The failure that is Arcane Trickster

[Jummby]

Doing the compulsory 3 and then never again isnt just a fail. Its an abject failure.

A massive waste of time and effort from SSG followed by us.

It actually looks like a cool.too for multiclassing. Just because people might only.take it to higher levels for the lives 3 times, that doesn't mean it can't have great multiclassing possibilities.

They said a while back Archtypes are for fun and for flavor on variations of classes.

I don't see all the fuss on this.

 

[Jasparius]

It actually looks like a cool.too for multiclassing. Just because people might only.take it to higher levels for the lives 3 times, that doesn't mean it can't have great multiclassing possibilities.

They said a while back Archtypes are for fun and for flavor on variations of classes.

I don't see all the fuss on this.

What are your multiclass thoughts ?

 

[woq]

It actually looks like a cool.too for multiclassing. Just because people might only.take it to higher levels for the lives 3 times, that doesn't mean it can't have great multiclassing possibilities.

They said a while back Archtypes are for fun and for flavor on variations of classes.

I don't see all the fuss on this.

The fuss is that people are tired of almost all the archetypes being relegated to flavor once and then never again or splash-type things. They don't have to be this way - it's a complete waste of potential fun.

Maybe you love the fantasy of blightcaster, but enjoy cap play. Tough ****, it sucks in raids and doesn't scale well into high difficulties. Maybe you enjoy the idea of using draconic spells with ki to rain down wrath on your enemies. Well, tough **** again - just doesn't scale into endgame.

It doesn't have to be that way. There are tons of ways you can enable scaling to maintain relevance at higher difficulties. They choose not to do so and it is both baffling and disappointing.

 

[Jummby]

What are your multiclass thoughts ?

Taking 2 rogue levels for trapping and evasion is fairly common. People do it often with wizards for example and the only done sides are losing the core capstone and 2 caster levels.

With a Trickster, you can take 3 Trickster levels. Use mixed magics and not lose any caster levels. Mixed magics only needing 3 levels is solid. You can be a wizard casting level 9 spells at max caster level with evasion and trapping.

You can than take that build and go feydark illusionist, if you want a build with a capstone, since it's a universal tree.

I see many more possibilities with the class. Alot of things for inquisitive builds and melee multiclassing.

The term FAILURE for a class seems dramatic to me. Failure are things like the Warlock Acolyte of the Skin. Instead of shooting eyebeams, you get a bizarre animation of shooting trapezoid blasts with incorrect hit boxes from your chest. You are fire based, with no fire strip.

You probably will see toons with at the very least some Trickster levels for a while.

When is the last time someon played the Acolyte of the Skin warlock?

 

[Jummby]

The fuss is that people are tired of almost all the archetypes being relegated to flavor once and then never again or splash-type things. They don't have to be this way - it's a complete waste of potential fun.

Maybe you love the fantasy of blightcaster, but enjoy cap play. Tough ****, it sucks in raids and doesn't scale well into high difficulties. Maybe you enjoy the idea of using draconic spells with ki to rain down wrath on your enemies. Well, tough **** again - just doesn't scale into endgame.

It doesn't have to be that way. There are tons of ways you can enable scaling to maintain relevance at higher difficulties. They choose not to do so and it is both baffling and disappointing.

I totally see your point.

You know firsthand I am in a guild that likes to run r10s at cap and raids on a regular basis.

I am not just frustrated with how many archetypes are ineffective at cap. I also hate how many regular classes struggle at cap.

 

[Jasparius]

Taking 2 rogue levels for trapping and evasion is fairly common. People do it often with wizards for example and the only done sides are losing the core capstone and 2 caster levels.

With a Trickster, you can take 3 Trickster levels. Use mixed magics and not lose any caster levels. Mixed magics only needing 3 levels is solid. You can be a wizard casting level 9 spells at max caster level with evasion and trapping.

You can than take that build and go feydark illusionist, if you want a build with a capstone, since it's a universal tree.

I see many more possibilities with the class. Alot of things for inquisitive builds and melee multiclassing.

The term FAILURE for a class seems dramatic to me. Failure are things like the Warlock Acolyte of the Skin. Instead of shooting eyebeams, you get a bizarre animation of shooting trapezoid blasts with incorrect hit boxes from your chest. You are fire based, with no fire strip.

You probably will see toons with at the very least some Trickster levels for a while.

When is the last time someon played the Acolyte of the Skin warlock?

If a class only works when you splash it of course its a failure.

AOTS is absolutely a fail, BTW.

 

[saekee]

I watched Strimtom testing spells, SLAs, etc. live during the recent Lamannia preview and confirmed with him just now - ki bolt was not proc'ing magical ambush. Likely because under the hood ki bolt is not coded as a spell. Interestingly, Torc was in the chat and taking notes - sounds like this may not be working as intended i.e. might get fixed - but be sure to confirm first before TRing...

i was not planning on it for magical ambush. It would be a means to have the ki bolt more powerful on a hybrid build. I hope Torc does not mess with ki bolts as they now work. They are a lot of fun and I would hate to have it nerfed and then convert my monk to a thrower.

 

[droid327]

Agree. I will probably just do AT 15/Art 4/Fighter 1 PDK I prefer iconic lives for quick leveling. Should be fine as Inquisitive and then move on after 3x lives. The no fail extra CC and sneak dice will work well.

14 AT/4 Arti/2 Pal BF might be another option for a GXB build right now. That's not saying much, but its something.

36 Mech 27 BE 10 KotC 7 Fey Cha based, you got 2 AoEs with Shatter and Exalted plus EF, and a class trance

Especially if you have enough RAP to grab the racial Recon SLA

 

[cocopufff]

I totally see your point.

You know firsthand I am in a guild that likes to run r10s at cap and raids on a regular basis.

I am not just frustrated with how many archetypes are ineffective at cap. I also hate how many regular classes struggle at cap.

My main frustration with the archetypes is that a lot of them could be good if they just gave them better support.

Sacred Fist is so close to being a fun option except they decided to kneecap it by making the skill tree super expensive and not giving it stances, trance, or a single way of reliably increasing Ki generation.

Dark Apostate is really interesting and a fun thematic, but they decided to try and make the tree support both melee and caster and it ends up supporting neither, and then of course it has weird anti-synergy with Domain of Death where both give immunity to energy drain, not to mention they didn't give it a single way to strip immunity for negative energy.

Dark Hunter was fine in a lot of ways, but the tree is just so underwhelming, and a lot of it stems from giving it a horrible imbue type with again no strip.

It's just frustrating because so many of these are easy fixes, and even things the community recommended at the time of release, and now you basically never see a bunch of archetypes used at all.

 

[droid327]

Sacred Fist is so close to being a fun option except they decided to kneecap it by making the skill tree super expensive and not giving it stances, trance, or a single way of reliably increasing Ki generation.

Dark Hunter was fine in a lot of ways, but the tree is just so underwhelming, and a lot of it stems from giving it a horrible imbue type with again no strip.

It's just frustrating because so many of these are easy fixes, and even things the community recommended at the time of release, and now you basically never see a bunch of archetypes used at all.

I consider 16 sf 3 monk 1 fvs to be the true "pure" version of the class. You don't really lose anything except C5-6 and they're just meh anyway compared to trance stance and 2 MA feats.

DH has an awesome Imbue, it works against everything. The issue with it is both DH and DWS are melee support trees, but Tempest is too expensive to be able to spend meaningfully in both the others, and DWS is a handcuff for the crit bonus core, meaning DH can't actually use the DH tree and it's just a regular Ranger with a few sneak dice and no evasion.

But yeah a lot of archetypes seem to be so chained to the "flavor" of the build that they cannot actually achieve full functionality. I think the best parallel for AT is DD. It was so centered around the dragon spells for its hybrid identity, but they don't scale into epic well, so it's MIA past 20. AT looks like it might suffer a similar fate for the same reason.

 

[Veldrina]

For me AT fails at one thing: supporting the iconic dagger melee + magic playstyle.

This is how all Arcane Trickster art have been about in other games.

Here... It seems to be a caster without melee capacity.
As a trickster I'd expect a big focus on illusions too (and the PL supports this) but the focus seems to be... on force spells?

Without going into balance & power (which matters to me a lot) ; the class just feels "wrong" right now.

 

[Falkor]

Honestly ... what we want are classes and tree's that work, and not another gimpy archetype that won't hardly see the time of day.

Give us another 'dragonlord', and not another 'dark apostate / sacred fist / AoTs / BC' .... most of the archetypes are subpar and don't see play. Make this worth your development time! Be proud of your work and release quality!

 

[Archaic]

You either do subpar melee damage with mid accuracy to hit and also fail your spell DC's because you had to take combat oriented feats on an already very limited feat class.

If you actually played an Eldritch knight you would know that...
Knight's Transformation: Toggle: While this is turned on, your Base Attack Bonus equals your Character Level. When you successfully hit with your Eldritch Strike, you gain Knight's Strike for 30 seconds.
Knight's Strike:

• +30 universal spellpower
• +3% Spell Critical Damage.

Exclusive from Enlarge Metamagic and any Eldritch Blast shape Stance. This stance works with other offensive and defensive stances, as well as Rages

And also you would know that...

Improved Knight's Transformation: While you have Knight's Transformation Active, you gain +1 Competence bonus to Critical Multiplier with Melee weapons and your Eldritch Strikes grant Improved Knight's Strike, which grants a +3 bonus to hit, damage and a 3% chance to double strike in addition to its base effects.

So... that said, yes you will either be better in Melee or casting as a sorcerer but a wizard has plenty of feats...

You would know that if you played too. Being real also arcane melee uses either Harper or Feydark for hit/damage from intelligence or charisma.

 

[Contessor]

It actually looks like a cool.too for multiclassing. Just because people might only.take it to higher levels for the lives 3 times, that doesn't mean it can't have great multiclassing possibilities.

They said a while back Archtypes are for fun and for flavor on variations of classes.

I don't see all the fuss on this.

Explain Dragonlord in this conversation.

 

[KirThalos Ravencrest]

If you actually played an Eldritch knight you would know that...
Knight's Transformation: Toggle: While this is turned on, your Base Attack Bonus equals your Character Level. When you successfully hit with your Eldritch Strike, you gain Knight's Strike for 30 seconds.
Knight's Strike:

• +30 universal spellpower
• +3% Spell Critical Damage.

Exclusive from Enlarge Metamagic and any Eldritch Blast shape Stance. This stance works with other offensive and defensive stances, as well as Rages

And also you would know that...

Improved Knight's Transformation: While you have Knight's Transformation Active, you gain +1 Competence bonus to Critical Multiplier with Melee weapons and your Eldritch Strikes grant Improved Knight's Strike, which grants a +3 bonus to hit, damage and a 3% chance to double strike in addition to its base effects.

So... that said, yes you will either be better in Melee or casting as a sorcerer but a wizard has plenty of feats...

You would know that if you played too. Being real also arcane melee uses either Harper or Feydark for hit/damage from intelligence or charisma.

And how much investment, gear/augments does it take for an EK to do comparable damage to a DL/PL split or Razorclaw? Does it even compare? is it pumping that hard? It falls flat in end game compared to the "meta" (hate that word) people use.

 

[Falkor]

After seeing the changes in preview 2 I realized that yet again, our feedback has been mostly ignored. Very disappointed and am let down. Not an archetype that will see much play.

 

[Jummby]

After seeing the changes in preview 2 I realized that yet again, our feedback has been mostly ignored. Very disappointed and am let down. Not an archetype that will see much play.

Presenting, the Arcane Dumpsterfire.

I am going to laugh when they end up having to nerf it.

 

[pirotessa]

I am going to laugh when they end up having to nerf it.

That must be in some other game you're playing like BG3 or something where they have that class.

 

[Elves United]

After seeing the changes in preview 2 I realized that yet again, our feedback has been mostly ignored. Very disappointed and am let down. Not an archetype that will see much play.

Presenting, the Arcane Dumpsterfire.

Force damage will be interacting with MRR like other types of damage.

Chain missile being turned into more of an AOE spell.

A sizable bump in sneak dice if you invest in metamagic feats but losing illusionary escape.

Magic hand will now be a free action. So supposedly you'll be able to use it while spamming magic missile, swinging a staff or shooting a x-bow without breaking your attack rhythm. ( actually if that works as advertised it would be kind of big )

Acrobat Sweep attack can now use int as a stat.

Replaced some stolen spells with marginally more useful stolen spells.


My thoughts -----

DDO is really trying to make Arcane Trickster caster viable DPS through magic missile type spell spamming. That appears to be their primary goal.

Arcane Trickster makes pure Mechanic and Acrobat builds stronger. But they'll still be lackluster in higher difficulty.

One might be able to make a decent inquisitive out of this.

 

[Jasparius]

Force damage will be interacting with MRR like other types of damage.

Chain missile being turned into more of an AOE spell.

A sizable bump in sneak dice if you invest in metamagic feats but losing illusionary escape.

Magic hand will now be a free action. So supposedly you'll be able to use it while spamming magic missile, swinging a staff or shooting a x-bow without breaking your attack rhythm. ( actually if that works as advertised it would be kind of big )

Acrobat Sweep attack can now use int as a stat.

Replaced some stolen spells with marginally more useful stolen spells.


My thoughts -----

DDO is really trying to make Arcane Trickster caster viable DPS through magic missile type spell spamming. That appears to be their primary goal.

Arcane Trickster makes pure Mechanic and Acrobat builds stronger. But they'll still be lackluster in higher difficulty.

One might be able to make a decent inquisitive out of this.

AT doing thousands of damage per missile with MM while Archmage does hundreds is a real kick in the teeth for a build which has struggled for 10 years.