As we are approaching the Titan Quest II Early Access launch, we have been extremely busy polishing the initial content, while also building what comes next. We do have a neat surprise today that we think you will appreciate. Remember how we previously talked about launching with the Warfare, Earth and Storm masteries? Do you know what’s better than three masteries? That’s right. We have decided to include the Rogue mastery as well in the initial launch. We hope you agree this is worth a little bit of an extra wait!
About the Rogue Mastery
We designed the mastery around 3 main pillars.
- Precision: Rogue abilities are precise and accurate, hitting precisely where they mean to.
- Preparation: The Rogue mastery allows you to apply coatings to your weapons, preparing enemies with various ailments to set up for powerful combos.
- Evasion: It's not brute force that brings you success, but moving through the battlefield as if you were your enemies' shadows. Your enemies will be none the wiser until they have your blade at their throat.
Some Key Rogue Skills
Below we will highlight a handful of skills from the mastery that work together very neatly, combining the pillars above. There are other skills of course, and depending on your second mastery, you will be able to build different synergies. As you can imagine, the Rogue mastery has a limited offering in terms of defensive capabilities, so this might be one of the cross-mastery opportunities to pursue.
Lethal Strike:
- A classic-style staple of the Rogue mastery. Deals a large multiple of your weapon’s damage to a single target. When heavily invested into and timed right, it will remove large chunks from the health of even the toughest enemies. What’s more, if you manage to kill your target with this skill, the cooldown is refreshed, allowing you to rapidly finish off weaker or low-health enemies.
- When you obtain the “Flow” status via other abilities, you will be dealing additional bonus damage, consuming the Flow stack.
- You are able to further boost it with modifiers, such as by adding a “Rupture” chance that deals a raw HP percentage damage to the target, a poison explosion, or a bonus damage reward against “marked” targets.
Mark For Death:
- Marking your target will enable a variety of interactions and powerful debuffs via its modifiers, but by itself simply deals a portion of your damage as vitality damage. You can only mark one target.
- Whether you look to build interaction with Lethal Strike, or release exploding poison into your marked enemy, or summon shadow daggers to strike the target, this is a a cheap and effective way to make your job easier.
Flicker:
- A teleport skill that will deal some pierce damage to your target. A critical part of the Rogue kit when working with a glass cannon build, allowing you to get out of nasty situations.
- Gain flow when used, recover cooldown and/or deal more damage when hitting your mark, gain cooldown charges, or transform it into an offensive ability via modifiers.
Preparation:
- An aura skill increasing poison and physical damage, but reserving a part of your energy. This directly boosts most aspects of the Rogue mastery.
- Via modifiers, increase your ailment and critical hit chances, convert your weapon damage type to either poison or pierce, or summon shadow daggers upon critical hits to hit your target.
With all these together, especially if further backed by the right items and passive skills, it should be possible to hugely commit to poison damage, marking an important enemy, applying Flow via Flicker, and using Lethal Strike on this target to release a massively boosted poison damage, as well as a secondary explosion to hit other nearby enemies.
Not everything about Rogue is about direct reliance on your physical weapon damage however. Most abilities have a modifier to summon shadow daggers, helping you scale your character with spellcasting capabilities, which comes in particularly useful in conjunction with the Earth and Storm masteries, where the Knowledge attribute’s scaling of fire, cold, lightning and poison damages synergizes some more.
Putting It Together
Here is a demonstration of much of the above in action:
- The character is dual wielding and deals massive poison weapon damage, with all weapon damage converted to poison via the Preparation aura.
- Applying Mark to the toughest target will release poison damage once we deliver enough damage to it while marked. It will also deliver a poison explosion to nearby enemies, which there are plenty of.
- Tossing a grenade, modified to deal poison damage into the crowd, we soften the whole group a bit.
- Hitting the marked target with Flicker, we gain the Flow status.
- With damage having built up already, we deliver a Lethal Strike to the Brute, taking it out of the equation.
- Eliminating the lighter enemies by using Lethal Strike repeatedly refreshes the cooldown, allowing us to spam it until we run out of energy.
https://youtu.be/IffZtDRyZgg
Coming Next
Going forward, we are going to resume regular blog posts, starting with more gameplay footage as promised.