Rogue questions

[mouseman]

I'm wondering which stats affect bow damage? I think both strength and dexterity, but I'm not that sure..

Another question: I have a bow of shock - does the game calculate the additional 1-6 lightning damage to the character sheet or just the base damage of the weapon? Apparently it calculates enchanted damage so this puzzles me.

Also are you supposed to use spells? Any hints about playing the rogue? I always played a warrior so I'm kind of lost here.

[PerfectFifth]

I've always found that just sticking to a bow for attacks is best. Definitely get teleport though, and mana shield, since you have little use of mana anyway.

[SSH83]

dex = damage. remember that all stats have a cap, so it really doesn't matter what stats you put first because with all the stats elixirs you will max it eventually anyways, and a backup bow is always nice.

Knowing how to hold down shiftkey to snipe monsters a screen away is more important than number crunching imo, especially because of the stunning effect when monsters get hit.

Spell-wise, teleport and mana shield as mentioned above. Other spells will be a waste of your mana. Staffs however are a different story because they can cast high level spells.

[HegemonKhan]

see jarulf's guide. it tells all the formulas and mechanics of diablo 1 and more.

i'm not sure if i can post the link to the site its on and am too lazy and don't wanna bug a mod either so if u can't find jarulf's guide on your own, pm me and i'll give u the link in pm.

according to jarulf's guide in diablo 1, this is how bow damage is dtermined (there's probably more complexity to it, so look at jarulf's yourself, i'm too lazy to try to post in full detail when u can just find and read jarulf's guide):

bow character damage:

warrior: str*clvl/200
rogue: (str+dex)*clvl/200
sorcerer: str*clvl/200
monk: (str+dex)*clvl/600
bard: (str+dex)*clvl/500 (this might suppose to be 600 and he typoed, considering monk and barbarian are 600)
barbarian: str*clvl/600

*. *=multiply
*. /=divide
*. ()=do what is inside parenthesi (or parentheses?) first
*. clvl=character level
*. str=strength
*. dex=dexterity
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as for your other questions, find and read jarulf's guide
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if u want character build guides, pm me and i'll send u the links. same reason as:

i'm not sure if i can post the links to the sites they are on and am too lazy and don't wanna bug a mod either so if u can't find character guides on your own, pm me and i'll give u the links in pm.

[Phredreeke]

Elemental bows are bugged. The bow does 1-6 damage plus the character damage (calculated by strenght, dexterity and level) and it applies that multiple times. Those bows will do much more damage than they are meant to do.

[srs0]

Keep an eye out for a bow with knockback too! Mine's saved me innumerable times. I never found much of a use for knockback in DII, but DI is a different story!

[Swiffer]

The link to Jaruls Guide should be fine, it is from the Lurker Lounge, which was one of the primary Diablo and Diablo 2 sources back in the day.

[mouseman]

Thanks for your answer! That explained a lot, like why my damage goes up after level up :) So rogue can pump strength at low level just as well as dexterity - damage-wise. I'm planning on putting points on both to meet the requirements of both armors and bows. Also, levels after max stat points are beneficial.

I have jarulf's guide, but 170 page guide is too much when you just need one simple answer. I have used it for other purposes, such as bnet commands and so on, though.

[Flux]

rogues are indeed almost all dex. the str is only useful to meet item reqs, and only body armor is very heavy. Bows are not, so for weapons you don't need many points in str. rogues gain less per vit than warriors, so it's harder to get their hps up, but they have much better mana and higher magic, so it's pretty easy to get them up to casting basic spells early on.

Bows are the way to go early on, though you can find some use from spells. Most useful is healing of course, but also holy bolt, if you can get a few books in the early levels, the damage scales up very nicely. Can be quite useful for undead bosses, skeleton king, etc.

Shoot in straight lines. Diagonal shots are very hard to hit with, esp if the monster is advancing, but if you go in rows (which are actually kind of diagonal the way the screen is lined up, but you know what i mean). Straight through doorways, down rows of columns, etc. You can turn entire levels into bowling alleys; just shoot in one row, listen, move over one, repeat. Arrows miss once you're like 2 screens away, but the entire dungeons are only about 5x5 screens, so from the middle of a level you can accurately hit things almost all the way to the side walls.

There aren't any haste bows, but rogues fire fast enough to stun lock, though you will sometimes get hit if you're point blank range firing. The hard part is doing enough damage to get some stopping power, and that makes a huge difference. Melee monster stop in their advance, casters/witches stop firing, if you hit them hard enough. That's all about your damage, which comes from dex and bow damage. Monster level factors in as well. You'll see it quite vividly, as you gain in damage and start stopping some weaker monsters, while blood knights will just keep advancing, boss witches will keep shooting, etc.

Good bows aren't to be found either. No kings or master's bows, and none of the higher % damages are found on bows either. IIRC Merciless is the best you can get, which goes up to around 120%, and you'd want that of heavens or perfection, I think. Or maybe wirt sells bows that go up to a bit higher %? I don't recall, but they're very hard to come by. Eaglehorn and Windforce are both very viable with the top magical bows, though i was never a fan of the knockback in windy, since it screwed up the angles on killing casters and witches.

Rogues want to max up on hps stuff when you're first getting into hell/hell, around level 30+. You need 350 or so, wiht good resistances, to play safely. That way you can take a few hits, finish a fight, and heal. Lower than 250 hps it's very risky to go w/o mana shield, but in that case your mana pool is probably only around 200, so you'll be constantly drinking blues. It's a wasteful time for the character, and it's hard to get good resistances w/o a shield.

Long term rogues should play like mini-mages (if you want to kill quickly. if you just enjoy doing bow, do bow), since they can get their spells up to the max level with the use of abandoned shrines. They don't cast as quickly as mages, but they're far faster than warriors, and a rogue can get up around 500 mana with good equipment. They can also fight effectively with sword/shield, but can't hit quite fast enough to stun lock mages or witches. Even when using bow, spells should be kept in mind; if you're on a level with half melee monsters that don't have res to light or fire, you should be teeing off on them with chain or fireball, while using the bow for the other monsters magic isn't as effective against.

In the old days, I used to do my rogue with dreamflange/shield for levels 13-15, sometimes switching to bow earlier if I got a lot of casters, or soul burners on 15. I'd go mage style on 16, running around to lure all the blood knights out, then blast them around a corner with fireballs. Then I'd go to bow to clear the advocates. I used extensive stone curse, golem, teleport, and found angles to kill from off screen, etc. I can sort of remember how fast I was in the old days, but haven't got the technique anymore. I've played 16 a couple of times in the past month with a rogue, and I'm slow and cautious, shooting down the alleys, never quite sure which advocates to stone, how to avoid shooting my own golem, etc.

I remember that i used to time myself, just for fun. I'd see how long it took each clear of 16 on hell, and note the number of blood knights/advocates. Faster with more blood knights, of course. I don't remember the times, sadly.

[Phredreeke]

There are no Haste bows, but there are Bows of Swiftness, which will give you a slight speed increase in regular Diablo but not in Hellfire (in hellfire they increase the speed the of arrows instead)

High level rogues generally prefer +resistance bows to +% damage bows, as it will save you a prefix on your jewelry for other uses. +% damage modifiers only apply to the weapon's damage, not your character's damage, which at high levels will outshine the damage on your weapon.

Mana shield is perfectly viable on a rogue. She gets as much mana as life per level and points in vit/mag, but only take 2/3 damage with mana shield.

[Zarniwoop]

Awesome, now do a sorc guide! =D.

I just started over because I didn't know the damage shrines can do to you.

[Phredreeke]

He already did (http://web.archive.org/web/20010417065353/www.diabloii.net/strategy/fluxmageguide/flux_mageguide.shtml) ;)

[Vandro]

Melee rogues are also really good, with high dex you won't be hit alot and with stormshield you can reach perfect block quite fast. Get a shield/jewelry with resistance. And civerb's cudgel to do serious damage in Hell. Get of harmony on your armor for the hit recovery. Snipe the succubusses with fireball/chain lightning, melee the rest. It's actually really fun doing things warriors and sorcerers normally do, but be really good at it too :)

[Phredreeke]

Yes. Thanks to the rogues high dexterity, CC is much more usable on her than on a warrior (who will need Gold jewels to be able to hit decently with it)

[ashbourn]

I having been using a something (+dmg% I think) bow of swiftness. Wonderful bow but very hard to find. Always check vendors for batter bows, I tend to get luckier there then in the dungeons.

Joe
*ashbourn

[Lanthanide]

'swiftness' is quite possibly the best damage increaser you can get on a bow. Regular arrow shooting speed is 0.40 seconds, with swiftness it is reduced to 0.30 seconds, which is a 33% increase in the number of arrows you can fire per second, however this additional damage is your entire *character damage*, which is much higher than the damage that you get from the bow itself (especially because the minimum damage is always 1).

It's possible that swiftness only drops the speed to 0.35 seconds - I haven't consulted Jarulf's guide, in which case it is only a 14.2% increase, but still not too shabby.

[mouseman]

I think I read in _the_ guide that due to a bug, swiftness and speed suffixes don't have any difference to the attack speed. I don't remember exactly, but there was something fishy about bows and speed. However, it is true that enchanted damage in bows aren't that good, because your damage comes mainly from your character and not your bow. So you could get resistance bows etc if that speed thing doesn't work as well as it should.

I'll check the guide when I'll get home. Altough there seems to be a lot of controversial debate about the best bow in the game.. This guide (http://web.archive.org/web/20010618105324/www.diabloii.net/strategy/shuri_rogue/shuri_guide3.shtml#Bows) doesn't even mention speed bows, for some reason.

[Lanthanide]

I think I read in _the_ guide that due to a bug, swiftness and speed suffixes don't have any difference to the attack speed. I don't remember exactly, but there was something fishy about bows and speed. However, it is true that enchanted damage in bows aren't that good, because your damage comes mainly from your character and not your bow. So you could get resistance bows etc if that speed thing doesn't work as well as it should
I just downloaded Jarulf's and had a look.

The 'of readiness' suffix is broken on all items and does nothing. For bows, Swiftness will increase the attack speed in Diablo, although in Hellfire it will increase the arrow speed (fairly useless). The regular bow speed for the rogue is 0.35 seconds, and with a Swiftness bow it goes down to 0.30, so that's a 16.6% improvement in the # arrows/second, so not as good as the 33% I originally guessed at. Interestingly the arrow speed increases at a rate of '1' per 4 clvls, so a higher level Rogue will have much faster arrows, which is something that I noticed in general in Diablo but never specifically saw it. The Warrior's arrow speed increases at '1' per 8 levels and the Sorc's always stays the same at the base of 32 (so he always sucks).

Interestingly looking at the table, the Sorc has a swing speed of 0.45 when wearing only a shield (0.40 for spells), which is faster than even a staff or sword of haste - so for the first few dlvls with your sorc you should be using a shield as your main weapon, rather than a sword or anything else.

[mouseman]

Interesting! It would seem like swiftness would be a pretty neat suffix to a bow since it "boosts" the overall damage and not just the weapon damage, as you pointed out. But no guides whatsoever even notify swiftness in bows - not even to prove it pointless or something. Although there are a lot of debate about bows and arguments about them.. Would flux remember a reason why? :)

Um.. can you hit monsters with a shield? Or do you just use your fist? Will you do any damage even if you attack fairly fast?

[Vandro]

I can't say anything about Hellfire, but in normal Diablo swiftness bows (and the needler) are really great bows. The increase in attack speed is really noticable. But some elemental bows were clearly bugged and did way too much damage, so that might be a reason that swiftness bows were not mentioned (pure speculation).

[mouseman]

Actually, elemental bows were mentioned but because the triple-immunes they weren't given much praise. The guides didn't mention that they are bugged and someone did say that they can also be bugged so that they actually do less damage, so it seems to me like a kind of a gamble.

[Zarniwoop]

For a rogue, it's both str and dex. For everyone else, just dex.

And I agree totally. DO NOT try to shoot at things diagonally. The game does a terrible job with anything but the traditional x and y axis.

[Phredreeke]

Which means the rogue gets twice the damage bonus from +all suffixed equipment when using a bow :grin:

[Lanthanide]

Which means the rogue gets twice the damage bonus from +all suffixed equipment when using a bow :grin:
The rogue has much lower base character damage than the warrior does anyway, so it's really not any advantage at all.

[mouseman]

Yeah but still, you don't have to pump strenght just for to be able to wear equipment - you also get something else out of it, which is kinda nice after D2.

[Flux]

I have played my Hellfire rogue a few more times, clearing out hell and the crypt a number of times, (she's level 43 now, SP) and tried some different bows.

I've used an ob/heavens lwb (dmg 84-97), a savage/perfection LWB (dmg 86-106), and a windforce (82-121). I've got around 310 dex, varying slightly by equipment changes. I didn't notice any difference in killing speed, playing full dungeon levels. If one bow or the others took an extra shot or two, it wasn't enough to make a noticable difference. So I'll endorse Phredreeke's endorsement of the old "get resistance on your bow" recommendation. I don't care enough at this point to do wirt runs, so I'm never going to find an emerald, but obsidian/heavens is good enough (from griswold, for about 85k). That with one ob jewelry or hat and your res is set.

Note that I'm playing SP, and in MP the mosnters have double the hit points, so 10-20 bow damage may become more visible then. I remember noticing it back in the old D1 days, at least.

Windforce i did notice the killing speed difference, but not usually in a good way. I'd routinely pop knights or other large targets one shot sooner than I expected to, so that 20-25 more max damage does add up. However, I think it was slower on the whole, since the knockback made me waste numerous extra shots on witches, mages, drakes, balrogs, and other skittish moving enemies or things I had to shoot at an angle. It was somewhat helpful against knights and melee attackers, but mostly in terms of letting me hold my position. With a normal bow I shoot until they are right on top of me, teleport back a screen, and keep shooting, which is virtually just as fast.

The thing I really noticed was the diagonal misses on the knockback. Not the odd angled ones, but the straight 45 degree angles, in all four directions. The way drakes usually attack from. I'd often miss every other shot that way with the windforce, since I'd hit with one shot, knockback, and then the next shot would pass right through the target. I think it's a bug, like the monster becomes intangible at almost point blank range to the diagonal. In windy's defense, it's awesome in the crypt, since all those narrow doorways become impenetrable when you're on one side with the windforce and the hordes of hell (or wherever those janky HF monsters came from) are on the other.

The one problem with using a resistance bow argument is that there aren't any useful prefixes on jewelry, other than +mana. All the stat boosting mods are suffixes, and so are the hps boosters, while prefixes are resistance and hps. So I'm taking off something like ob/lions ring and putting on drakes/heavens ring. Which is a huge net gain on mana, but a loss on hps. If I shop a while from gris, I'll end up with one ob/zod jewel, and 2 dragon/zods. Not a bad set up, obviously, but my hps will remain in teh low 300s, while my mana will be up over 400, and that's without a royal circlet. (Awesome/lion armor.)

This is, I think, what leads some rogues to use mana shield, since it's not hard to get the mana up over 400, and while you're basically wasting pots using them for mana shield (I can clear 13-16 on about 8 blues now, just using mana to heal and teleport and some stone curse.) it's not as if gold is in short supply. The extra cushion from mana shield can save you in an emergency too, since the bigger hitters in hell can do up to 200 per swing, and you will almost certainly not be over 400 hps with a bow equipped.

[Lanthanide]

Ahh yes, that's one of the differences in Hellfire - the vendors (particularly Griswold) will take account of your current equipment and attempt to generate items that are better than what you are wearing, and they can also generate much higher quality equipment as well. So being able to buy things like your obs/heavens bow is actually possible, whereas you'd (almost?) never see that in regular Diablo. They also don't sell jewelry in regular Diablo, so you'd never see obs/zod rings or amulets at all.

Given that Hellfire was single player only, this was probably a good design call.

[Vismund]

Hmmm, I'm new here and a shade confused. The joining up thingy said I wasn't allowed to link to sites, but I joined here espec to show you guys my Youtube let's play series of Diablo. I posted here solely because I am the rogue.

So would it be okay if I gave a link to my youtube channel?

Sorry for the hassel.
Vismund

[Flux]

Hmmm, I'm new here and a shade confused. The joining up thingy said I wasn't allowed to link to sites, but I joined here espec to show you guys my Youtube let's play series of Diablo. I posted here solely because I am the rogue.

So would it be okay if I gave a link to my youtube channel?

You tube is fine. Or blizzard or gamespot or other such sites. We have a policy against links to other fansites since we used to get constant ads and spamming and those sorts of silly squabbles are no fun for anyone to sit through. Hence the site policy.

[Vismund]

Thanks alot Flux. I can understand spamming must get annoying.

My channel is http://uk.youtube.com/Vismund42
The first video can be found at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NuaIkGjqQQk

I appriciate all ratings and comments. Espec. subscriptions ;)

I would appriciate comments and tips as it has been a while since I played.

All the best
Vismund42