Advanced Rogue Guide

While the classes are pretty evenly balanced, a good Rogue might just be the best of the four. The rogue excels at dealing high damage to one target and is fairly easy to use effectively. These are the hunters who will seek out enemy actives and quickly take them out before they can do too much harm. He will annoy enemies with his evading abilities and with high stats can be a very scary opponent. Two borderline worthless skills also make this the quickest class to gather coins for in reaching (most of) its potential. Strong, well-balanced guilds need 25%-40% Rogues to really crush their opponents.

Special Ability
Level 1: +30 damage to enemy on offensive or defensive victory
Level 2: +60 damage
Level 3: +100 damage
Level 4: +100 damage, able to equip 2 skills
Level 5: +100 damage, able to equip 3 skills

Skill: Evade (lv1- 1250 coins, lv2- 5000 coins, lv3- 10000 coins)
Equipping this skill at lv1 gives a 20% chance to take no damage either attacking or defending. Lv2 increases it to 25%. Lv3 increases it again to 30%. This will only prevent base damage in a normal attack. Bonus damage from equipped generals or class skills and abilities cannot be evaded. Deshara’s bonus isn’t really bonus damage- it adds to the base attack and thus it can be evaded. It still works when stunned... not that it matters.

Skill: Poison (5000 coins)
Using this skill will cause the target to take +35 damage for his next 5 offensive or defensive fights, regardless of outcome. The success of using this skill is the same as a normal attack (your total offensive power vs. the enemy’s total defensive power). Unlike with other skills, you still do normal damage on attacking, but no rogue-specific bonus damage is applied.

Skill: Ambush (5000 coins)
Equipping this skill gives an additional +50 damage anytime you are victorious (offensive or defensively) against an enemy with full health. Borderline worthless. Why? As a Rogue your primary job is to take down enemy actives. If they are active, that means they have more than likely received retaliation damage (or already been attacked by allies) and aren't at full health. Doh!

Skill: Lacerate (7500 coins)
Using this skill decreases the max health of a target by 100. It's not stackable and for that, it's utterly worthless. Why decrease someone's max health by 100 when you can just attack them for 280 damage?


Strategy

As a rogue, your damage to a single target will be unparalelled. Therefore you will be most effective picking out strong active enemies and killing them... quickly. A warrior using Whirlwind may be able to outdamage you by up to 150 points per token, but the bulk of their damage will be to targets on either side of their primary one. You will outdamage the whirlwind warrior by about 50 points to just the single target. If the warrior decides to perform a standard attack instead of whirlwinding, you will still outdamage him by about 30 points per token... and this is just looking at how your class ability stacks up against a warrior with 3 class skills! Adding Evade, Poison, and Resistance will only increase your usefulness.

Evade and poison are your bread and butter. Buy evade first, as its 20% evade rate will increase your effectiveness in battles dramatically. It will keep you alive longer and really hurt the enemy (when he can’t evade you). Poison doesn’t deal the rogue’s +100 (+140 w/ Deshara) bonus damage when you use it but deals +175 damage over time unless it’s dispelled (5000 coin Cleric ability). You shouldn’t normally use it on an enemy with less than 800 health since it takes 3-5 rounds for its usefulness to surpass a normal attack. An exception to this (and a great use for Poison in general) is to help quickly take down enemy rogues (poison damage can’t be evaded) or any troublesome enemy actives. You probably shouldn’t use Poison if an enemy Cleric is healing your victims with Dispel since he is effectively nullifying you token for token. An easy way around this is to cast poison, then get 4-5 hits in quickly before the enemy Cleric can react.


Best Rogue Generals

#1 Deshara - (Oracle general at lv180-189)
21 attack/19 defense at lv4, with a special ability that gives +40 damage to Rogues on an offensive or defensive victory. Essentially she makes the Rogue’s greatest asset noticeably greater, causing you to do a whopping +140 bonus damage per win! Without further explaining how awesome this is, let me caution you against attacking weak enemies with Deshara... why do 290 damage to someone with only 250 health left?

#2 Aethyx - (Oracle general at lv250-259)
24 attack/18 defense at lv4, with a special ability that gives Poison +10 damage for an additional 2 turns. This means poison now does +45 damage for the next 7 offensive or defensive actions the enemy partakes in, meaning Poison can now do 315 damage over time instead of 175, almost doubling its usefulness. While Poison was only kinda useful by itself, with Aethyx it becomes a must-have. While the total potential damage with Aethyx’s Poison exceeds Deshara’s bonus, you will only rarely see it play out that way, especially if you spam it. Since it now requires 7 actions to run its course, it will be most effective on enemies with over 1100 health left, but don’t hesitate to use it on troublesome enemies with less health.

#3 Deianira - (2500 coins in guild shop)
20 attack/17 defense at lv4, with a special ability that gives an extra 20 damage in guild battles. You can view her as a mini-Deshara, and Deianira is good for all the same reasons. However, Deianira’s bonus activates all the time, win or lose, and for that reason is probably better when defending.

Optimal Rogue General Use

Deshara/Deianira when attacking normally, Aethyx when using Poison, and Deianira or your best defensive general when not spending tokens. Unlike with other classes, none of the best rogue generals are chest drops so you should have no problems getting them (eventually).

Don’t bother

Raziel the Silent (Annihilator chest @ lv150, 1.25% chance)
Ignoring the tiny chance that you’ll actually get him, his ability gives Evade an additional +6% chance to work. Evade is certainly a useful skill, but +6% isn’t really going to make a big difference. Put another way, Raziel will cause Evade to work an extra 1 out of 16 times. Worth it? Nope. If you DO get him by chance though, his ability and high stats would make an excellent defender when you aren't using Deshara/Deianira or Aethyx.

Esmeralda (Wrath chest @ lv250, 1.25% chance)
Ability causes Lacerate to decrease the target’s max health by 150 instead of 100. While this may put Lacerate in the realm of “situationally useful,” by the time you actually reach lv250 most of your enemies are going to have 2000+ health. Decreasing it to 1850 would be a waste of a token any way you look at it. She still looks sweet.

Rafaria (Oracle general at lv330-339)
She has worse stats than Esmeralda. She has the same ability but worse than Esmeralda. She is available at a higher level than Esmeralda. She looks cool but not as cool as Esmeralda. If Esmeralda is useless, that makes Rafaria extra useless.