Rogue - Mechanic (and Traps) Proposed Changes

[Enoach]

It has been over 6 years since I've played a build with more than 2 levels of Rogue so my thoughts on the Enhancement Tree won't really be of any use because I don't know what they are to compare to where you are going.

However, I can comment on the Trap and Grenade making side.

One of the reasons why my Bard/Arti/rog build has 4 levels of Artificer is for the Trapmaking skill. I like the idea of making traps and setting them. I like the direction you are going with traps and look forward to what is available for the Epic Trapping.

[ddorimble]

Capstone needs a big boost. People must have wanted to build 18 rogue/2 artificers since the level 18 core is much better than the level 20. That's fine, keep the level 18 as is, but the level 20 is going to be need to be a lot stronger or 18/2 becomes the default.

Agreed, it's ok, but I can have like a constant +20 damage with a Glass Cannon on. You better come big if you want people to put that down.

Plot Twist (by M. Night Shyamalan): Level 20 Mechanic capstone allows Rune Arm use. That's right, I said it. It honestly doesn't seem all that different from the way Evasion was given to Swashbuckler's at 20. To mollify that obvious and practically required 2 Rogue splash.

[knifefighter]

Rogue mechanic is the only ranged class that can't create arrows/bolts. from my time as an artificer I remember needing ~3-4k bolts before starting a quest.
assuming 80% returning, this puts the rogue mechanic at 800 bolts per quest. with quivers usually not holding more than 1k stacks, this means a mechanic has a lot of back and forth running between quests to shop for more, not to mention the likelihood of running out mid-quest at some point or another, rendering himself mostly useless.
I realize making all the mechanic's ammo 100% returning poses a ton of other problems, but surely giving them a spell like ability of creating a stack of standard non-magical arrows or bolts (multi-selector) would work well with the class being a mechanic...
and if you can create a stack, and it is then 80% returning, then you're sitting pretty.

I will never play a pure ranged rogue as long as I have to go back to the vendor every quest or two to buy arrows, A major annoyance for me. Have to splash arty or ranger. You should either put the returning to 100% at tier 3 or give mechanics some proper way to create ammo.

You can umd conjure bolts scrolls for ammo, creates a stack of 1000 now, recent update changed.
80% returning is way better than having a way to create your own ammo, at the very least it enables the use of Flame Arrow scrolls wich is alredy better than a crafted plain ammo with no bonuses, but on the long run it also makes room for actualy using all that <insert random bonuses here> ammo you drop and never use, additionaly theres also cannith crafting for ammo.

The problem with scrolls to create them comes up when you're in the middle of battle and you run out, if you have enough agro you're never going to pass that concentration check on EE to make any more. Ya maybe I should be more prepared, but theres no good way in game to check your stock of arrows without spending 5 min going through your inventory every battle. Also when you run out of scrolls and arrows you're now useless for the rest of the quest. (I run out of things midquest very often on other characters, luckily with casters I have tons of other spells to use, with arrows/bolts running out there's nothing else to switch to but melee that you might not be built for)

[Dreppo]

I'm not sure what to make of the weapon specialization expanding from "crossbows" to "bows, crossbows, and throwing weapons". The crossbow theme was made sense because they are mechanical devices. Crossbows and traps, that seemed like enough to specialize in without diluting flavor. Now bows I could kind of get behind, because they are mechanical devices too, albeit much simpler than crossbows. So sure, give them bows. A possible downside is that since there is a much better selection of named bows, most people will ignore crossbows and switch over to bows. A few more named crossbows would help.

I don't really like the idea of mechanics becoming the best at throwing weapons. They aren't mechanical, they are much more of a finesse weapon. Throwing daggers in particular are easily concealable and you can imagine throwing one as an opening foray coming out of stealth. These have been an assassin specialization until now. But even with the assassin T5 Knife Specialization, assassins won't be as good at throwing daggers as mechanics will be with these proposed changes. I say remove throwing weapons. It's anti-thematic and treads on assassin's territory. The increased bonuses to crossbows, as well as bringing regular bows into the mix, are plenty.

I have two suggestions for further improvement:
1) The first mechanic core adds 5m to ranged sneak attack + point blank shot. This fits mechanics perfectly. I'd like to see this expanded upon in later cores. Maybe another 5m at 12, and another 5m at 20.
2) How about a way to use runarms without having to dip into artificer? It's a mechanical thing so it's thematic. But while artificers get it cheaply (for free at level 2), make it expensive to get from mechanic... either a T5 enhancement or part of the capstone. And remember that artificers can improve runearms through the battle engineer tree, while pure mechanics won't have any such options.

[Caprice]

Agreed, it's ok, but I can have like a constant +20 damage with a Glass Cannon on. You better come big if you want people to put that down.

Plot Twist (by M. Night Shyamalan): Level 20 Mechanic capstone allows Rune Arm use. That's right, I said it.

18/2: constant +2d6 +2d8 from Glass Cannon
versus
20: constant +2 damage, +2d6 Sneak Attacks, +1 all relevant class skills, decent panic button & burst DPS ability, +2 to all DCs for abilities in tree

I agree that 18/2 will be popular, but I think the capstone isn't terrible either and I think I could justify to myself staying pure.

Hmm. Is Hip Flask's passive damage bonus going to be extended to bows and thrown or remain specific to the flavors of crossbows?

P.S. I like the Plot Twist a lot but I don't think it would be well balanced.

Edit: I missed that Hip Flask's active ability is an Action Boost. That makes it significantly less exciting IMO.

[maddong]

Does mechanical reloader let the thrown attack rate cap go above 84 (3x the bab 0 thrown attack rate of 28)? Because people are already hitting the max attack speed with thrown weapons due to whirling wrists being so good.... Regardless, options at reaching that attack rate are good.

Expert builder (core 18) is a nice alternative to holy sword. An elf/half elf/sun elf rogue 18 can make nice use of furyshot with pinion and arrow of slaying. Pinion becomes 15-20/x4 so you can get 3 bolts x 4 crit x 5 adrenaline x 250 slaying = 15000 damage x ranged power not including the weapon damage multiplied by 60 x rp. And it is nice because it doesn't go on cooldown like many shot.

[Severlin]

~ The flavor we wanted for Mechanic is to be a saboteur and sniper.
~ We don't want them to be an Artificer light, so we don't want to just import Artificer stuff into the tree.
~ Runearms will stay exclusive to Artificers.

We had a long discussion of conjured bolts versus Fletching on the player council forums. Some points:

~ If you really want to conjure bolts you have UMD and scrolls.
~ Conjuration spells really isn't in flavor for rogues.
~ Fletching will really shine when we have more powerful crafted ammunition with updated crafting systems, and will be also be really good if we put more powerful ammunition on special vendors.

As an aside I like the idea of making ammunition found in treasure to drop with an increased stack size. I can't promise that for Update 25 however.

Sev~

[ddorimble]

18/2: constant +2d6 +2d8 from Glass Cannon
versus
20: constant +2 damage, +2d6 Sneak Attacks, +1 all relevant class skills, decent panic button & burst DPS ability, +2 to all DCs for abilities in tree

I agree that 18/2 will be popular, but I think the capstone isn't terrible either and I think I could justify to myself staying pure.

Hmm. Is Hip Flask's passive damage bonus going to be extended to bows and thrown or remain specific to the flavors of crossbows?

P.S. I like the Plot Twist a lot but I don't think it would be well balanced.

Hey, no worries, everyone has different goals. It'd be 18/2 for me, though. There are many more things than just Glass Cannon, I just think that's the highest straight damage one. That splash is basically adding an entire additional inventory slot for all kinds of wonderful different effects. Sign me up!

[Livmo]

Wow. Now I'm definitely debating whether I should keep my arty pure. Mmmmm hard choices.

Shadar-Kai with 6 levels arty and the rest rouge. You survive by wit and guile. Fun if you want the challenge. Improrved traps would help this build allot. I would love a net trap that can be deployed via a weapon to catch the Sleestaks with.

DDO Wiki:
http://ddowiki.com/page/Trapmaking

Here is Coldin's Guide:
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/259276

The Order of Syncletica's Stealth Guide:
https://sites.google.com/site/ddostealthteamsix/

[Livmo]

As an aside I like the idea of making ammunition found in treasure to drop with an increased stack size. I can't promise that for Update 25 however.

Sev~

IMO a fletcher should be able to fletch at the trap station in House C and be able to make various ammo via the parts picked up in quests/raids. Right now there is still an overabundance of mechanical trap parts tho.

If I could fletch, then no need to splash 1 level arty to Conjur Bolts (you get + from weapon and not bolt since the don't stack. A weak bolt is OK if + god on weapon). Splash 2 levels of art if you want Conjur Bolts and Rune Arm.

However, I'm turned on to the idea of fletching. Feelss more realistic to me for a Mechanic. I make stuff instead of cojuring it.

[Severlin]

Shadar-Kai with 6 levels arty and the rest rouge. You survive by wit and guile. Fun if you want the challenge. Improrved traps would help this build allot. I would love a net trap that can be deployed via a weapon to catch the Sleestaks with.

DDO Wiki:
http://ddowiki.com/page/Trapmaking

Here is Coldin's Guide:
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/259276

The Order of Syncletica's Stealth Guide:
https://sites.google.com/site/ddostealthteamsix/

With the Sleestak reference I am truly disappointed that one of the links wasn't to a YouTube scene from the old Land of the Lost series.

Sev~

[Livmo]

With the Sleestak reference I am truly disappointed that one of the links wasn't to a YouTube scene from the old Land of the Lost series.

Sev~

Could not resist this one, although not original:

[Qezuzu]

Here are the proposed changes for the Rogue Mechanic tree.

Trap Update

Constructed Traps will be have the following changes:

• The time to set a trap will change to 1 second.
• The time for a trap to arm after it has been set down will change to one second.
• The cooldown between setting traps will be changed to 8 seconds.
• The time traps persist for will be lowered to 60 seconds.
• New traps for higher levels will be introduced with higher damage. Players will be able to craft traps all the way up to level 27, with an appropriate increase in damage.
• Trap feedback will be sent to the player who set the trap. This means you will see damage numbers for your traps.

Note that the DC for elemental traps and spell traps will remain as they are on live, using a percentage of Disable Device and increased by Mechanic and Artificer talents.

• Grenade DCs will be increased to 10 + (Minimum Required Level * 2) for heroic, and 10 + (Minimum Required Level * 3) for epic levels.
• New grenades with higher minimum levels and increased damage will be introduced.

Does this mean that the Web Traps (and other spell traps) with DC's of >100 is WAI? It's always something I thought was a tad powerful for a tier2 ability and Improved Traps doesn't say it increases spell trap DC this way, and the improvements to the setting speed and cooldown makes it a much more spammable ability. These changes could potentially unbalance spell traps or at least Web traps, but on the other hand removing such a reliable source of CC would basically nullify an Assassin's ability to solo difficult content.

About spammability, how expensive are the epic-level traps going to be? Because the current ML11 traps, which require 100 elemental parts per 15, are already going to require a bunch of farming if I want to use them on a regular basis. If the ML27 traps are going to require 500 parts or something for 15 mines, it won't be a practical ability.

Just looking at the ratios in my ingredients bag, Mechanical and Fire traps make up an overwhelming majority of traps, at least in the epic content that I play. I'm not saying there aren't other traps of different elemental types, but it means that I would have to go out of my way to get traps parts if I want to combat something like Fire Elementals, which is a pretty common fire-resistant enemy that I would want to use traps on. This wouldn't be a problem if traps were cheap, however.

Holy and Unholy trap parts? These have no known use. Holy mines could be made to be very good for anti-undead

Mines are buggy on some terrain and fail to appear. It's really noticeable on very uneven terrain (a lot of "outside" quests), and I rarely see it happen when in a building ("inside" quests). This is something you should look in to as well.

Tier Two

• Crossbow Training: Now called Sharpshooter. +1 to hit and damage with all bows, crossbows, and thrown weapons. Non-repeating crossbows increase the damage to +2.
• Wand and Scroll Mastery: (1/1/1 AP)

Is there a chance for Wand and Scroll Mastery to also do something like improve casting speed or provide a bonus to concentration?

Tier Five

• Sharpshooter: +3 to hit and damage with all bows, crossbows, and thrown weapons. Non-repeating crossbows increase the damage to +6.
• Mechanical Reloader: You reload repeating crossbows 20% faster, draw thrown weapons 20% faster, and reload non-repeating crossbows 40% faster.
• Time Bomb: Cooldown is now 20 seconds. Time to set the bomb is now very fast. Time before exploding is now 2 seconds. Saving Throw to negate knockdown now uses your Disable Device skill as the DC.
• Sniper: (2 AP): You gain 1 extra sneak attack die with bows, crossbows and thrown weapons. Non-repeating crossbows increase this to 2 sneak attack dice and also gain +1[W]. Great crossbows now Vorpal on a 19-20.

These are nice changes. It's obvious you're trying to greatly improve non-repeating crossbows here, but with their representation in named loot (especially great crossbows) I don't think it's something that will work. But it's better than leaving them all worthless.

The tree needs some sources of increased sneak attack range, like Deepwood Sniper has.

[ArkoHighStar]

I like the overall tone of the changes, a big fan of more than one weapon choice for mechanics and making the ranged rogue.

But how about a doubleshot bonus for bows to go along with the speed bonuses you are giving to every other weapon

And why do non repeaters get a + 2 bonus and not every other non repeating weapon like bows and throwing weapons.

also hip flask will the to hit and damage portions of that be expanded like with sharpshooter to other ranged weapons

[bbqzor]

AARRRGGHH the forums just freaking ate my long response. Man so much rage, I hate these junky forums and their constant problems. RAAAGGGEEE. AARRGGH.

Alright short version, mourning for the lost details of the long version. Sorry if this one is more crass or pointed. I just dont have an hour to go over things in detail again, forgive any rage that shows up. Did I mention rage. Okay. Gotta move on. Rage.

TRAPS:
-Look okay, have to play it on lama since it depends on feel a lot. Like how fast/slow/playable it feels in use. Cannot tell that from here, WILL feedback on lama, hope you have time to change it still at that point in the cycle.

CORE:
-Tanglefoot is junky, even on a super rogue (lv20, range power 150, int 70) the DC and damage are too low to be of use high end (maybe eh, definitely not ee).
-Improved Detection is good but maybe ought to offer Int to attack. Its level 12, 1d6 is a bit of a weak gain, and mechanics are likely going to just go to harper anyhow. Id remove the AP tax over it. Especially since if youre not into repeaters this isnt a very exciting level, and the tree is trying to promote that.
- Expert Builder is great. But where as other similar abilities are available at level 12 (in various T5 cores) or lv14 (holy sword) mechanics have to wait until 18. Thats a long time, and really hampers builds trying to use it. Because its so limiting, Id like to see the trap cooldown boost expanded to all traps, not just alchemical. So like, even with the new trap rules, mechanics are faster than anyone else, as they always have been. That would be good.
-Capstone, drop the cooldown to 2 mins. A 50% uptime is like having 1d6 dmg 100% of the time, that still doesnt compare to assassins 4d6 or theif acrobats hitting two mobs. But, this heals you, and provides other benefits. So make it 120s, thats the same as some other things like uncanny and has an okay feel... a heal and boost every 2 min. Waiting 3+ mins starts to be like why bother, its just too long and not fun and no one wants to wait that long over their capstone. At least 50/50, 2 min heal, etc... thats pretty workable for what the tree is.

T1:
-Sharpshooter is good all the way up, including T5. Due to Rage(tm) Im not relisting this. Its good. T5 is good. High five, moving on.
-Lacerating Shots is still total lame because it requires a great crossbow. Why so lame. New rule, repeaters get 11/22/33% of bleed. Reg xbows get 25/50/75% of bleed. Greats get 33/66/100% bleed. Everyone can now use this. More high fives. For added awesome, consider having T3 simply add Bleed to your crossbows (the cannith crafted version, 1d8 vs stuff that doesnt not have blood). Because mechanics need some dips too, otherwise they are trap monkeys and no one likes monkeys. Especially not that guy whos going to post after this claiming to like monkeys.
-Thunderstone, you almost cool. Can we get the daze time to scale up like 6/9/12s. Considering you cannot attack the dazed guys, and it takes skill and timing to aim the thing, I dont think having it be a "lock" cc ability if your DC manages to be high enough is bad. Mechanics NEED some good cc for thier trap/ranged/slowdps builds to work. Parking one group while they and the party work on another is fair. Barbs can do this to 1-2 mobs with earsmash, why not mechanics. Plus mechanics can shout thunder, Thunder, THUNDERSTONE HOOOO. So they got that going for them. Just make it not lame please.

T2:
-Good changes.
-Why is skill boost still 1 AP per. I know its useful to mechanics, but its not that useful. Its not better than dmg boost or haste boost or something. Give them a "trap action boost", thats basically what this is. Only do it without an AP tax. Because ap taxes are lame. 1/1/1 is the way to go.
-What, exactly, is Improved Traps going to do with the new formulas above. Just +1 DC per rank? We need very explicit details about the new trap DC, and what you want it to do, and what this will do with it. Please.

T3:
-Wrack Construct, good change, but can we assume the Melee Selector versoin will run off Melee power? It just says ranged power, is taht only for the ranged one?
-Ooze flask is now NOT lame. So yay. But why is the DC still lame. Since the DC only checks the 8 AC portion and thats the part no one is going to care about lets just keep the DC from thunderstone here and start with a 20 base. I mean the least this thing can do is actually do what its supposed to do and drop the sunder effect on a mob. Its single target, give mecahnics a break here, they already gotta sink animation time into using the thing. No reason to hit this one with a low dc.

T4:
-Fletching, awesome, except math. 80% makes 100 bolts into ~466 bolts. I say around because the forum deleted my math RAGE RAGE, okay sorry. But it was around that. It should be 50%/70%/90%. Because 90% is close to making 100 bolts last for 900, which is almost like an artificer stack of 1000. Which is important because anyone whos ever played an arty can tell you exactly how freaking fast bolts go. And this ability should be best used to promote the use of using real, actual legit dropped ammo when necessary. So that a mechanic ISNT reduced to using House D ammo against that nasty champ or something. And those kinds of ammo drop in stacks of 20. Those 20 wont even last 1% of a hp-bag mob's hp. They need to go farther. Making a stack of 100 into a stack of (almost) 1000 is playable, I think. Go 50/70/90.
-Leg Shot bump is good, its high enough in the tree some good dmg is nice to see.
-Where is the thing that makes mechanics have a chance to not use up traps? They got one for arrows but not traps. Trap parts are so hard to get to fill consistent trap use, what are we to do? Are new trap recipeis going to give mechanics better returns? Can Fleching be expanded so we dont use traps up too, just like we dont use arrows? Etc? I had typed more on this but rage. Just think about how many traps you have to disarm to build even one mine, then if you used only one mine per room of mobs how fast youd go into the hole. It needs to be addressed.

T5:
-Mechanical reloader gets the disclaimer that have to play on Lama. Due to how speed effects are split between reload and firing, its impossible to tell if this is enough or not from paper. BUT. Something like this was 100% needed, and its here, and thats fantastic. The ability is great, it may need tuning, but great to see. High five.
-Time Bomb.. what. It has terrible... timing. 1s to set, 2s wait, 6s cc, 11s cd, repeat. Instead, make it 30s cd, and trip mobs for 10s. They are down about the same proportion (33% instead of 30%) but it gives the player more time to act between (10s of cc at a time instead of 6). And it makes the player spam the ability less (instead of spending 1s every 20 to set it, 1s every 30). This means a few things. It means less spam by the player of one ability over and over which is boring. Less time loss to animations meaning more uptime for the character overall. Longer windows of mob cc allow the character greater opportunity to, you know, play and do stuff. I am worried that between alchemical stuff, setting traps, reloading crossbows, and the like mechanics will simply NOT have anytime to actually fight. Itll be moving from one slow animation to another. This is a T5 ability. It should allow freedom to act within the window it provides. That window needs to be longer than 6s (to do more than like reload your repeater and fire once or something) and it needs to recur less frequently (so they have more chances to use other abilities instead of spamming one over and over). The end.
-Sniper... fail. Look adding 1d6 to repeaters is just not T5. I know you want other stuff to be useable... but look: how many named non-repeaters are there. Exactly. THey are your bread and butter. You cant not support them. And 1d6 of sneak to a repeater, 1d6 which isnt even guaranteed to land since its sneak, its just pitiful. Thats not T5. Thats like T1. Needs to change. Make it all crossbows +1W (t5 worthy). Non-repeaters get 2d6 sneak AND increase their sneak range another 5m (just like the core, so its now 40, thats enough to escape ae effects and stuff, worthy for sniping with single shot crossbows which is sniper-y sounding). The great crossbow 19-20 is actually cool, IF it means their innate vorpal trip works on 19s now. If that is so, leave that part, because Im sure someone (not me) will want to make some flavor build to use it, and thats neat the game lets you.
-Rapid Fire.. Rage! And not because my post was deleted. But because whomever did the math and determined repeaters fire "more" bolts so need "less" doublestrike was just plain bad at math and theyre wrong. Go get a stopwatch and look at how many shots per minute a repeater fires vs a bow or crossbow or whatever. And yes, tehre will be some variation, sure. But its not "they shoot 3x as fast" because "thy shoot 3 bolts per mouse click". Its all about total shots over time, and theyre the same (ballpark) as anyone else. You need to remove the doubleshot penalty they get as part of the ranged pass. In which case, Rapid Fire suddenly works alright. I will do more math and stuff if needed, but forum ate it. If you somehow do not believe that 70 (or whatever its up to nowadays) shots per minute with a repeater is the same as with a bow, I dont know what to say, because they are pretty close. I seriously hope you can have someone just log in and look at that because the math the last round of guys used doing doubleshot was waaaay wrong. Repeaters dont deserve that nerf. I get you want the dmg per hit scaled lower since they "front load" their damage to avoid a runaway first strike power curve. But doubleshot shouldnt get caught in that battle, thats not what it really does. By the time you get significant doubleshot, the mobs arent dying in one repeater volley, and the concern that nerf was (wrongly) made for doesnt exist. Thanks.

Ok so, theres the shooting from the hip redo. Overall, tree is better, tree still not there, maybe after some adjustments it could be cool. But part of that will depend on new traps not being lame, and the feel for traps and reload rates being tuned right, and removing the poorly thought out penalty on repeaters. Rage. Thanks for the preview and hope the rage version of feedback was still helpful. Cheers.

[Oxarhamar]

~ The flavor we wanted for Mechanic is to be a saboteur and sniper.
~ We don't want them to be an Artificer light, so we don't want to just import Artificer stuff into the tree.
~ Runearms will stay exclusive to Artificers.

We had a long discussion of conjured bolts versus Fletching on the player council forums. Some points:

~ If you really want to conjure bolts you have UMD and scrolls.
~ Conjuration spells really isn't in flavor for rogues.
~ Fletching will really shine when we have more powerful crafted ammunition with updated crafting systems, and will be also be really good if we put more powerful ammunition on special vendors.

As an aside I like the idea of making ammunition found in treasure to drop with an increased stack size. I can't promise that for Update 25 however.

Sev~

Increased ammo stacks would be great.

Stacks of 20 is too low.
Crafting stacks of 100 is still too low.
Remember to update the stacks from collectable turnins as well.
Stacks of ammo should be reasonable with the amount of ammo spent.

Sev, please do us a favor. Grab a crafter and craft up 1000 bolts or arrows (take notice the time it takes to do so) then enter a quest and watch how quilky they are consumed.

The time spent crafting is laborious compared to the time it takes to go through them in normal play.

[Caprice]

Hey, no worries, everyone has different goals. It'd be 18/2 for me, though. There are many more things than just Glass Cannon, I just think that's the highest straight damage one. That splash is basically adding an entire additional inventory slot for all kinds of wonderful different effects. Sign me up!

I don't disagree. Even beyond the rune arm options (e.g. Disruption, Banishing, swappable Potency for self-healing, extra augment slots, easy AoE barrel smashing), the free Rapid Reload and the INT-based Spellpoint injection & Magical Training to power KtA and endless Cocoons is a huge boost. You can also squeeze a little more damage out via Enchant Weapons and BE enhancements. I would go that way myself on a repeating crossbow user, but I feel like there are other weapon options now. [Edit: Changed to straight agreement for repeating xbows] At the moment I'm thinking of an Elf/HElf AA Mechanic and staying pure for that.

FWIW I feel like that's also always been true of Artificers in reverse. Rogue 2 Evasion splashes were popular for a long time, especially with the capstones being a bit broken for ages, and even now that the Armor Up changes made Evasion largely irrelevant you still need a Rogue 2 splash if you want to use traps effectively. And historically every staff build needed to splash Rogue 2, even the staff-based Henshin Mystic. As long as those splashes are based on weapon choice and not because a different class is inherently stronger, I am fine with this.

Since "sniper" has been mentioned as a theme, should there be a little more PBS/SA range in the tree than just the very first core? I am not advocating it since I don't really think that it needs it, but I don't look at the tree and think that's a theme.

[Lauf]

We had a long discussion of conjured bolts versus Fletching on the player council forums. Some points:

~ If you really want to conjure bolts you have UMD and scrolls.
~ Conjuration spells really isn't in flavor for rogues.
~ Fletching will really shine when we have more powerful crafted ammunition with updated crafting systems, and will be also be really good if we put more powerful ammunition on special vendors.

As an aside I like the idea of making ammunition found in treasure to drop with an increased stack size. I can't promise that for Update 25 however.

Sev~

How about a slightly different solution - make quiver stacks 10k in size instead of 1k
that way players can craft/buy and carry enough ammo for it to stop being a hassle

[btolson]

Core 18, Expert Builder: You gain a +1 Competence Bonus to Critical Threat Range and Critical Multiplier for bows, crossbows and thrown weapons. Critical Multiplier increases to +2 for great crossbows.

I'd like to suggest that this be changed in some way.

Either break the boni up and distribute them throughout the tree (into t5 sharpshooter, 12core, elsewhere), or shift the entire package to 12core.

Boni can be split by bonus type (threat range in one place, multiplier in another, extra multiplier for great xbow in a third) and/or weapon type (xbow boni in one place, bow boni in a second place, thrown in a third place).

My concern is that with this huge package bonus @18, there will only be 3 species of mechanic going forward:
20 rogue
18 rogue/2 arti
6 rogue/14 pal

Shifting or distributing the boni will allow for a wider array of builds to be viable.

[Oxarhamar]

How about a slightly different solution - make quiver stacks 10k in size instead of 1k
that way players can craft/buy and carry enough ammo for it to stop being a hassle

That would be great until you realize how long it would take to craft 100 stacks of 100 to fill the 10,000 Quiver.

Do go craft 10,000 arrows or bolts & get back to us on how long it too you.

Then go spend those arrows or bolts questing & tell us the time spent crafting is reasonable in relation to playtime.