Best melee weapon skill for rogues?

So I was thinking of making a pure rogue character save for one melee weapon skill, but I don't know which would be best. I'm tempted to go for axes for the large crit bonuses, but there are relatively few axes in the game as far as I know (I've certainly not encountered a huge number) and one of the others might be better. Any ideas?

Other skills would be: Archery, Tinkering, Burglary, Assassination, Artful Dodger and Perception, with the potential to swap one of them (Perception) for either Fungal Arts or Archaelogy, though after my current character with FA I'm getting a little tired of dropping spores constantly and I'm not a huge fan of Archaeology despite its usefulness.

 

Personally I chose swords, since that includes daggers and thus sounds rogue-ish.
But really, the only thing you don't want is maces (blunt damage with low melee power is a bad idea) or staves (likewise), so other than that it depends on your luck with finding a good weapon matching your skill.

And if it's about other skills, then it depends on whether you are playing vanilla or with mods. If it's the first one, then I don't see much wrong with your build (though you might want to change Perception to Big Game Hunter, as it does give you an ability to get some food earlier for the late-game if you are playing on GR without spending points in it), and if it's the second one, then taking Poisoner or Ninjutsu might be a good idea (depending on whether you want to go purely for crossbows, or if you want to have thrown stuff too). Other than that, depending on your approach to the game you might want to change Assassination into something, but I don't know about that one since you might actually be getting some use out of it.

 

Honestly, for a rogue I don't found melee weapons all that useful.. You are a bit squishier than warriors, and even they have health problems are higher levels, and your crossbow/ traps will kill most enemies just as fast anyways. There is actually a very good axe that is craftable in the Tinkering tree (its a pretty rare hidden recipe..), so if you insist on a melee weapon, that works best with your crafting skill, assuming you are going for maximum (5) Tinkering. Fungal Arts is probably more useful than Perception, Artful Dodger or Assassination, you get alot of free healing, and many other useful buffs.

 

I'm a big fan of maces, largely because of Dwarven Handshake.

 

Well, Artful Dodger actually can be useful, depending on the build. The same with Assasination and Perception (though the last one can freely be changed for something else most of the time).
But I do agree that melee weapons skills are pretty much fillers, and most of the time you'll better off simply getting something else for passive bonuses.

 

swords are the best melee weapon for rogues, since they specialize in light armor, they get the most benefit from dodge and counterattack.

 

Except for the fact that Light Armor is a joke in Dredmor right now.

Imperial Boilerplate reduces your dodge by 2.

 

Rogues tend to get Tinkering, which crafts the best axe in the game.. and a weak sword. If you are getting level 5 (4 if you find the goggles) Tinkering, I say axes are best. If not, then swords are probably your best bet, the sword's power attack has more range so is also probably better than the axe's power attack for rogues.

I wasn't saying those skills were bad Kazeto, I just meant that Fungal Arts is really useful.

 

Swords stack with the Counterattack you get from rogue levels, but regardless you're not going to want to be attacking things later because they'll crit you through your own counterattacks and counter your actual attacks. Rogues generally can't take very much of that kind of punishment.

Maces are pretty good because of the knockback they have. You could go for Psionics for your knockback needs, however. Unarmed also provides knockback and (currently) adds damage to your crossbow. You'll also be able to dual wield tomes and/or shields using unarmed.

Staves might work in rogue builds that use a lot of magic.

I don't really see going with axes as anything but a pure warrior. They provide no utility and their only defense is the higher damage from crits. In general to make use of that you need to be able to take more punishment than a rogue does.

I tend to go with either staves or unarmed as a rogue. The others don't seem to really be worth the slot anymore now that the non-specialization debuff no longer occurs.

 

Few questions/clarifications because I been thinking about similar.

1) when you say dual wield tomes/shields do you mean take dual wielding skill tree and then get a benefit from it by equipping 2 shields/tomes? Or do you just mean equip, I was curious as I read that the dual wielding bonuses dont work with unarmed, but is this a loophole?

2) Why do you need magic, with staves, are you saying that staves work as cleanup for when you are out of mana? Or is there some benefit of having magic power along with staves, I ask this because I took the axe skill tree, but then did all of dungeons lvl11-13 with the fruit staff because I had picked up the death curse so I needed food, then was paranoid after I removed the curse, so I stocked up about 900 fruits in my inventory before switching back to an axe, the staff was doing great damage as it was.

3) I agree, axes didnt seem to be killing fast, and they dont provide any blocks/counters so you are just trading punches, which hurts at the zoo's if axe is your only damage method

4) What is the non-specialization debuff, I think I know, because when I had the axe tree filled up and switched to that staff I was doing a lot of damage, assuming I was getting the bonus from the axe tree applied to the staff, does this work with dual wield and/or would this work if I took Axe,Mace,Sword and used any melee weapon and get all 3 tree's bonus? I would love to take swords,dual wield, and mace/axe and get all that counter bonus but with a different weapon equipped.

Sorry for all the questions

 

Also to add to this, I was using an axe build and got the Diggle God Of Digging blessing, does that add fleshbore? Basically at the end game, every hit and counter attack I made stacked Fleshbore on the enemies, it was really funny to see them melt the more it stacked because they had reduced absorption and resistances, I stacked one enemy 5 deep (J-factor says it can be stacked 3 times) Also my crossbow would crit and add fleshbore, same with the staff, and I dont think I EVER missed with the golden crossbow, though the curse it would put on them didnt seem to do much at the late levels everything resisted it, but early on if I shot something with the golden crossbow it would degen really fast.

Are these things due to the high crit chance? Fleshbore does it trigger on Crit? and does a crit chance bypass the chance that you would miss normally with an item such as the golden crossbow?

 

You can equip tomes and shields or dual wield them freely without having the dual wield skill, any kind of magic skill or the shield skill, regardless of what weapon you have in your other hand. Tomes don't count as weapons, and there's no penalty for equipping shield without taking the shield skill tree, it just provides bonuses when using a shield (this one doesn't double if you have two equipped though IIRC).

 

I thought he was asking if dual wielding tomes or shields provide the dual wielding tree's bonus's, so that you could use it as a work around for a Dual Wielding Unarmed Combat class.. sadly, I don't think it works that way. It could be cool if it did though ^^

 

1) I just mean using two tomes or two shields. There is no penalty for either one. I don't think you'd get far meleeing a lot with just two tomes but it's convenient for crossbow builds. You are right that DW doesn't work with Unarmed (one of the many reasons it's gimp...)

2) Some people like to play with magic. Staves provide a lot of magic boosting stats. Rogue-y characters tend to do well with magic because they don't need to wear heavy armor like warriors do and get a lot of Savvy from rogue skills. Dual Wielding staves could be effective in this case because you'd gain a lot of Block and Haywire from stacking the staves skill bonus.

3) Axes are good if you do have the ability to trade blows. Crit is a very good stat because it overrides a lot of defenses.

4) The debuff no longer exists as of a few patches ago.

 

Thanks all for the clarification, I guess I still dont know what the debuff was since I have been playing since after it was removed, was it just that if you took axe mastery and equipped a sword, that you would lose all the axe tree +crit and other bonuses?

You guys are really helpful, thanks again

 

It would give you a pretty big debuff if you equipped a weapon that you weren't skilled with. Equipping a sword with axe skill, would not just not give you the axe tree bonus's (I am pretty sure it does that now anyways), but would make the sword near useless.. you'd almost never even hit anything really. The same thing happened with dual wielding as well.

 

So lets say I want to make a Mace build, but I take the axe, sword, and dual wield trees as well, I get them all maxed, I would have 2 maces equiped but get all the +Counter and +Crit bonuses?

that sounds kinda fun Im sure if this is true, its just temporary though, thanks for the answer on the debuff.

 

I'll do this in list format:

Taking Mace skill + wielding sword: No bonus applied.
Taking Mace skill + wielding mace: Mace bonus applied.
Taking Sword and Mace skill and wielding one of each: Both bonuses applied but Hands Full debuff.
Taking Sword, Mace, DW, and wielding one of each: Both bonuses applied.
Taking a weapon skill and dual wielding that weapon: Bonus applied twice.

 

Hmm.. Wasn't aware that the bonus doubled, or that there was a Hands Full debuff (since I almost always dual wielding now). Thanks for clarifying those two points !