Play styles / Tips?

[Maxelcat]

Now I'll admit now, I play in a Tactics guild. We're all friends and PnP together. That being said.

Voice Chat.

buy a Mic, seriously. then tell your party what your doing. as soon as the trap Icon comes up Say TRAP! Tell people your looking, Tell people your disarming, and most important!!!! Tell them when you are successful! Too many times people have run threw traps thinking their disarmed while I'm still looking for the thing.

Traps/Locks

this is the rogues bread and butter. these should always be maxed out. there are places (one of the shadow dungeons) where disarming all the traps gives you another 3K+ xp. even the disarming bonus of +% is worth it, the 30 seconds it takes to disarm saves HP.

Stabbing.

Don't be first in combat. let the DPS grab the Agro. Then start stabbing. With a good party you should pick a fighter and stick in his shadow, then you can juggle Agro between you.

Stabbing 2.0

Kill the casters. kill them. kill them all the time. they should be your first targets. you should have a ridiculous reflex save, which means you can survive the lightning bolts, fireballs, etc... if your build is good you should drop them in just a couple of hits.

Stabbing 3.0

Protect your casters. the tanks are crunching melee and with high jump/tumble you can pop back and SA anything that's agroed on casters. your cleric will love you.

Stabbing 4.0

ok, ranged is nerfed and will 'prolly be for a while... however any ranged attack you make in 30' of the target is a SA. so stand behind the shield wall and fire away. (you will want something with precise shot on it if you don't have the feat)

Stealthing.

ok, I'm not so good with this, there's some good guides already that talk about creature activity, how they spot check, things like that. Practice it on low level dungeons that you can already solo, the trick is to NOT kill everything.

personally, I only really use it for checking around corners.

Keep your "eyes" down to one, and when you see your own red feet, stop. it means something is trying to hear you.

Don't stealth spiders and slimes, they have tremor sense.

Stealthy Stabbing

yes undead are immune to SA, almost all of them have the crappiest spots ever. every attack from stealth means the mob has no idea where you are. your not getting SA but your getting free hits. that and following a confused mummy trying to figure out where you are is funny.

Spot/Search/Listen

Search is your important one, followed by spot, followed by listen. people might say Listen is useless, If your looking around a corner having the extra check to see anything hidden is worth it. (and weirdly, you can actually hear bats before they spawn, look up and you'll hear the bats red foot prints.)

Things you will need.

Id highly suggest taking the Mechanic path till around 9 to 12th level. then when you swap out, you have access to gear that can replace the bonuses.

buy all the subtle backstabbing ever. less agro means more SA.

UMD!!!!

The easiest way to work it out is look at the UMD for wands. once you can UMD level 1 wands you are a pocket caster. might not seam like much but look at the utility wands. jump/water breathing/tumble/healing...

heck the lowest permanent cure wand from the catacombs is low UMD and has saved my life and the lives of my party members more times than i can count.

Dragon Mark of Shadow.

mostly for the displacement, and you can cast it on others. 40% miss chance keeps the tanks fighting.

Shadow walk is AWESOME but restricted... however picking up soul stones doesn't dispell it. If your fast on it you can turn a wipe to a heroic save everyone dash to the shrine rescue mission.

something with Spell Resesitance.

Get the highest you can, the extra protection against those horrible non reflex save spells is more than useful.

well, there's what i can think of...

[kiori]

Very useful information, one thing I will find tough though is taking listen, I am new and with limited pts to spend on skills, it tends to be one I dont put into( its a hard choice and I have made it due to what I have read and seen of builds on here ).

I would certainly like to hear more opinion on why its not liked by some, my disable and picklock seem to be fine in the most part, but with spot maxed on a starting wis of 8, I find it very hard to find traps at times, and often they are found by people walking into them, definitely not ideal. At a guess for the more experienced longtime player they know where everything is and can just do a search in the right location.

[Bobcat77]

Awsome guide. -Very- useful.

[Credinus]

Until you have a +4 int item, carry around a wand of fox's cunning. That extra point or two towards search -can- and -will- find some panels that you couldn't previously find. In fact, you should carry wands for all the stat buffs until you have +4 items of them, they can help out a lot.

Once you start doing level 8+ elite quests, you're going to have to invest in some extra search gear. Look for some good clever goggles of minute seeing. The Korthos Island troubleshooter set will probably do just fine if you're maxing out your search skills every level up 'til then.

Bluff isn't useless, contrary to popular belief. It's not as useful as diplomacy in a group, but it's useful nonetheless. If you've got a good amount of int on your rogue (and thus, more skill points to spend on level up), put some points into it. Bluff is obviously useful when soloing, and is also quite useful against the tougher bosses even in a group. In addition, it works in PvP, which makes for some good stress relief.

Unless you want to start using pure good or true chaos weapons early on, true neutral is the way to go. This gives you access to stability/greater stability items to help keep you alive in the first half of your levels, and eventually your UMD will let you use those pure good and true chaos weapons.

Get 75 Free Agents favor as soon as possible, as this gives you the ability to buy +2 tools in packs of 50 for a mere 150 gold a piece.

When soloing, try to find a good fearsome armor or robe, as this will allow you to survive melee zergs from the enemies much more efficiently.

Run the Sharn Syndicate quest chain as soon as you can (non-free quest). One of the end quest rewards is a nicked shortsword which is +1, has additional 1d6 acid damage, is bound (so no permanent damage), and has a +2 sneak attack bonus. These swords can be very helpful until you get the gold to buy a really nice weapon.

Spread your attacks out. If you're fighting in a group, don't focus all your backstabs on one target. By switching enemies every few backstabs, with the help of subtle backstabbing, you can bring a large group of enemies down without ever drawing aggro off the DPS/tank.

Don't be afraid to sneak away when things go awry and the party is about to drop. It's much better to have one "cowardly" rogue run away and sneak back in to collect soulstones than to have to make someone re-enter.

When soloing, use traps against your enemies. Your reflex saves, especially against traps, should be phenomenal pretty early on. In those long quests with hard bosses, always leave one good trap open somewhere that you can fall back to if needed. Stand in that trap, block, and watch your enemies fall to the ground around you.

Be polite. Even if a zergertard runs in and dies from the trap you already pointed out and are in the middle of disarming, just suck it in and know you're the better adventurer.

[Angelus_dead]

Don't be first in combat. let the DPS grab the Agro.

That's self-contradictory, as it supposes that the rogue is not the DPS. It rarely makes sense for a rogue to wait and have someone else attack an enemy first.

[kiori]

I wouldnt mind trying bluff, but so many nice skills and only so many pts. I made a drow rogue with a ftr splash, but decided to remake it pure rogue. Now I know many advocate splash, but I noticed Impaqt mention in another thread that alternate capstones would be available eventually, hopefully one that makes staying pure worthwhile, if not, well I can always make another toon.

On my remade rogue I took the following skills, and all bar haggle will be max( haggle will be prettly close and if I eventually get a +2 int tome it will be )

balance
jump
diplomacy
haggle
Disable
Open locks
Move silent
Hide
search
spot
umd

Not had any real issues with search, disable or open locks, spot is the one I have found hard, only item I have found with +spot on it so far is the goggles from the island with +3 search, +3 spot, +3 listen, I keep them on most of the time and swap out to the +4 reflex trapblast goggles for disabling and combat( well mainly combat, I forget sometimes for disabling ).

Any idea's aside from owl wisdom pots on where I can obtain better +spot items?