Versatile and enormously useful against single targets
Hi, and welcome to the fifth class build for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Today, we’re going to take a look at the Tempest rogue, which is a very interesting class, both because of its versatility, high damage and insane single target focus ability, Thousand Cuts.
What is a Tempest?
Well, to put it mildly, it’s insanity in a flask. This class relies on taking flasks that enhance certain aspects of the character’s body during combat. It’s also a very flexible class, able to excel with dual daggers or a bow.
Personally, I prefer the Tempest archer, and that is the build that I will talk about here.
The Party
This is actually reasonably straightforward. You’ll need a tank, without question, and Cassandra and Blackwall are great for this task. Iron Bull works too, as long as you don’t let him use too many of his Reaver skills.
As a Tempest, you’re the party’s rogue class, so the choice of whether to go with two rogues or two mages is completely up to you. I find that two mages specialising in crowd control, ala Dorian and Solas maximises the rogue’s survivability.
If you do go with two rogues in the party, I absolutely suggest equipping the second rogue with a bow rather than daggers, as the AI isn’t very good at flanking and staying out of fights. If you want two dagger rogues, you’ll have to keep chopping and changing between them to make sure everyone survives.
The Build
Subterfuge Tree
You’ll only need two skills from this tree:
- Stealth – which is essential for all rogues, and Assassins rely on this skill for most of their damage, and
- Easy to Miss – which reduces your threat level against all enemies. Basically, if you can’t get into stealth, you’re still less likely to be attacked.
You don’t really need the upgrade to Stealth, even on harder difficulty levels, because your tank should hold all the attention anyway.
As an option, especially in the early game, you could pick up Knockout Powder and Mercy Killing, which gives you the ability to perform a little crowd control of your own by putting enemies to sleep and having any attacks you make on those targets become automatic critical hits. However, this is hard to do as an archer, and the upgrade to Full Draw puts your target to sleep anyway.
Sabotage Tree
You’ll spend three points here:
- Caltrops – which is useless, but required for the next two passive skills,
- Looked Like it Hurt – which gives you stamina for every critical hit you make, and
- Cheap Shot – which reduces the armour of your target for six seconds every time you make a critical hit.
Seriously though, don’t use Caltrops, even as an archer. It’s completely useless.
Archery Tree
I would pick up everything here, except for the upgrades to Long Shot and Explosive Shot. Everything else is good, especially Full Draw and Leaping Shot. The order you do this in is, of course, up to you.
If you prefer dealing extra damage earlier, then I’d go with the left hand side of the tree with Leaping Shot. The right hand side of the tree is a little bit more about crowd control with Explosive Shot.
Double Daggers Tree
A couple of passives here will definitely help you out, Sneak Attack and Dance of Death. Sneak Attack gives you passive flanking critical hit chance and Dance of Death lets you regain stamina per kill.
Tempest Tree
As an archer, you will not find any circumstance where you’ll want Flask of Frost active, since everyone will automatically attack you. Since you’ll be so far back from the main fight, and you won’t be able to take advantage of the freezing of your targets, I say that you could rightfully ignore the three skills on the left of this tree.
If you’re working with dual daggers on the other hand, you will want Flask of Frost active, so make sure you pick this based on your play style.
What you will want to pick in this tree, is everything else. Get the upgrades too, as well as Thousand Cuts. Using Thousand Cuts on any boss when you’re above level 20 will pretty much mean an instant kill.
Your gear
The disadvantage of the Tempest is that you may well be caught with your trousers down when you’re waiting for cooldowns to finish, something rushes you, and you’re not quite prepared.
In this case, I recommend that the best Prowler armour you can find, and some Fade Touched Obsidian or Silverite would be the best choice of defensive measures.
The other thing that’s important is to look for materials that can increase the attack rating of your weapons. This build doesn’t rely so much on critical hits as the Artificer or the Assassin, so don’t worry too much if your critical hit chance doesn’t go much beyond 20 or 25 per cent.
Battle Strategy
This is the kind of build where it doesn’t matter if you strike first. Open up with Flask of Fire and then either a barrage of Long Shots or Full Draws. It can be against multiple targets, and with the upgarde to Full Draw putting most targets to sleep, it might be an idea to disable a couple of archers or mobs to take the heat off your tanks. The rest of the fight is pretty much standard archery fare.
For bigger targets, you can definitely unleash the totally overpowered Thousand Cuts, which will mow through a high dragon’s health in less than thirty seconds if you activate it with 300 focus points. Even if it’s not fully charged, you’ll still knock off a significant amount of health.
In Closing
This is a fun and versatile build, and can cause significant amounts of mayhem. It’s not as good as an Assassin at spike damage against single targets, but when it comes to taking down big bosses, this is the build for that task.
Typed by McMoron 