Dread Lord to Assasin?

[Fae]

Just got my last past life for dread lord playing pure dl to 20. Is it possible to switch at this point from swf to twf and blend in Rogue assassin with dread lord? I use daggers because it's my flavor and I liked some of the dread lord options but I'm not really into ddo math. It may not make any sense at all to multi-class rogue with dread lord...

Thoughts, Ideas, am I just crazy?

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

For DPS Dragonlord can't match assassin tree + vistani for daggers. You get +2 crit multiplier and effectively +2 crit range with daggers if you take both the level 18 core and tier 5 assassin. VKF is filled with dagger-friendly things. That doesn't leave much room for dragonlord enhancements.

If you wanted to combine rogue and dragonlord kukris would work much better due to the expanded crit range giving you effectively the same crit profile as daggers with assassin. It's one more crit range than dagger without tier 5 assassin and all the goodness from vkf. So you get the same crit profile as an assassin with tier 5 dragonlord. At that point you would really want to go str and not focus on assassinate at all.

So short answer is that yes it would work great with kukris. If you prefer dagger thematically you would end up losing 1 crit range compared to kukri.

Minimum 12 rogue for the improved sneak attack epic feat. 12 rogue, 8 dragonlord is probably best as you get 2 auras with that split and 3 bonus fighter feats. You get improved uncanny dodge, etc. I wanted to try dragonborn to see if the augmented breath would work on Dragon's roar with this exact split. I assume it would, but haven't got around to running and testing this build yet.

 

[saekee]

As Sarlona stated well above, plus:
Assassins, through various trees, gear etc., are also about building sneak dice damage (not just the dice but aggro management, fort bypass, etc etc). I think the dragonlord tree does not lend itself to that playstyle.

BUT you could do a splash with swashbuckling and dagger (still swf). 3 bard, tier 5 dragonlord gets you 15-20/4 with a dagger. It is not the best combo weapon for the splash, but I assume your interest here because you have some fancy daggers.
Rogue levels will be for extra sneak damage, skills, trapping and evasion—splash up to you. Guardbreaking on a shield is really handy on high crit builds; great CC and works on reapers (not Dooms).

 

[LurkingVeteran]

If you really want, I don't see why you couldn't go dagger with DL T5, Vistani C4 and some 15+ points into Assassin for the rest. I don't think the crit profile is worse than Assassin/Vistani, since you get +2 mult from DL T5 and +1 range from Vistani C4. You could even get most levels out of Rogue for the sneak attack.

By end-game , I don't think the build is that much weaker DPS-wise than pure assassin, depending on how many rogue levels you lose out on. You are mainly giving up a few sneak dice as well as assassinate + up to 30MP from Assasinate T5. But you get wings, the roar (!), extra feats and some imbue. I don't think the DL tactics is as useful on a dagger rogue, but it does not seem like a bad compromise. EDIT: Maybe you lose out on movement speed as well.

The main issue I see is that it likely has to be STR-based to make use of the roar. Or CHA via Illusionist, but then you won't have much points over for Assassin. Not that you gain much from Assassin APs anyway, it's mainly the rogue levels you want. Regardless, by not having DEX as main stat means you have to put some effort into ensuring that your Evasion reflex saves are high enough. Making it all work may require some fiddling. You could also go with DEX but then your roar is useless and I don't really see much benefit of going DL.

You could also just go pure DL/Vistani with daggers, that is probably easy to build and you get all the DL cores at the cost of Rogue sneak dice. DPS is lower but easier to build and play.

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

If you really want, I don't see why you couldn't go dagger with DL T5, Vistani C4 and some 15+ points into Assassin for the rest. I don't think the crit profile is worse than Assassin/Vistani, since you get +2 mult from DL T5 and +1 range from Vistani C4. You could even get most levels out of Rogue for the sneak attack.

The reason why it's worse is that the assassin tree has a unique benefit of adding an additional +1 to crit range with daggers so that it' equal with kukris. So with VKF/Dragonlord you are at -1 crit range with dagger. You end up with the same crit profile using kukris because the crit range is on the weapon itself vs. coming from T5 assssin.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

The reason why it's worse is that the assassin tree has a unique benefit of adding an additional +1 to crit range with daggers so that it' equal with kukris. So with VKF/Dragonlord you are at -1 crit range with dagger. You end up with the same crit profile using kukris because the crit range is on the weapon itself vs. coming from T5 assssin.

Ah, I assumed they copy-pasted that into Vistani. That's ~10% DPS loss. Not terrible, but noticable.