New Combo or Skill, "Obscure"...

To "Obscure" ...


Does anyone use Distract for anything?

I decided to begin finding uses for the "Distract Skill" in the Subterfuge tree.

Because there is no "Pickpocket", there seems only one other use I can think of, which would be sneeking away gathering things from higher content than my rogue character could otherwise be in.

Some skills enhance other skills further down their skill trees. Is there any other use or benifit from this Distract skill? Does the Distract skill enhance any other further down the Subterfuge tree?

One thing I have noticed, is that Distract gains in skill in the same way that the skill "Trip" does, where gains are increased through a "success not failure" rather than other skills gaining from each use.

"Trip combines with Rend to create the Hamstring combo"...

In regard to the above mentioned Distract activities, I would like to see a combo made from:

• Distract + Escape = "Obscure"

The combo "Obscure" would not greatly, but "tremendously" expand and extend with duration of effect of the Escape skill, long enough for a successful attempt at gathering a resource from any heavily guarded area.

Imagined case senario;
Using the stealth skill along with using distraction, the player evades detection to close with his desired objective. Using distract, the player moves as many monsters/animals/humanoids away from the objective. The player begins harvesting the target. Once detected the player now combining Distract and Escape to produce "Obscure", provides a further amount of time to harvest the target before being once more detected.

"Obscure" success, should be directly linked with all the skills (and their learned levels) listed below:

• Distract
• Camouflage
• Silent Movement
• Escape

All of these skills have interest in being able to "Obscure" what is happening at the scene of the theft, which is not a theft as such, yet fulfills our needs of thievery, "to spirit something secretly away".

If not in Combo, this skill should be replace the Pickpocket, or added to the Subterfuge tree.

To "Obscure" What'cha' Tink a Bout Dat hu ?'


*Special note: The Subterfuge Tree has no combos other than using trip in the blades section of combo, yet also, most of the stealthy skills in Subterfuge are virtually useless in gaining things ''

What, do, you, think?
~Time Lord~

 

chris developed distract at the same time as he was building the rise and it's great there. have a room full of enemies you can't just charge in and take, just around a blind corner? distract one out and around the corner, kill out of sight of his fellows, repeat.

you can use distract to lead mobs away from something, like a gathering node, but also TOWARD something, like a blind corner or a mob of a different faction

 

Totally agreed.

The first skill in the tree was developed with a (then) high level scene in mind?
That is questionable game design.
For a low level skill, I would expect it to have especially early applications with good hints of how to make it work.

I tried hard to make this skill yield any good result when I was new in the game, to no avail. Then I never touched it ever again.

Subterfuge tree is another one of those things that looked great on paper but in reality it's not much more than a gimmick. For such mechanics to really work, the whole AI and mob behavior should be reworked, which is unlikely to happen.

The only player I ever witnessed using the Subterfuge tree was the late Ozzy Questor, and it only worked for him because he was in a party, so others catched aggro while he spent time getting backstabs.

 

Sure that's the kind of thing its designed for. Not even that its necessarily higher content than you but you don't want to fight closely. Might just want to avoid someone or set up a sniper shot or send a pet to do the dirty work.. Or maybe you only want to fight one enemy at once.. The game should allow a lot of different game play styles and pure stealth characters rely on stealth.

It would also be great to have a smoke bomb type potion that let's you escape easier, as well as the ability to set up traps for enemies, physical or magical.

Combos are always good, too; thr game needs more combos.

 

For what it's worth, you can also use mesmerizing melody to gather without fighting mobs. It's basically like walking around inside of a force field.

It's not always practical since it has a long execution time and mobs with ranged attacks can hit you outside of the song's radius, but with high level bard innates and wicked caster gems it's pretty effective. Probably not usually as practical as just killing stuff, but it's pretty fun. Not very rogueish though I guess.

 

That's very useful. I will need to lure other things away from the Aether Corpion which is something I need to accomplish solo in order to get it's Aether Corpion Poison Gland used in Aether Corpion Poison.

This is another useful thing, as I will need to keep the Aether Corpion busy while I kill it.


Back to this proposed New Combo or Skill, "Obscure"...

The "Escape" Skill works at only close range, while creatures who use ranged attacks never come off target being far away outside the Escape area of effect.

Not that real life has anything to do with much of our game, but in real life practice, the first to loose targeting on an escaping target are the ranged attacks, therefore the skill "Escape" is no more than a dodge and is therefore not in good resemblance to it's name, yet if combined with "Distract" and Escape then having a larger or infinite range would then be more in tune to the discription of a real life Escape.

If such a combo or skill were linked to Camouflage and Silent Movement, this would then add relevance and importance to these two very un-usefull skills.

Bringing relevance into the Subterfuge Tree's skills is what this is all about. Yes things can be accomplished through other skill trees such as our friend @Lazlo has stated (even stunning targets with the stun properties of other attacks accomplishes the time needed to harvest something), yet Subterfuge in it's own tree, hasn't those same qualities which would allow to "steal something away or steal one's self away" from direct confrontation.

Even NPCs come up and salute a successfully Camouflaged or Silent Moving Avatar. They can see us, which means those skills are only cosmetic and don't actually work in a practical or meaningful way. The cohesiveness of what is sugested brings them more into a truer Suterfuge Motif.

"Obscure", it's a need for any successful "Subterfuge" ...

... "Sorry, I am a Rogue and therefore not a Tank"
~Time Lord~

 

One of the things I believe in is "Rhetoric" ... so, I offer this;

The world has gone tamer/bow/mage crazy lately with all the ear markings of Power Creep. If there were such a combo, think what it could do in the hands of such a majority of players. I suspect it would reach "exploit" levels of unintended circumstance.

That's my offer in opposing view on this sugestion.
~Time Lord~

 

Subterfuge has been labeled as useless by a lot of people. I've spent the majority of my playtime today looking into that. I've always used it successfully to some degree, but a few hours of exploration, some of it on stream have effectively debunked that. A few tweaks wouldn't hurt, however it's anything but useless.

 

I just dropped "Sap", as it didn't fit into my personal Rogue's build, and it didn't seem effective. I'm now considering dropping "Camouflage and Silent Movement", as I've seen little (actually none) use for them.
"Backstab" seems OK and "Poison", though I find poison to be very weak. I do have it long lasting at 132 skill in it, but even when compounding their use, they still seem very weak. I am however staying the poison course, as I am hoping it has redeaming qualities I have yet to see.
~TL~

 

Sneak attacks damage scales depending on your stealth %
Silent movement is decent stealth, camaflouges is a lot higher, but you can't move.

 

Sap can be a nice way to lay down a camouflaged sneak attack. Like Vesper said, Sneak Attack scales with your Stealth % (the value described by the tooltip, not the skill level). A way to increase your damage when needed could be to silent movement over to the mob, and Sap it. This will leave it mezmerized for a few seconds, allowing you to use camouflage and then sneak attack, making your stealth% much higher, resulting in bigger damage.

I don't personally find it useless, but most of the tree is sub-par compared to anything else, especially compared to the metas of today, the game is far too rapid paced, playing a stealth build at least in PvE slows you down to a crawl compared to other builds. Even for avoiding mobs, a good bit of fast running like we all know how to do, and you're already making the mobs leash back to their original position, no need to stealth past them.

Poison is much better with daggers, followed by Spears and Shortswords. These weapons give a bonus to the damage dealt by the poisons, up to 100% more if you are using dual wield daggers, which can be pushed further with jewels and artifacts. Some poisons serve a debuff role, like applying healing reduction modifier, attack speed slows or stuff like that, while Corpion poison is there for pure additional damage, that is usually the one you will want to use to get your actual DPS up (and it can bump up quite nicely with the right tools).

 

I used it to move mobs away from resource nodes when my avatar was too low a level to fight, also lured corpions to fight the aether variants when they were around and then I could finish them off once low enough.

 

Yeah I totally agree with that.

You can do 3k big hits, but only one once every 10 seconds... no way the DPS is significant compared to other trees.

And in PvP it's literally only for ganking. If the enemy is not afk or spots the subterfuge user, subterfuge gets rekt.

(This last past Vesper forgot to mention)