Does Archer Rogue get better?

[Ignis Imperia]

Hey so, about 18 hours in after getting through all the other 3 games, deciding to run rogue in each, done dual wield for DAO & DA2, done archer for Veilguard, so I felt given the option I'd do archer in Inquisition too.

Now, I am level 9, I have most of the archer skill tree unlocked and some stealth stuff. My question is, does it ever get as entertaining as any other class? I am sorely disappointed by my arsenal at the moment.

I have: A snipe, a boom arrow, and a shotgun evade shot. None of these is exactly on par with say Solas using Blizzard, ice mine or ice wall (I run him with ice magic mostly), or Blackwall going GET OVER HERE with FIRST SKILL in battlemaster, or Cassandra being immortal tank who never takes damage and in aoe dishes out a lot of it, and then there's Sera who I made DW rogue and she only has 2 skills so far and already those 2 skills look so much better than my entire arsenal.

So I'd like to know whether I'm doomed to play an NPC side character of the party to the end at this point or whether the archer at some point gets a second tree that has actually interesting abilities.

[Hirakhos]

In Short: Archer Rogue is the most powerful build in the game bar none
It's kind of boring how powerful it is honestly.

What you do to unlock its power is pretty simple:
In the green tree, get the grapple hook and the "Stamina restores on critical hits" nodes
Now you can hook to people before using the shotgun shot for enormous damage

Then later in the game when you can get a subclass, pick Artificer:
Get the node to lower your cooldowns on every critical hit
Craft some gear and weapons with high critical hit and high cunning (Bear hides help and the Grunsman's Bow schematic can be bought from the black emporium)
Shotgun Arrow now restores its entire cooldown and stamina and does 300% damage, you've beaten the game and can solo kill any boss with no difficulty, as well as all your other abilities refunding themselves

The cool part is the cooldown effect works for your companions too, so if you put some critical hit on them you'll have literally no cooldowns even on single hit abilities.
Hope that helps!

[Ignis Imperia]

Originally posted by Hirakhos:

The cool part is the cooldown effect works for your companions too, so if you put some critical hit on them you'll have literally no cooldowns even on single hit abilities.
Hope that helps!

So, Solas will be spamming blizzards all day you say.. :D

Thanks for the suggestions and some reassurance, I was quite disappointed going down the archery tree so far so I'll try going down the green tree for the hook now. :)

[barzai]

It's been my experience that the best skills are those that are not weapon-specific. But I'll definitely have to try this, generally I focus more on defensive builds early in the game--in the case of Rogues, that's the Stealth ("blue") tree and the Sabotage ("green") tree.

Poison Weapons with the healing upgrade, then down to the end of that branch to pick up Toxic Cloud and the Lost In The Mist upgrade.

Also, the passive in the stealth tree that makes enemies not perceive you as a threat. I always had a hard time with the stupid Pride Demon at the Temple--the boss fight at the end of the prologue--until I realized all I had to do was stay in the demon's "baffles"--his aft arc--and he'd just stand there as I slowly whittled him down even after all my team and allies were dead!

[Ignis Imperia]

Originally posted by barzai:

It's been my experience that the best skills are those that are not weapon-specific. But I'll definitely have to try this, generally I focus more on defensive builds early in the game--in the case of Rogues, that's the Stealth ("blue") tree and the Sabotage ("green") tree.

Poison Weapons with the healing upgrade, then down to the end of that branch to pick up Toxic Cloud and the Lost In The Mist upgrade.

Also, the passive in the stealth tree that makes enemies not perceive you as a threat. I always had a hard time with the stupid Pride Demon at the Temple--the boss fight at the end of the prologue--until I realized all I had to do was stay in the demon's "baffles"--his aft arc--and he'd just stand there as I slowly whittled him down even after all my team and allies were dead!

I only play Hard difficulty as I wanna experience the story of the games first on my first feel so I didn't really find a fight I'd struggle with thus far except the Hinterlands dragon which I tackled at level 10 with 2 warriors, me and Solas as frost mage, took about 7 tries, but sad part is at the moment I feel better playing Solas most fights than myself, my abilities are just not very flashy and I feel more like a side character. Though I hope to change that up, starting to level the green tree slowly, nearly reached the hook by now. If that doesn't help, I might respec to DW rogue after all.