Poisons and dual wield

Nexus Discussion Thief
1

Thieves were one of the premier solo classes for sure. Backstab was pretty awesome, specially once you got to a certain point. However thief damage was kind of lackluster after the backstab so you generally had to rely on just auto attacks to take down your target once the backstab was done. Arcadia said with the new code that on hit effects will be possible, so I think that poisons could be a great thing to add to thieves. You could potentially have a few different kinds of poisons:

One that does instant set damage, and one that adds a DOT damage, would probably be the two main damage poisons. These would probably be the main two poisons used, prally mainhand the static damage and put the DoT on the offhand.

Maybe you could also add a poison that gives a chance for backstab to lethal blow if its coated on your mainhand weapon, heartseeker poison or something.

Maybe a blinding poison that lowers a mobs accuracy. You would just have to be careful about making poisons too good, as a blinding poison could potentially be something if its too good you may end up with everyone bringing a thief to their group everytime if no one else has a blind mechanic.

Maybe a thief can even coat a missile weapon with poison and you could have crippling poison that slows a mobs movement around the room, you could backstab, then switch to missile and kite.

You may have to tone down backstab a little but if you up their other damage I think it would work pretty well. the only problem with Dual wielding is how you want to incorporate backstab modifiers because backstab was already really strong, giving it another 25% damage would be pretty huge if you backstab with the offhand weapon as well. You could maybe make it so thieves can backstab with their mainhand weapon only, and the offhand just does a regular attack for 25% damage when you backstab. That way you get a little bonus damage but its not crazy.

And I don’t think thieves need to able to wield two hand weapons, as that causes the same problem as dual wield would if you allow backstab with both hands. If you can make the weapons two handable and one handable then they should be able to wield weapons that have both options, but just only be able to use it as a one hander.

I suggested in another post giving Rogues riposte along with fighters, but I think if something close to this poisons system is implemented I think they will be plenty strong. And they aren’t really designed to be a tanking class, they just offtank for a few after a backstab, and then the real tank should get it off them in theory.

2

For start I’d lower the backstab damage. If kept as it was, it would be way too high other mechanics are to be added.

Poisons are naturally Rogue/Assassin mechanic and it would be nice to be able to play with it. Depending on the strength of the poisons, perhaps mob cannot be effected by more than 1.

Aside few the few poison’s mentioned already we could have things like:
Silence poison – increases the cast time between spells for XX amount of time. (I wouldn’t go for full silence as it would be rather overpowered vs mages).
Paralyze poison – X% chance to cause stun for X amount of time.
Health poison – blocks target ability to regenerate health over time (to be useful vs let say Troll who have high regen during battle?)
Mana poison - blocks target ability to regenerate mana (combine that with mage drain, poof, useless caster :slight_smile: ).

Also poisons should affect only living mobs. Elementals, Undead ect. would be naturally immune. Some creatures would have natural immunity to certain poisons. Other might have “Resist poison” on, which could be countered by Mage to remove the target resist (or monk special hits shattering through the mob resist shields if the idea is embedded) and only then poisons could work vs those targets.

Regarding dual wield, I’d say go for daggers only, or sword in MH and dagger in off hand at best. And no 2H weapons for rogues (I think they were unable to use blunt and 2h weapons anyway or I’m wrong?).
For backstab modifier should be taken whatever weapon is used in MH. Otherwise it might get too complicated.

What about additional mechanics during “stealth” such as:
Sap – renders the target “asleep” for X amount of time, any damage will remove the effect. Usable vs humanoid only

3

Yea having the poisons only work on living is a good call, I had thought of that but lost track of it in my ramble there.

In regards to stun poison, its kinda the same thing as the blind poison I suggested, that one may just be too strong. Some of the others sounded pretty good though.

If we start doing a lot of hard cc like sap, it might be a slippery slope of deviating the game too much from what nexus was. Then you might have to add poly for mages, then we would have to think of new mob abilities and make the game harder to account for cc. Besides there needs to be some risk to stealing, if you could just sap a mob and then steal from it without risk of a vital that would be undoubtedly broken. Then you end up with level 1 thieves stealing from stuff way over their level.

I don’t know if you remember when steal was based off Dexterity and I think size and level didn’t factor in, you could go steal from Krakkens with near 100% success rate with sprites and halflings at level 1.

4

I only had lvl14 thief so, not that much experience with it :slight_smile:. And this is entire idea generation phase. Some are stupid others not so much,

Also I kinda assumed any action vs sapped targed would break the CC and invoke normal reaction like vitals and such. The suggestion was merely to mitigate multiple mobs in the room or new encounter while you handle with the current one. But I can live without it :slight_smile:.

I definitely dissagree with blind vs stun mechanics. Blind lowers chance to hit on the mob but the mob remains active, casts spells, attacks, moves ect.

Paralyze essentialy stuns the target for X amount of time. Not to mention it’s a chance to stun.

5

To be honest I don’t remember many, if any creatures, above tier ten that could be stunned anyway? It was just an aggro change for monks way back when to tank. It was always resisted.

6

Backstab was OP. After that you had to finish off mobs. Our ogre thieves could one shot a whole lot of mobs at 10 to 14th tier. It was very very fun to play rogues. They were feared by all other players except berskers and fighters with enough armor and my monks. I could eventually dodge a backstab and return with a nice touch of death.