance, and usually it takes more than 1 hit to kill them. The rogue doesn't one-hit kill everything, which means the damage is not lost, like you suggest. Only when you reach the point where a class can one-hit a lot of powerful enemies does it mean any further damage is meaningless. I'd love a link to the spiritshift druid calc you mention. Regarding the last part, the variation in weapon damage is not that much, surely you know this? Taking the Estoc as an example, average damage roll is only 15% lower than the max damage. It's not like you'll roll one attack and hit for 500, and then roll another and hit for 200. More like you'll roll 500 on a lucky hit, and 425 on an average hit. Also, you guys are wrong about finishing blow. The point is not that you can do 1000 damage on a dead target. The point is that eventually you run out of good DPS talents/abilities to take, and finishing blow is an easy +50% damage in any circumstance and additional massive damage to take down bosses. You'd be silly NOT to have it on a build whose only focus is single-target DPS. Someone else said "trust the veterans here" but honestly, and don't take this the wrong way, the veterans have long since come and gone (except peddrolem, to his credit he was testing out abilities and calculating stuff since the game came out). This is an old game that is not too complicated and has been "solved" for a while now. It's kinda disappointing to come back here and instead of calculations and technical discussion you see "trust us" and "lol nerd".

So then divide out the finishing blow low endurance bonus... 1700/2.5 = 680. That's still pretty decent for any class. And how long does druid's shapeshift form last nowadays? 20-something seconds? A lot of my fights last longer than that. I agree with your last part, impossible to be sure unless you build a druid to see how high he can go, but let me tell you ahead of time that this exercise has already been done tons of times over the years and rogue comes out on top. re: "lucky crit", check a properly built rogue's accuracy and crit rate. You're less likely to get a graze than a crit.

Sure, it's linked in the first post of this thread. 199 max damage. Not max level, not optimal race (elf is useless in melee), far below maxed strength, not even using a 2-hander for top damage per hit. Clearly not a min-maxed build, safe to say all the right talents aren't in play either. Now imagine what that max dmg figure could be if all of those simple tweaks were incorporated. Edit: actually you don't have to imagine, search highest crit and you'll find a post on this forum of a guy doing 700+ with his rogue. I've seen higher, 1000+, but can't find right away. Honestly I also agree that rogues need a buff, because this game is more than just single-target DPS, and rogues offer almost nothing else. But I mean let's be real, nothing beats a good rogue sneak attack for blowing up one dummy.

Good one! for a second there, I forgot which subforum of which game I was reading... Regarding your arquebus comments, you probably already know the basics, but bows are only stronger vs. low DR enemies. The guns are/were actually very well balanced around the concept of armor penetration, and piercing damage is a pretty common DR. And this completely ignores the fact that all the damage of an arquebus is front-loaded, which is hugely important in combat. First backstab shot out of stealth is massive for a rogue. Overkill is an issue if you are running 6 arquebuses in a party, not just one. Furthermore, there is no real equivalent to the "gunner" talent for a bow. Again, I make no claims to rangers being weak as of White March II. Like I predicted, maybe once you work out the DPS with a new bow and twin arrows, it catches up to melee rogue and at that point the rogue is obsolete. But the original rogue DPS far exceeded the ranger.

The best one target Dps class at the moment is the shapeshift druid, wich can reach abut 200-230 DMG on hit with 0 recovery ( + a wounding lash if you are a boar). Nothing else come even close. Not true at all, mate. In the other thread, a guy posted a rogue 3 levels below max which showed a max per-hit damage of 200. Who knows if it was even optimized. It's not a stretch to say you could increase that at least a bit over lvl 14-16. Also, I don't know why you'd add driving flight to a single-target DPS comparison... there's no doubt the rogue is junk at anything other than single-target DPS, no need to prove it further.

Has anyone done some calculation comparisons of the damage a rogue can do compared to ranger (or whatever is the highest single-target DPS class now)? You really should assume you're doing constant sneak attacks, because there are countless spells and cipher powers that provide the flanked state. I have a spreadsheet from early 2015 that shows a melee rogue wielding Estoc (+weapon focus, twohanded style), using savage attack/vicious fighting/reckless assault/dirty fighting/minor threat, doing approximately double the DPS of an arquebus ranger, ignoring driving flight damage to a secondary target. Don't know if any of that is invalid with the latest game version, or if there exists a better ranger build with the new twinned arrows and a warbow, but that's one hell of a deficit to overcome in order to call rogue the worst class!

The first part is definitely not it, because back when the game came out, people did the calcs (spreadsheets, etc), comparing rogue to ranger and other classes, and single-target DPS nothing beat a backstabbing melee rogue. You just needed to expend a lot of time and effort maneuvering him into the right position. I think it's the last part of your post - Druids and other classes must have gotten big boosts (druids used to be mid-tier) while rogues stayed where they were. And if they boosted rangers to do as much damage from range as rogues can do from melee, that pretty much puts rogue out of a job...

What happened to rogue? It used to be the best single-target DPS and therefore very useful on a team.

The game is quite good but the replayability is a bit lacking. You can finish the majority of quests on your first playthrough. In terms of choices and outcomes, it mostly plays out in the epilogue slides, so the actual gameplay does not vary much based on choices.

Yes definitely, although a chanter thrown in there for tanking and some sure-handed Ila / fire chant would be extremely beneficial IMO. You don't really need healing when 5 rangers can focus fire on the most problematic targets and take them out in under a second.

It's still 4DR benefit for 20% speed cost, because you can enchant clothing to superb/proofed. How often has that been the deciding factor in whether one of your backrow characters lives or dies, and is that worth handicapping ALL of your backrow characters all the time by 20%? I don't think so. There are strategies for dealing with shadows that are both better than tanking them with wizards, and allow you to keep your backrow firing at full speed. Not saying 20% recovery penalty will make or break the game either, but I think it's wasteful.

As someone pointed out a long while back: Linear DR increase yields exponentially increasing survivability. If you're getting hit for 14 damage per hit, plate lets you survive twice as many attacks as brigandine, and four times as many as leather. Since the point of armor is to increase how long you can survive being attacked, you can see why this means that DR is exponentially better. On top of that, plate doesn't even follow the linear DR trend of all the other armors. It's straight up +2DR over brigandine for no increase in recovery penalty. So tl;dr plate is too much better than other armor to justify not using it. Clothes or plate, that's what my party is usually wearing. Instead of making a "balanced" build that wears leather for much less survivability than plate and 30% increased recovery time, I think you're better off with pike and plain clothes behind the tank.

I think the keep needs an expansion pack or something to flesh it out and integrate it into the story. It feels disconnected aside from the epilogue slides talking about it. In regards to the endless paths, there's definitely some filler material in there. Watcher's keep was half the levels of the endless paths, but felt like it had more content. The "combat only" levels almost seem to dilute the rest of the experience.

Ranger is not weaker in ranged damage, he's stronger, but the problems I see are three-fold: 1) Ranger's damage is not sufficiently better than mages to justify the general lack of spells/activated abilities. Rogues have weaker ranged damage but can switch to melee to do some serious harm. Ranger barely has any activated abilities, it's just sitting in the back doing boring (albeit impressive) DPS and not much else. At the very least, marked prey should be given some juice so that the ranger can be the "ranged assassin" that can take one thing out at the blink of an eye. Or maybe make it give EVERYONE +20% dmg, like it does in Dragon Age. 2) No build diversity. Pretty much one good ranger build, with a limited variety of weapons. Otherwise go play another class for better results. Kinda boring. 3) Pet is underwhelming. Pet builds are underwhelming, the pet cannot do significant damage even if you build for it. I think it should be given much better offensive capability, and some defensive so that I don't have to micro it so much.

A guide would be great, but updating the wiki would be even greater, since it is far more user-friendly and practical. The days of the old-school guide are done, it'll be out of date before it's even finished. Also, I think any proper spell guide should also list the exact damage/effects/speed/duration/range of the spells, so that people can judge for themselves by reading through it, rather than only seeing an arbitrary "this is 8/10 good, that is 9/10 good."

Just buy a second wizard at the nearest inn and pick different spells to transfer over to your main. Boom, full spell list available.

Don't get why you have to say the same thing about roleplaying in every thread posted on this sub-forum. You don't need to put everyone in their place, just say your piece once and let it be. It's the character builds forum, of course the discussion is going to break out into build efficiency...... is it your mission to teach everyone that they can roleplay in a roleplaying game? On topic: arquebus is king for ranger, pistol maybe a close second if you don't mind the range and slight reduced damage, and if you're also going to switch to blunderbuss to insta-gib low-DR targets. Don't forget the stalker's torc amulet (is this a random loot drop? I haven't played enough games to be able to tell) which adds another 20% damage on top of the +10 accuracy you get from stalker's link.

I don't think draining mod applies to the carnage hits, does it? edit: nevermind that was retaliation.

Draining weapon hands down, x1.2 speed boost doesn't even work right now.

He kinda has a point. For example, 10 damage added onto 100 base damage is a much smaller percent increase than 10 damage added onto 10 base damage.

How so? Animancers practice a sort of necromancy. Ciphers and watchers mostly just use mental powers.

The theme of the game is that people can draw upon the energy of their soul to achieve superhuman feats, so ciphers and watchers are just variations of that ability. Much like wizards, druids, priests, monks and chanters can create "magic" out of seemingly nothing. While they're all strictly defined classes with strictly defined mechanics in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if the lines between "classes" are far more blurred in the lore, since they all draw from the same source of power (unlike traditional D&D).