Matt Reed was the irresponsible, 28-year-old slacker son of widower Lames Reed, a famous town crier in Narfnarfjörður (Living Lands) known as the "Daily Sentinel". Matt's attitude changed when Lames was found dead from an allergic reaction to a wasp sting. After the funeral, Matt fired the staff aside from his maid, but later re-hired Fulmineo, Lames's fencing teacher and a skilled martial artist. Matt and Fulmineo got drunk together and, upon agreeing that they both hated Lames, visit the graveyard to cut the head off Lames's memorial statue. After they succeed, they rescue a nearby couple being mugged. When bailiffs mistake Matt and Fulmineo for criminals, Fulmineo evades ad distracts them with his blinding speed and he and Matt return to the mansion. Matt convinces Fulmineo they should become crime-fighters who pose as criminals in order to infiltrate real criminals, and to prevent enemies from using innocents against them. Fulmineo develops a carriage outfitted with several gadgets and weapons, which they call the Blatant Ugliness. Matt plans to capture Benjin Shudnof, a mobster uniting the criminal families of Narfnarfjörður under his command, and whom his father was trying to expose. To get Shudnof's attention, Matt uses a job as town crier as a vehicle to publish news about the "high-profile criminal" the Mad Hornet. Meanwhile, he learns how to shoot a bow from his orlan lavatory attendant who's name he just can't remember since the guy is so small and unimportant - besides the fact that he can teach Matt how to shoot the bow and stuff. Then Matt met a nice young and round cipher lady who slapped him in the face when he tried to touch her inappropriately. When she left for Gilded Vale in the Dyrwood in order to get some land from a total loonatic named Raedric Matt and Fulmineo decide to follow her... because Narfnarfjörður is a boring place anyway and the name of the town itself is a nightmare. =================================== The Mad Hornet =================================== Difficulty: PotD -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Rogue -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Wood Elf -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Living Lands - Merchant -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats: MIG: 19 CON: 3 DEX: 19 PER: 16 INT: 18 RES: 3 -------------------------------------------------------------- Skills: Lore 4(!), Athl. 4, Mechanic max -------------------------------------------------------------- Talents (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) Envenomed Strike (!) Weapon Focus Peasant ® Vicious Fighting ® Penetrating Shot ® Marksman Outlander's Frenzy Runner's Wounding Shot Abilities Distant Advantage (a) Sneak Attack (a) Deep Wounds (!) Deathblows ® Sap ® Blinding Strike Crippling Strike Withering Strike Dirty Fighting ® --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional echantments by me; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: Persistence (Durgan Refined*, Exceptional*, Corrosive Lash*, Beast-Slaying*) Boots: Boots of Speed® or Glanfathan Boots Head: Footpad's Hood or Crested Hat Armor: Aedyre Clothing in gold/black (Pierce Proofed*, Exceptional*, INT+2) Neck: Cloak of the Frozen Hunt or Torc of Falcon's Eyes Belt: Sentinel's Girdle Rings: Ring of Thorns, Ring of Overseeing or Ring of Searing Flames Hands: Ryona's Vambraces or Archer's Gloves Quick slots: summons, scrolls of Insect Swarm (needs 4 Lore) --------------------------------------------------------------- The idea behind this build is to stack a lot of DoT effects. Since most of these effects don't stack on themselves, you also have to attack fast so that you can hit one enemy after the other until the DoT effect expires and you can reapply it again. The best way for that (in my opinon) is a hunting bow since it's fast and has a long range. Rogues have the raw DoT-ability "Deep Wounds" and can dish out lots of single target damage, even with a hunting bow - so I figured that a ranged rogue would be the perfect class to do this. The hunting bow "Persistence" has a DoT enchantment named "Wounding" which does 25% of the caused damage as raw damage over time - and again this speaks for the rogue because his hits/crits do a lot of damage because of sneak attack and deathblows. So the 25% are a really nice bonus if you look at the flat numbers. On top of that comes Envenomed Strike. This awesome ability is only usable three times a rest, but it's really helpful against these nasty high DR bosses because it does a lot of raw damage. As a little bonus I took Runner's Wounding Shot, which does not only hobble the target, but again adds another DoT effect. This whole arrow/venom/dot thing reminded my of a wasp - hence the name. From Outlander's Frenzy comes some madness . It boosts your attack speed a lot and as soon as the frenzy will be buffed to 1/encouter usage it will be more than just a flavour thing. Speaking of Madness: I also wanted to put on some baggy trousers, but there aren't any in the game - so I went for the Aedyrian Clothing. It has nice stripes that can look wasp-ish if you choose gold and black as colors. The scroll of Insect Swarm fits nicely into this wasp-pattern and can be used to add another AoE-DoT effect (that's why I had the Ring of Overseeing. Together with high int the AoE was huge). In theory now we can stack 5 different DoT effects (Deep Wounds+Persistence+Envenomed Str.+Runner's+Swarm) on our targets, which is pretty awesome. When you start the encounter you just do the shift+click thing to chain the commands to attack one enemy after the other without too much micromanagement. Since you will shot with good speed, it won't take long and all enemies suffer from some serious DoT. You can repeat this until all enemies are dead. From time to time a foe will die and you will have to pause and update your command chain, but that's ok. If you want, you can use scrolls to apply Deep Wounds in an AoE: use Minoletta's Concussive Missiles (8 lore) for that. As far as I know it's the only way to apply crush damage in an AoE with a scroll (besides Twin Stones and that's meh). It works with Deep Wounds because that applies to ALL direct pierce/slash/crush damage the rogue does. So Insect Swarm does not cause Deep Wounds - it's pierce damage, but it's also DoT and not direct damage. I did not use Concussive Missiles because I needed a high mechanics skill on this rogue and therefore only put 4 points into lore for Insect Swarm. Where was I? Deep Wounds: to get the most out of it, you need both high might and high intelligence. If you have 20 points of intelligence, Deep Wounds will last for 15 seconds. With a might score of 22 (I think) you will deal 4 raw damage per tick (3 sec). So overall you will cause 20 points of raw damage with this stats - awesome! This also works if you hit enemies that are immune to pierce damage by the way. There's no immunity to raw damage. Same for Envenomed Strike (=raw damage): you need high might and lots of int to make it really awesome. Persistence's Wounding and Runner's Wounding Shot will fail to do any damage if the target is immune to pierce damage though. But it's great that you can still harm immune enemies despite their annoying immunities - I'm looking at you, silly blights! If you can manage to debuff mobs and do deathblows, the damage from the bow itself is also nice. Together with all the raw DoT and Penetrating Shot is gets really nasty. This way you can do kind of AoE damage. You just have to hit every foe once and then let him bleed out - or let the poison do it's job. On top of that you have all the nice afflictions that rogues can cause: Blind, Stun, Hobbled, you name it. It adds some nice CC to this build as well. The icing on the cake is the usage of Combusting Wounds. You can either use a Ring of Searing Flames yourself or ask a wizard to cast that. All DoT effects add 5 burn damage per tick then. So with 5 different DoT ticks you get +25 damage from Combusting Wounds every 3 seconds. I had two other chars that also made use of Combust. Wounds (The Backlash Beldam and The Engineer - build incoming) so I didn't have to cast it with this rogue. Mobs will melt - but it's also good against the fat ones like dragons. Against a single enemy the dps drops a bit because the DoT effects don't stack with themselves (as I said before), but the good thing is that the DoT-durations get updated all the time so the effect never stops. And you can run away a bit if you need shelter and the ticks will still cause some good damage. With this build and a paladin tank (who did nothing except staying alive) I did the Nalrend-the-Wise-bounty. Would have worked in solo mode with summons I guess - but I was to lazy for that. Dokey - hope this wasn't too long. Thanks for reading and bye bye!