I am really liking how the rogue plays in EverQuest Legends. Which is, perhaps, not really surprising, as the rogue was my main in the classic EverQuest for years. I like that you can just go pretty much anywhere. Combined with the druid for ports, the world is truly open to exploration.
My first serious EQ character was my halfling druid, Etha. Druids were fine in the early days, but up around past level 30, druid healing wasn’t enough to keep a group alive, druid nukes weren’t super effective, druids just weren’t much fun. It got to be so hard to find a group that I finished my leveling journey to 60 quad kiting spirocs in Timorous Deep.
I immediately set out to find a class that would be able to get groups and would be fun to play. A level 60 druid could do some powerful twinking.
Nina (warrior) and Tipa (rogue) were the result; Nina came first, and I had her in full crafted armor tanking the heck out of Runnyeye groups in no time. Tipa was later, around Velious, and I had a lot of armor from the orc fort for her. I was in the raid guild Diving Grace with my druid at the time, but that wasn’t really satisfying; my main contribution there was debuffing cold and ice resistance and nuking, if I felt like it, though the wizards and mages far, far outstripped druid damage.
Halfling warriors weren’t much wanted; ogre warriors couldn’t be stunned from the front, and so typically, raids would want the ogre warriors. I opted to go with rogue.
In order to inaugurate my rogue career, I decided to do the Burning Rapier quest, an iconic weapon that was a badge of sorts in the rogue community at the time. It requires fairly high skills in pick pocketing, lock picking and assassination to pull off solo. It took a long time, but I did it — finally.
I started taking groups as a rogue, and finally decided to switch mains and guilds. I did the rogue epic, and after that — I was a rogue. My druid and warrior were my official alts.
As a rogue in Crimson Eternity, I was part of the rogue crew. We had our own secret chat channel and section on the forums. Our job was scouting; we could crawl to all the bosses in all the zones and check things out. Sometimes it would be the rogue team’s job to kill a mage, drag their corpses to the raid staging area, and have a necro rez them and then they would summon the rest of the guild to the raid.
Anyway, so I was a rogue until I stopped being able to find groups and switched to cleric, the class I remained for the rest of my EQ career. That’s a different story.
Back to EverQuest Legends. Throughout this leveling in the beta, I thought I would be trying different things. But when I chose rogue as my second class, I just really fell in love with it all over again. It’s very cool to be able to crawl through Sol B or LGuk or every other place and just get to where you want to be without having to fight your way down there. Rogue double attacks and backstabs combined with the mage nukes and pet just is incomparable damage. Evasive stance means I don’t often have to worry about heals at all — druid heals are just to top things off between battles.
In my duo with Kasul, when the game goes live at the end of the month, I’ve committed to tanking as a plate class. Kasul will be playing a barbarian, and so in order to make travel easier, I need to play a good-aligned race; or at least a non-evil-aligned race. And, because halflings do not good tanks make, I won’t really be able to get away that them or gnomes.
MAG/ROG/DRU wasn’t the only combo I tried; I leveled MAG/ROG/ENC, too — enchanter as the third class. The problem here is that in EverQuest Legends, you can only have one pet. Enchanter comes with their animations, mage with their elementals, and usually enchanter can charm a mob as well. Since enchanted mobs are the best DPS in EverQuest Legends, I would just debuff and charm the highest level mob I could handle and send that in, nuking with mage nukes and tanking with the rogue’s evasive stance. Enchanter was super powerful, but I felt that was pretty much all I was doing, since keeping track of the charmed mob and switching to new ones as necessary was taking most of my time. It was super effective. Crushbone and Befallen were pretty easy with a charmed pet; I’d break charm, and tank with evasive while I debuffed and recharmed it — it hardly ever broke in battle. And when it did, well, that was my opportunity to trade up.
So my likely multiclass combo in EQL Live is going to be Dwarf Cleric/Shadow Knight/Wizard, swapping wizard with enchanter once I get the wizard ports. All of SK, wizard and enchanter are int-based spell casters, so there’s some synergy there. It would be more lore friendly to go with Paladin as the tank, and lean into the wisdom-based synergy with cleric, but I want to play an SK. Enchanter will let me illusion as an inky (dark elf), and so I will be able to zero in on the Dark Elf Shadow Knight I wanted to play, but still being good aligned and accepted in all good and neutral cities.
But without rogue in the mix, I lose the evasive stance. I lose being able to go anywhere easily, though I will get invisibility and invisibility to undead so should be able to get through Lower Guk without much issue. Also feign death, that can’t be undersold.
Without the evasive stance, I’ll have to rely on defensive stance, which is good, but not as good as evasive. And I will have to actively heal myself. But that’s the way it goes.
It’s going to be fun. But I fully expect, by the time I finish up in EQL, that there’s going to be some rogue somewhere in that combo.
