Heroes,
As you already know, in Titan Quest II you will create your own class by utilizing aspects of two masteries. We want to give you a more detailed look at this by highlighting individual mastery combinations.
Expect more of these over the next weeks, as we are approaching the long-awaited Early Access.
In this example we will take a look at a combination of Rogue and Earth, which form the Ashstalker.
Rogue Actives
Let’s talk about the active skill tree on the Rogue side, where we will put a lot of our points.
We will be heavily focused on the Trick Shot skill. This is a fast, target-penetrating projectile attack.
We want to use this to deal very targeted damage and with our Modifier system we customize it to to disrupt our foes.
We add the following modifiers:
Interrupt: When we hit a channelling enemy, they get stunned. Very nifty when trying to disable channeling abilities like enemy heals or charged up attacks.
Counter: Let’s double down on this aspect! With this Modifier, channelling enemies take hugely increased damage, making it the perfect “snipe” in the right situation.
Enhanced Critical Hit: Hugely increases our crit chance to round things out and synergize with some of our other abilities (more on that in a second).
To further boost the damage and critical chance of our abilities, we will be using the following supporting skills:
Preparation: An aura that increase damage for us and our allies. We customize it to synergize with our plan: The Enhanced Critical Hits modifier helps us further here.
Mark For Death: This skill lets us mark a single target. By choosing the Shadow Dagger modifier we’ll deal massive damage when critically hitting the marked target. If timed while an enemy is channeling, this has the potential to get a super juicy super-crit! Note: The keen eyed amongst you might see the “3” extra damage for this Modifier and I can already hear your sceptical mumblings!
Rightfully so! This is just a UI-Bug and the damage of course is much more than that).
Rogue Passives
On the passive side we want to create good scaling to support our choices.
We will mainly focus on 2 passives for this:
Accuracy: This passive increases our damage and crit chance, which already is a great combination for us. But here’s the catch: The feat High Critical Chance synergizes very nicely with our plans. It increases our crit chance by a hefty 100%, but reduces the crit-damage in return. Luckily, we partially mitigate this drawback by our other choices! Remember the Shadow Dagger modifier we just talked about? That now triggers every time!
Deft Hands: This offers a good set of bonusses throughout. Damage? Yes please. Attack and Cast Speed? Never hurts. By choosing the Critical Hit Chance we get exactly what we need and further build our synergies.
Earth Actives
If we position ourselves well, each of these Trick Shots should be able to damage many enemies, but as its area of effect is in a thin line, we could use a clearing skill from Earth to help us get through light mobs more quickly.
Let’s pick the Earth Enchantment aura to benefit both our fire and physical damages. As our Trick Shot does pierce damage, this should be a clean synergy. But having 2 auras early in the game can be highly taxing to our energy pool, so putting a point or two into Conservation to reduce this energy reservation is a good idea.
As for our mob-clearing skill, let’s go with Roiling Magma. Who doesn’t like a big ball of fire to dispose of all those pesky swarming enemies? We go for the following modifiers:
Overwhelm: Once we spec into this, whenever we use our Weapon Attack we gain a stack of Overwhelm. When we have 3 stacks, our Roiling Magma can consume them for a super charged shot.
Enhanced Ailment: With this Modifier we have a higher chance of setting enemies on fire as well. That’s very useful against light mobs in case they survive our initial shot somehow. The burning stacks should finish them.
Weapons and Attributes
Now that we have our skill trees locked in, let’s quickly talk about weapon choice.
Since we want to build these Overwhelm stacks quickly, it makes a lot of sense to opt into dual-wielding daggers for their fast attack speed. That also perfectly fits the style of an Ashstalker!
We will definitely put some points into Agility. We can also split it with Might to boost both physical and fire damages with our connected meta-attributes (Fitness and Resolve).
A more focused build is also possible. While splitting is good for versatility, as enemies have varying damage resistance profiles, focusing on less attributes gives you larger advantages in certain areas of the game.
The choice is yours to make!
Putting it all together
To summarize:
We use Trick Shot to deal high critical damage, especially to channeling enemies. With this we can even interrupt their abilities, helping us to control the battlefield in a very rogue-ish way.
Roiling Magma helps us to clear out light mobs, especially after we charge it up by swiflty attacking with our daggers a couple of times.
Our 2 auras (Earth Enchantment and Preperation) give us a constant boost. Finally Marked for Death allows us to pick and obliterate a single target, if needed.
Here’s a short clip about how this build looks in action:
Youtube Link to Crit Trick Shot Ashstalker - Rogue and Earth
Oh, and one more thing:
As the experts amongst you might already suspect, many of the passives in the Earth mastery will boost spells, but not weapon attacks. This lacks synergy with our main ability, Trick Shot!
That could be a problem for us in the long term. Unless… we turn it into a spell! The Trick Shot Modifier “Shadow Dagger” does exactly that.
That’s all for this one. Of course, this is only one way to build an Ashstalker and as you progress through the game you could add a lot more abilities and passives to this build.
We can’t wait to see what kinds of builds you all come up with.