Maronu's Thief > Bandit > Rogue Guide

<div align="center">Maronu's Thief > Bandit > Rogue Guide</div><div align="center">Currently for players lvls (1-20)</div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center"> </div> Table of Contents: 1. Introduction to Rogue - General Description of the Rogue 2. Stats - Key Stats for Rogue - Explanation of all stats 3. Skill Builds and Leveling - Thief to Bandit (lvl 1-20) --Tips for beginning your adventure --Leveling guide 1-20 --Skills 1-20 --Combos --Leveling Locations --Questions - Bandit to Rogue (lvl 20-40) 1. Introduction to Rogue Hello, and welcome to my Rogue guide.  It is currently a work in progress and will only walk you through levels 1-20, but it will provide you with an overview of the class for later levels.   I plan to expand upon this at some point, adding a walk through for higher levels as well as possibly some PVP tips, sets, and how to build your character if you want to spec to be a perma lvl 50 or lvl 45 for battle square (group pvp mode).  I mostly created this guide for the contest with the intent of helping new players; that being said, if you are new to the game and looking for some reasons to play a Rogue or a simple guide on leveling a thief from level 1-20, you may find much of this information to be beneficial. General Description of the Rogue: Rogues are an excellent PVE class with a very fluid style of play.  They are great at mobbing and have a variety of AoE melee type skills that hit the area surrounding the player.  As the most acrobatic class, many of the Rogue's skills involve flipping, jumping, and spinning around with their duel wielded claws (the rogues weapons of choice).  Their skills also include entertaining antics and shenanigans, such as hiding in a box and moonwalking. While they excel mostly in PVE and could even be considered underdogs in PvP, rogues are able to evade stack, obtain a decent amount of movespeed, lock and mob opponents fairly easily, and when played correctly, they can hold their own with many of the other classes and can be quite rewarding and fun to play. In missions, it will often be your job to rush ahead of your allies and mob large groups of monsters, leaving the rest of the group to clean up what you leave behind.  Skipping over smaller groups and saving them for the others will be key if you want to complete missions quickly.  In PVE the Rogue class relies mostly upon the skills Final Decision, Upper Screwdriver, and Windmill.  I encourage you to watch videos to familiarize yourself with some of the classes skills as well as the other classes before deciding that Rogue is for you.  Below is a skill demonstration video.  In other versions the class names are different and you will often encounter players who refer to bandits as jesters or rogues as harlequins.  THQ used those names for the class as well.  They are the same thing, so do not be surprised if you here the class called by one of those names. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhW_CK2eWc Our moonwalk skill turns us into an astronaut instead of MJ due to potential lawsuits. 2. Stats Key Stats for Rogues: Before we get started, let us talk a little bit about the various stats in the game.  The main stats for Rogues are agility, health, aim rate, evade, movement speed, and critical damage.  Mostly you will be focusing on health, agi, and aim for leveling purposes.  Survivability and being able to hit monsters is key in PVE.  A little bit of movement speed can also be fun as a rogue, especially since it increases the speed of our windmill skill, but you will not be seeing move speed on many equips anytime soon.  It can be found rarely as a soul craft option on boots as well as some accessories for level 40+ characters.  If you manage to get a character card from a quest after level 20 (currently unavailable, but you might be able to get one in the future) you can get movement speed from the card.  Don't fill the card out until you have looked at a guide or checked with a friend, as your choices affect the stats you get.  More on that later.  Evade is mostly for pvp, and you need a lot of it in order for it to be effective (30-300+ depending on level , starting at lvl 20 since you can't pvp before then).  You should prioritize evade last and only worry about it if you are planning to stop leveling and focus on pvp.  No matter how high your evade is, a player's hit rate on you will not go below 30%.  Keep that in mind if you are ever planning to stack evade.  For the most part, you will probably be out growing most of the equips you get at lower levels fairly quickly, and you don't need to worry about them too much, but understanding stats will give you an idea of what is best to use during your adventure.  Generally, aim on accessories, and health or agi on armor will be what you are looking for equipment wise. Explanation of all stats:

Spoiler

Strength (str) Increases your characters physical damage by a small amount.  This can be noticeable at the beginning of your adventure, but later on the damage will not be noticible when compared to the benefits of enchanting your weapon.  This is not an important stat for Rogues or any class for that matter. Intelligence (int) Increases mp, magic damage, and magic attack.  Extra mp is kind of nice, but we deal physical damage.  There are other stats that are much more important than int. Health (hlt) Increases your hp and gives you a small amount of defense.  Good for rogues. Agility (agi) Increases evade rate, accuracy, and defense.  Good for rogues.   Aim Rate (aim) This stat allows you to hit monsters that are higher level than you in PVE and hit evade stackers in PVP.  I would recommend around 160-200 aim later in the game if you are planning to fight monsters 5-10 levels higher than you.  In order to get an idea of if you will be able to hit someone in PVP subtract their evade from your AR and you should get the approximate percent that you will hit (if the number is below 30 your hit rate will be 30% since this is the worst possible). Evade Rate (evade) This will make enemies miss you, but not unless you have a decent amount (30-200+ depending on level).  During endgame many classes, including Rogues, can obtain 300+ evade, but aim and health should usually be prioritized first for leveling and also pvp.  Hit rate not being able to go below 30% applies to monsters as well.  This means you will always have a chance of getting hit and invariably you may eventually get killed if you rely solely upon evade for protection.     Critical Damage (cd) You will deal more damage when you crit.  It's good for PVE and taking out high defense players in PVP.  Pretty self explanatory. Critical Rate (cr)   This stat is a bit deceptive.  It might seem good at first glance, but the bonus percent is relative to your base crit rate rather than 100%.  Example:  If you crit 2% of the time and have an accessory that gives you 5% crit rate your total crit rate would be 1.05 x .02 = .021 or only 2.1%.  If a players says that something gives absolute crit rate, they are saying that for that particular equips the bonus is added rather than multiplied to the base.  Equips that give absolute cr are only labeled with crit rate, but they are usually IM items or rare equips.  Except for the few items with absolute crit rate this is a terrible stat.  Don't get it. Movement speed (movespeed) Self Explanatory.  Makes you run faster.  Lots of fun and very good for pve.  This can help you catch players and keep up with fast moving characters in PVP as well.  The base is 150, so percent movespeed gives more of a boost than regular movespeed.   Armor Defense and Armor Magic Defense Increases the defense of the piece of armor that it is on by the amount listed.  This will not help you very much unless you have enchanted your armor to a high level (+15 or higher) and the armor naturally has high defense.  Useless stat for the levels covered in this guide. Physical and Magical Damage Drop Rare stats found on some accessories and IM equips.  Will make you take less of the type of damage listed by percent listed.  Not bad, but you won't be able to get enough of it to make much of a difference.  It's mostly for endgame mages.  Don't worry about getting it as a soul craft option.  Health, agi, aim, and evade are better. Maximum/Minimum Physical Attack Increases physical attack.  These are not terrible stats to have on a weapon.  Max is better than min. Maximum/Minimum Magic Attack Increases magic damage.  You are not a mage.

3. Skill Builds and Leveling Thief to Bandit (lvl 1-20) <div align="left"><div align="center">

Thieves use their speed, stealth, and intelligence to their own advantage. Their stealth and agility allows them to gain the upper hand in any battle by positioning themselves in advantageous position against any foe. Thieves count on close quarters combat to search out weak spots within an enemy's defense and exploit it to their own needs. It's not easy to find a thief and by the time you see one, it may already be too late.

</div></div> Sounds pretty good, but the Dragon Saga website does not tell us that thieves are the most difficult class to start with and level from 1-20.  Most of our skills do relatively low damage.  We lack the mobbing ability of warriors and do not have the range of archers or magicians.  As the humble thief, the rogue starts off as the worst PVE classes available, but don't worry.  If you are not daunted and have the bravery and skill to reach level 20, you will be able to job advance to bandit, a beast able to kill a large group of mobs with the press of a button or two.  For now, stay on your toes.  If you are new to the game you may find soloing missions to be very difficult during these early levels.  There are many bosses and some groups of monsters inside the missions that can kill you quite easily if you are not paying attention and are not quick to react.  In particular, be wary of the axe brother bosses and groups of ranged monsters (axe throwers and shamans).  You will find the MM runs to be quite slow if you solo; therefore, I strongly encourage you to join a party for mission maps (MMs) whenever possible.  It will make things easier.  You will finish the mission faster and get more experience.  With that in mind, let us begin. Tips for beginning your adventure    - Enter channel 1.  Being on the recommended channel for your level will give you an experience boost and you are more likely to find players around your level. - Complete the tutorial.  You will get a helpful gift box, which contains a variety of nice items you can receive as you level up (skill reset, feathers to revive you if you die, some pots, etc). - Red quests are hero quests, which are your primary quests.  These are important for advancing the storyline.  Yellow quests (adventure quests) are less important, but you might as well do them because they still offer decent exp awards. - You can press "L" to bring up the quest log and complete many quests directly from the log.  This will save you the time of running back to the npc. - Hold Z and let go once the bar is charged to do a "charge attack".  This will be useful against some bosses at these low levels. - Press k to open your skill menu - Press y to open the community tab where you can form a party and edit the party name.  Click a person who has a party name above their head to request to join. - To whisper someone type /w CharacterName then press enter. - Click menu and go to keypad setup to change your keys around or see what various keys do. - Make sure to buy potions from the potion seller in town.  Keeping your mp up so you can use skills and your hp up will be important.  Mobs do high damage during these early levels.  It is not the mage's job to keep you healed, although some can heal you if they have high level slow heal as you get closer to lvl 20. - Hold down and press x to attack a mob that has been knocked on the ground - Bosses cannot be launched, stunned, or knocked down. - When you see a boss about to attack quickly dash to the side or away to evade.  Also, most attacks won't hit you in the air, but beware of lag.<div>- Do not approach groups of ranged monsters directly from the front - Press esc to skip the boss intro when entering a boss map.  If one player does not do this, everyone must watch the scene.  It gets annoying for players who have seen it 100 times.  Press esc!  Please see Miname's Guide on this if you do not feel it has been stressed enough here. Leveling Guide 1-20 Before you leave town, it should be noted that there are two exclusive medals that you can only get during this point in the game.  They are "God Like Control" and "Grind Master".  In order to see your medals press J to go to open your journal and go to the medals tab.  Feel free to explore the rest of the journal as well, especially the quest section.  Some medals offer decent stats when you equip them, and one of the ways to complete the 4th job change way later is to get 70k achievement points by collecting medals.  The two exclusive medals are obtained by obtaining 2nd job on the first day of playing and reaching 2nd job without dieing.  If you like to collect things and want these two medals, feel free to try to become a bandit post haste and meet the requirements; however, these are not the best medals in the game, and they are not needed in order to do the 4th job change, by any means, so trying to collect them is entirely up to you. Pick up the yellow quests and red quest.  Your main objective at this point will be to do hero quests, since they will walk you through the story and also help you to reach level 20, but you can do the others when they are convenient and on the way.  The game will display a Q symbol above the monsters that you need to kill, which is extremely convenient and saves you the trouble of remembering what to kill when you have a bunch of quests that you can do in the same area.  Simply follow the hero quest line, and when you are required to do a mission, do not hesitate to join a party or make your own.  You should also focus on familiarizing yourself with the various skills available/recommended to you and gaining precise control of your character if the controls feel awkward.  Soloing is quite possible, but if you are going for the medals, don't go into the mission maps until you feel ready.  If you don't know what to do, at any point, don't hesitate to open your journal.  You can see the quests available to you, and from the quest section you can also tab between all quests and main quests.  At level 19 you will be able to pick up a quest called "Fellowship entry test begins" in the first major town, Port of Winds.  This quest line marks the end of the first stage of your adventure, and it will eventually lead you to become a member of the dragon fellowship, granting you your job advancement!  Note that part of this quest line requires that you go to the culverts.  They can be accessed from Port of Winds.  I've seen a number of players ask where the culverts are, but you should have no problem finding them or any other location provided you are using your map.  Make sure your equip your gas mask because otherwise you will take damage from the toxic gas while you remain in the area. Skills 1-20 Quick Skill Build for Leveling (needs skill reset later): Air Combo Launch: lvl 1 Cutdown: lvl 3 Aerial Frenzy: lvl 5 Rocket Punch: lvl 5 Thief's Stealth: 0 or 1 (1 is to buff archers for faster AAS) Final Thief Skill Build (after lvl 20 skill reset or what you should use if you didn't do the tutorial for some reason): Air Combo Launch: lvl 1 Cutdown: lvl 1 or 3 Aerial Frenzy: lvl 1 Rocket Punch lvl 5 Vitality: 0 or 1 (1 if planning to evade stack only) Dexterity: 0 or 5 (5 if planning to evade stack only) Thief's Stealth: 0 or 1 In depth look at skills

Spoiler

Skill Name: Air Combo Launch Description: Launches standing enemy into the air. Recommended Level: 1 Reason: Prerequisite Skill Skill Name: Aerial Frenzy Description: Hits airborne enemies for low damage.  In pvp, will not hit a player who has aerial recovered. Recommended Level: 5 for leveling purposes if planning to skill reset.  Level 1 after skill reset or if not planning to use. Reason: Main source of damage at low level, but mostly used for combing and assisting archers Anti Air Shot skill in pvp at later levels. Skill Name: Somersault Kick Description: Similar to Air Combo Launch Recommended Level: 0 Reason:  Longer animation and cooldown than air combo launch.  Most of our skills are ground based. Skill Name: Cutdown Description: Shoot downwards and attack enemies from above.  After being launched, this skill can help you get back on the ground more quickly.  Launches at level 3. Recommended Level: 3 or 1 Reason:  Having this skill at 3 will make leveling to 20 easier.  The launch can be followed up with aerial frenzy. Skill Name: Rocket Punch Description: A ranged boxing glove skill that has a chance of inflicting stun on the opponent Recommended Level: 5 Reason:  Good damage below lvl 20.  Higher level gives a higher chance of stun.  Good catch skill in pvp. Skill Name: Nozzle Tuning Description: Upgrades the damage of rocket punch. Recommended Level: 0 Reason: Rocket punch is a low damage skill that is only used to stun the enemy. Skill Name: Relaunch Description: Launches an enemy that is lying on the ground. Recommended Level: 0 Reason:  Most of our skills are ground based. Skill Name: Double Attack Description: A chance of dealing an extra attack during your x attack combo. Recommended Level: 0 Reason:  Only works with x attack Skill Name: Venom Description: Shoot poison mist at an enemy Recommended Level: 0 Reason:  Slow and terribly low damage Skill Name: Vitality Description: Group health buff Recommended Level: 0 or 1 Reason:  Prerequisite Skill, High mp cost Skill Name: Dexterity Description: Group agi buff Recommended Level: 0 or 5 Reason:  Useful if you are going evade build and have enough skill points Skill Name: Thief's Stealth Description: Group buff that raises attack speed Recommended Level: 0 or 1 Reason:  Only level to 1 if you want to buff archers to help the speed of their AAS skill or priests double shot at later levels.  Otherwise useless.

Combos - Cutdown > Aerial Frenzy - Air Combo Launch > Aerial Frenzy Leveling Locations Press "M" to display the world map or "N" to display a map of the area if you get lost.  You should focus on hero quests, but f4 will provide a good source of experience if you run out of hero quests or feel that you want to gain an extra level or two before moving on to the next area. - lvl 1 to 5: Windia Plains - lvl 5-10: Advanced Windia Plains - lvl 10-15: Traiter Ridge - lvl 15-19: Canyon of Oblivion - lvl 19-20: Wailing Hill Wolves Den (required during part of the fellowship entry test begins quest line) Questions Q: What to do with unwanted equips? A: Click the hammer icon in the corner of your inventory and then click the equip to turn it into souls.  They can be sold on the market for good amounts of gold. Q: I can't use equips.  How to unseal equips? A: Go to the NPC Julie and select Exchange Scroll.  Exchange souls for seal removal souls then click the scrolls to break the seal on equips. Q: How to upgrade equips? A: Generally, I wouldn't worry about upgrading equips till later levels; however, to answer the question, go to Julie if you want to soulcraft.  It is the general consensus that you can safely sc equips from regular (white with no bonus options) to advanced (green with one bonus option) without fear of the equip breaking; however some players have reported things breaking, so use your own discretion. For enchanting, go to the blacksmith and enchant your gear.  You can enchant from +1 to +4 without fear of breaking or resetting.  After these levels you will need insurance scrolls, which can be purchased from the item mall. Bandit to Rogue and Beyond -coming soon-

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Edited by Maronu, 30 May 2011 - 06:43 AM.

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Maronu's Thief > Bandit > Rogue Guide

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