How I Play My Level 50 Rogue
How I play my level 50 EverQuest Rogue solo on Live: a bare-bones melee class carried by backstab, the Sneak Attack discipline, and the high-damage poisons you buy in the Plane of Knowledge, plus mercenaries, evade, and utility skills like pick lock.
At level 50 the Rogue is a bare-bones melee class with almost no abilities. I play this one solo on Live, which is the better place to be a Rogue because you can buy real poisons in the Plane of Knowledge. The whole game plan is to backstab as much as I can, let the poison proc do the heavy lifting, and lean on a mercenary and the odd utility skill to survive.
Session Overview
Not much to the class yet.
- Role: solo melee damage. There is no box, no synergy, just me and a mercenary.
- Bare bones: Rogues have no spells and only a couple of useful disciplines at 50. Classic through Gates of Discord is a boring stretch for pure melee (Rogues, Warriors, Monks).
- Live versus TLP: on Live the poisons make a Rogue hit hard. On a TLP you cannot buy them until much later, damage is low, and groups are hard to find.
- Where it opens up: once the AAs and disciplines arrive in the 80s the class gets much more interesting. This is the quiet part.
Backstab and Sneak Attack
The one thing a Rogue does.
- Backstab: be behind the mob as much as possible. Backstabs range from around 93 to 359 with my current weapon. I keep it auto-fired because I am lazy.
- Sneak Attack: the one discipline I go out of my way to use. After a few seconds hidden, it makes your next backstab never miss and hit harder. Hide, sneak, get behind, then backstab.
- Positioning problem: the backstab arc is narrow, and going from face-tanking a mob to landing behind it in one move is hard when you are solo.
- Chaotic Stab (59): later I get to backstab from the front for less damage, which is a second real button to press.
Poisons
Where the Live damage comes from.
- Buy them in Plane of Knowledge: the Rogue poison merchant is by the small bank near the Guild Lobby zone line. I am using the level 40 tier (Bite of the Shissar line).
- Big procs: the poison can proc for around 1,400, which on Live is where most of my lower-level damage comes from.
- Aggro cost: a 1,400 proc is a lot of hate. On multiple mobs I usually end up tanking whatever I proc it on, which the mercenary tank cannot always pull back.
Positioning and Mercenaries
Swap the merc to the job.
- Tank merc: at 50 the tank mercenary can hold multiple mobs, which lets me get behind and backstab.
- Healer merc: swap to the healer mercenary when I need cleric buffs or sustain instead.
- Speed: hide and sneak both slow me down a lot. J-boots help, and something granting Selo's would make getting into position painless.
Evade
Shedding aggro with hide.
- How it works: pushing hide while in combat gives a chance to drop your aggro and evade onto whoever holds it next, usually the mercenary.
- Skill dependent: the chance scales with your hide skill, and mine is low, so it can take a few tries.
- When to use it: after a big poison proc pulls a mob off the tank, evade to hand it back until the next proc.
Utility Skills
The non-combat toolkit.
- Pick Pocket: worth leveling anyway because you need the skill for the epic 1.0.
- Pick Lock: Rogues and Bards open locked doors. You need roughly 200 skill for the Sebilis crypt and the Chardok door to the Royals. Level it fast on the lockpicking book just inside Plane of Tranquility by hitting the use key over and over.
- Traps: Sense Traps and Disarm Traps exist. I could not get disarm working in Chardok, but the skills are more useful inside Lost Dungeons of Norrath content.
Gear and Consumables
Weapons and the potion bar.
- Weapons: a 13/19 raid rapier (North Temple of Veeshan loot) in the main hand, still a Rough Defiant off hand that costs me damage.
- Fungi Tunic: one of my weekly item picks. When I am not tanking it regens around 36 a tick, which pairs well with only the tank merc out.
- Potions: haste potions and healing potions from the Plane of Knowledge alchemists, plus cloudy potions for instant invis in the bazaar.
- J-boots: another utility pick, mostly to offset how slow hide and sneak make me.
Durability: the Rogue is fragile, so most of my weekly item picks have gone to survival utility rather than damage.
Rogue Cheat Sheet
- Set up: tank merc out, poisons applied, J-boots on.
- Open: hide, sneak, get behind the mob, Sneak Attack into a backstab.
- Sustain damage: keep backstabbing (auto-fired) and let the poison proc carry.
- Manage aggro: after a big proc, hide to evade the mob back onto the merc.
- Swap as needed: healer merc for buffs and sustain, tank merc to reset and backstab again.
YouTube Generated Transcript
hello and welcome to how I play My Level 50 Rogue so we’re going to this is this is not going to be a very long video I don’t think uh there’s not much to the class at this point now I’m playing on live and this is f ofi but uh you know there’s just not a lot of abilities to the Rogue right now so we have like no spells right uh we do have a few disciplines and there’s only one that I use that sneak attack sneak attack you carefully aim your at your opponent causing your next back stab to never miss and cause greater damage you may only prepare for a sneak attack after being hidden for a few seconds once you’re visible you must attack quickly or you lose your advantage so I don’t think any of these training dummies are low enough level for me to uh actually land a backstab on I think I picked them up I don’t know why 70 70 yeah these are all too high but uh effectively what you do is you you hide you sneak you know now we’re uh we’re good right we come over behind sneak attack sneak this is a few second delay right or did we not sneak oh we failed to hide never mind there we go we hid now we can sneak attack come on there we go got it and then you just backstab and then uh we backstab a level 70 for 207 so uh you know it’s pretty nice but uh you know normally it’s like around 300ish backstab with my current weapon but that’s the only like ability that I go out of my way to use now there are other things we can do right uh like the main thing back a rogue does is backstab so you want to be backstabbing as much as possible uh which is kind of hard to do in all honesty when you’re solo like this character has been uh we do have a mercenary right and I do use the tank mercenary or the Healer mercenary so that allows me to sometimes you know get up in your backstab right but you have to be within I would say like right here to right here to backstab so it’s kind of hard to go from uh let’s turn off sneak so we can move faster here it’s kind of hard to go from like you know face tanking mob to backstab me in a single uh you know action it’s kind of hard so you know you lose out on that damage of your tanking uh until 59 then you get chaotic stab which allows you to backstab from the front for Less damage but still gives it to so it’s you know it’s like it’s two abilities now like two abilities we can kind of use now what really is nice on live is Rogues can go to a merchant in PL of knowledge right right by the the small Bank near the guild Lobby zone line and you can purchase um these poisons here B it of the shizar uh they they go from like whatever level you are right so these are level 40 versions uh required level 40 and this is kind of like where a lot of the lower level damage on live for a rogue kind of comes from here let’s just turn on an attack real quick and you can kind of see here like how much damage we’re doing with our current weapons and stuff let’s go to spell damage here uh now I don’t know if I’ll be able to there so it resisted it so let me see if I can find a lower level one here real quick uh this one’s 70 you’re 65 let’s try that one I had the Hobs in friends change all these guys out 60 oh there’s a 601 all right we’ll go with this level 60 I should be able to land the poison on at level 60 now the poison is actually uh pretty crazy when it comes to uh the amount of damage it does especially on live I it’s in the thousands like uh like I’m hitting for what 20 to 40 normal attacks my backstabs are see here if we can get a backstab see where next backstab is going to be now I do have Autos skill backstab there we go 1400 uh uh proc for the poison right uh 128 backstab on this guy I saw some higher ones earlier 93 so we’re getting some terrible terrible backstabs at the moment but it is uh it can go up higher right there there’s a 270 so it just varies and you know how that goes but we proc for 1,400 now uh that’s a lot of aggro uh if you think about it and if we have a you know multiple mobs we’re probably going to be tanking whatever the mob is we proti this on it’s it cars a lot of aggro to pull this off of the Rogue and the mercenary tank uh sometimes you know works pretty well sometimes not there’s a 359 backstab right there so you can kind of see the range now I using a 1319 weapon so this is we bought this one uh a few episodes ago uh it’s I think North t loot uh raid raid raid Rapier right so it’s it’s a decent weapon it’s not the best we could have at this level but uh it’s it’s decent enough to get us some kills here and you know we’re losing damage you know from our off hand because we’re using like this terrible rough Defiance still but so poisons that adds into our you know what we’re doing here that’s our arsenal of stuff now this is not specific to the Rogue but specific to how I’m playing the Rogue right now so I have uh haste potions from the Alchemists in PL of knowledge uh healing overtime potions uh pure healing potions those uh poison potions and I do have cloudy potions on her also cuz cloudy potions are instantaneous in bz um so that’s kind of a little bit useful in certain situations like the the has hide and sneak but I haven’t been working with my skills uh hide and sneak also lowers my speed significantly so you know it’s very useful to have stuff like that but other than like that stuff right the Rogue that’s pretty much the Rogue in a nutshell right we get hide and sneak and that allows us to hide so see here I fail because I have like no skill in hide at all so we do it again there we go we’ve hidden from View and we are we’re already sneaking so you can see how slow we’re moving here now if we take off uh journeyman boots this is what it’s like without any kind of speed modifiers now with journeyman boots a little bit faster right it’s a good distance faster and if we had a bar to give us SOS we would you know be zooming around it would be no problem so you know it’s you got to get into that position where was this one is the f 50 right level 60 right so we just go you know sneak attack I I like not oh I guess I did something to break hide so I’ve hidden and I failed sneak you see the herd of elephants fails sneak and then you have to you know wait 2 or 3 seconds to retry there we go now we are sneaking again go over here sneak attack once it’s on backstab 173 didn’t really get much of a benefit out of that at all in all honesty so you kind of see just how that works out and stuff like that uh let’s see what else is there worth covering for this class right now now like as we get AAS and we start getting more disciplines in the 80s things will get a lot more interesting with this class uh but all the Mele classes in classic kunark vas I would say all the way to like Omen of War Gates of Discord they’re pretty pretty boring uh they have no real anything to do like uh monks get a kick uh Rogues get the backstab Berserkers come later so they don’t really count right now because they do have more uh stuff to do uh Rangers paladins Shadow Knights uh Beast Lords they all have spells and stuff because they’re they hybrids so they don’t really count but Rogues Warriors monks they’re very Bare Bones at this level so not a lot to do um but I think that’s like everything that I can think of that I do right it’s it’s pretty much walk up to the Mob backstab it if I can uh I have it Autos skilled cuz I’m just so lazy but there we go we got a 308 it’s you know a whole lot to it now Rogues do get some other things that are kind of unique to the class but they’re not really uh what’s the word they’re not really combat skills so we get pick pockets which allows us to uh pick the pocket of a mob now you want to get that skill up anyway to get your epic 1.0 um so it’s something useful to have now we also get disarm traps uh we get sense traps and stuff like that I tried doing this in chardo where I know a trap is and it I couldn’t get it to work I’m I’m haven’t spent any effort onto it but uh it is something that exists I think if we do any of the Lost dungeons of norrath instance dungeons it’s more useful inside of the that content uh but we’ll we’ll see as we go through some of this stuff um and then we get pick lock which uh requires lock picks right here and uh BS and Rogues get picked lock you pretty much there are doors in siis that you can’t get into without uh so the Crypt uh you need a rogue or a bar to open that in uh chardo there is a locked door going to the Royals and you need uh a barter Rogue to open that you need about 200 a skill so what is my skill at now I think I went and worked on it yeah I got pck loock at 35 you need about 200 skill to open those doors uh there’s not much after that I think there’s a few raid mechanics that require it but that’s about it not no no group content after that stuff that I know of uh but there is a book in uh plain of Tranquility right when you Zone in I have a video on it on how to level up uh lockpicking really quick but every time you click a lockpick all you do is you like grab the lockpicks like this and you like say this is the book that in PL of Tranquility you just hit U over and over over and over again and it will uh every time you hit U it will uh up up your skill you can also click it with the uh lock picks in your hand but if you click in the wrong spot you’ll like sometimes it says do you want to drop it it’s kind of weird it’s not doing it now for some reason but I’ve had it where tries do that and it also like I don’t know I’m clicking but it’s like moving the camera and stuff so it’s a little Annoying I just like to hit you and it works phenomenally uh but that is that is how I play my rogue it’s we were playing this character solo so there’s not much to it there’s no box F there’s no synergies going on yet uh I switch mercenaries as I need right if I need you know cleric Buffs I switch to the the Healer mercenary if I need the tank to actually try to get some experience I switch to the tank and at this level the tank mercenary is able to not die to mobs here at like you know level 50 right so that you know he can take multiple mobs and I can backstab now if I push hide while I’m combat right right now so oh he’s I guess you have to have aggro for it to do it but that’s how a rogue can evade and lose aggro so that’s probably something useful to mention um it’s dependent on your hide skills so I don’t have a lot of a lot of skill but every time you push hide it gives you a chance to lower your aggro right for some reason when I push it it’s uh just going straight to trying to hide and not actually trying to evade because the combat dummy is not like on my extended Target list so I’m not aggro you know stuff like that so a little bit different but it lowers your aggro and you can evade onto the next person who has the aggro so if I’m you know face tanking a mob I can evade it onto the tank mercenary the Healer mercenary and so on and so on and then they will uh have Agro for however long it takes usually until the next poison proc uh generally how it’s been working for me but it it’s a little bit of a useful way to kind of shed some of that aggo to make things slightly more uh uh palatable for soloing but uh it’s it’s been a difficult experience so far the the Rogue is lacks durability like I think we used our item to get a a funy tunic we use J boots we’re using her I I I changed the series that I play this character in you know once a week I get to pick a new item and it’s been uh utility items to Keep Us Alive Now the funky tunic uh is nice to have for a rogue because if you’re not tanking you’re regenerating health and uh if you only have the tank mercenary out that’s useful because he’s while he’s tanking I’m getting you know 36 regen so stuff like that is you know just little tidbits of information there uh but that’s that’s it that’s that’s all I got for the Rogue it’s uh it is a fun class on tops you don’t have access to the poisons until I think later than ples power even though it’s available in that I think it’s like Omens and Wars when you can pick that stuff up maybe even later so on live you have a better Advantage when it comes to that uh it’s hard to get a group for a rogue on tlps for sure uh they don’t do a lot of damage but on live uh they do significant damage so it’s it’s like night and day but uh yeah there we go there any questions or comments I said something wrong please let me know uh thank you very much for watching please have a Fant fantastic day oh
