The Ultimate PvE Rogue Guide for Ashes of Creation

So you've chosen to step lightly into the shadows to join the Rogue archetype for Ashes of Creation. They are the only archetype with true invisibility, limitless amounts of crowd control, poisons, and ways to make your targets bleed out of existence. Rogues are a highly mobile, and a class with tons of utility for you and your party.

Unlike traditional MMORPG's, in Ashes, Rogues aren't solely DPS oritentated. Instead, Rogues are encouraged to use their tools and mobility to slow, stun, trip, and use whatever dirty tricks up their sleeves to debuff and disorientate their enemies. You will have the classic Kick option like WoW Rogues, but it is highly situational and so are most of your other abilities making it a versatile archetype requiring high–awareness and high–execution.

All of the aforementioned and more make an extremely fun and powerful Archetype.

For those of you looking for a PvP specific guide, please click the link below.

Please be aware that the information provided on this guide may be out dated due to the current rapid changes being made to combat, stats, and time-to-kill by Intrepid. Guides will be updated as the significant changes settle. Thanks for your patience!

Strengths

• High single-target damage.
• Can combo with other archetypes.
• Can play around crowd control related diminishing returns.
• Good option for playing solo.
• Has high sustain, making it a good option for extended periods of time in combat.

Weaknesses

• Primarily melee, lacking ranged options.
• Difficult to execute.
• Lacks high AoE damage.
• Less availability in team comps.
• Misuse of crowd control abilities can limit your party's combos due to CC diminishing returns.

As a Rogue you will have an archetype resource named "Advantage". This resource is generated through a myriad of ways to boost your abilities and can stack up to two times. Advantage can be seen by checking your class icon with the red bar around the icon or visually on your character you can see each hand have a blue fire on each hand for each stack of Advantage you have. For abilities, you will have Advantage generators, consumers, and passives you gain through having the Advantage by putting your target off-balance and surprising them from smoke and shadows.

For a full list of every Rogue ability, please click the link below for the Rogue Spell Glossary

Rogues, much like every class in Ashes, can wear any gear in the game, regardless of if it's Light, Medium or Heavy Armor. Each armor type has it's own set bonus depending on how many pieces of the set you have, however for PvE you'll find most Rogues decked out in a mix of Medium and Heavy Armor. Later down the road the best in slot gear will also be Medium Armor primarily; however, what you need to hit the stat diminishing return values that will give you the most physical power, physical penetration, crit power, attack speed, health, and defense mitigation. I will cover loosely what you should be aiming for:

• Physical Power: 190‐200
• Physical Penetration: 30%
• Crit Power: 180%
• Attack Speed: 98-100%+
• Health: 5-7k HP
• Phys/Mag Mitigation: 30-40%
• Lifesteal: 50% (Not Recommended)

**Note: Lifesteal isn't recommended because there is an RNG factor on weapon combo finishers that makes it not optimal. It is acceptable for PvE, but never in PvP in its current state.

As for weapons, much like the gear, you can use any weapon you find. There are a ton of different types of weapons; from one and two handed swords, one handed maces, daggers, to short and long bows, energy wands, energy spellbooks and starting Phase 3, there will be two handed spears, one and two handed axes, and rapiers. The goal is to just use whatever gives you the most Physical Power because of how abilities and auto attacks scale off this stat. Be mindful that it is Physical Power and not Magical Power you'll want; all weapons can be either Physical Power or Magical Power.

As for which weapon a Rogue prefers, in a perfect world Rogues will use either a Greatsword or Daggers in their primary weapon slot, which both use two hands, and in the secondary weapon slot you'll use a Longbow simply because these weapons are more likely to cap your Diminishing Returns on your stat blocks. You can be like Zybak and run an energy wand for the cooldown reduction in the weapon tree, but it will make hitting your DRs much more difficult; however you can theorycraft away as that is what makes Ashes of Creation so fun.

There are a plethora of consumables ranging from potions, to food buffs, to scrolls and much more. All of which can drastically boost your damage, all for a relatively low price. It's highly suggested that you pick yourself up some of these consumables listd below.

• Rations – Provides health regeneration over a period of 20s.
• Novice Scroll of Strength – Increases Strength(your main stat) for 3 hours. If you use a higher rarity scroll, so does the amount of Strength gained. You can only have one scroll buff active at a time.
• Fresh Salad – Gives you 275 Physical Power Rating for an hour.
• Beef Tar Tar – Gives you 851 Physical Penetration Rating
• Beef Steak Sandwich – Gives 638 Physical Power Rating and 213 Max Health.
• Apprentice Health Potion and/or Apprentice Mana Potion – These give you Health or Mana, depending on which you consume. These share cooldown with each other, so you can only use one at a time!

Below is a list of all major Rogue changes. Intrepid does many patch updates, however they don't always effect Rogues, or if they did, they were really minor like visual changes or bug fixes.

• Shadow Step should no longer get players stuck inside/under terrain.
• Draining Poison reduced from 40% mana leech to 20% mana leech.
• Rogue Archetype and Dual Daggers are now available.