Yak Cast 7 “Angry Yak”

Heh, Shade. I’ve grouped with him before. When he couldn’t get a Magic Circle Against Evil buff, he started complaining and berating the other party members for not having the spell and insisted that the cleric shrine well before he needed to in order to get it. He’s just about the most arrogant and hateful person I’ve encountered in DDO to date. He’s got a well geared powerful character and has good skill, but as a group leader he’s an utter failure. He doesn’t understand that a leader is there to bring out the best in everyone in the group, not berate them for playing “incorrectly.”

I didn’t want to give the impression that a pure rogue is useless, only that *traps* require only a rogue splash. Any time they can get their sneak attack, rogue’s DPS is superior to just about anyone else’s (exceptions exist), and otherwise (if built well) their DPS should at least be decent, and if they’re vorpalling it’s irrelevant anyway. They get a lot of skill points with a ton of class skills, and honestly their AC’s should be at least as good if not better than any other TWF-er thanks to their usually high dex scores. They only get 6 + Con hit points per level, but bonuses to Con from items, false life gear, and other hit point boosters can help immensely (they’re only 80 hit points behind a fighter at level 20, other gear being the same).

I guess the best way to summarize is to say that locks and traps are just a side-skill for a rogue, one that most can pick up with a mere splash; their real purpose is killing things, something that they do very well especially after grabbing Assassin 3. It’s unfortunate that many people play rogues badly and give them something of a bad name. You never know if you’re going to get a mostly useless squishy little bow-plinker who can’t kill anything, or a well-built killer who can UMD most anything he wants and out-DPS other melees with ease, though…so it’s a crapshoot.

For optionals — many low level optionals aren’t worth it in terms of time-to-XP if you have to go out of your way for them, but the devs have recently jacked up the XP *greatly* for them in many cases (those waterworks optionals you mentioned used to be worth less than 15-20 XP). If you ever run part 2 of Shan-to-kor or part 2 of Delera’s, you’ll definitely want to get all the optionals there, because they’re worth thousands of bonus XP and can basically double the XP for the quest. Delera’s part 2 in particular is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 12000-15000 XP if you go for everything (maybe half that if you don’t), and it’s only a level 7 quest! Still, I find optionals in general hit-or-miss in terms of “Is it worth it?”, so it’s always a case by case basis, but today’s optionals beat the hell out of the way they used to be.