Dragon Age: Inquisition – How to Play as a Rogue

The Rogue in Dragon Age: Inquisition can be played multiple ways depending on your style. Rogues start with either a ranged weapon or dual blades. Ranged rogues start with the Stealth and Long Shot abilities, while dual blade rogues begin with Stealth and Twin Fangs. Just like the warrior class, you can switch the weapon of any rogue to change their play style. However, Archery techniques will not work if your rogue has dual blades, and Double Daggers skills will not work if your rogue uses a ranged weapon. Both weapon types utilize Sabotage and Subterfuge skill sets at any time.

The Archery skill set focuses on attacking from a distance, offering damage bonuses if you attack from elevation and other skills that rely on distance and positioning. Double Daggers focuses on attacking from behind and utilizing stealth to land big damage. Sabotage uses poison to increase weapon damage and gives rogues access to various traps. Subterfuge has a heavy focus on stealth and evasion.

Best Skills

Dance of Death

• Skill Set: Double Daggers

One constant in Dragon Age: Inquisition is the fact that you can’t attack when you lack stamina. Dance of Death restores 50 stamina every time you kill an enemy. This allows you to continue your offense in situations when you’d normally have to wait for your stamina to replenish. It works especially well during longer boss battles, or battles against a large group of enemies when stamina becomes a constant restraint.

Deathblow

• Skill Set: Double Daggers
• Damage: 200 percent of weapon damage
• Cooldown: 8 seconds
• Cost: 50 stamina

Deathblow is great for killing an enemy that is close to death or inflicting significant damage against a wounded enemy. By default, the attack inflicts twice as much damage as your base weapon. For every one percent of health the target is missing (up to 50 percent) you gain an additional three percent damage bonus. That means in the best case scenario the attack inflicts 350 percent damage. If that weren’t enough, against an already wounded enemy you automatically attack a second time, meaning you could hit for up to 700 percent damage.

Explosive Shot

• Skill Set: Archery
• Damage: 100 percent of weapon damage
• Number of Hits: 2
• Explosion Radius: 4 meters
• Cooldown: 12 seconds
• Cost: 35 stamina

It’s rare to find only one enemy in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Therefore, skills that hit multiple targets work very well. Explosive Shot is one of the few rogue techniques that will hit multiple enemies. It deals 100 percent of your weapon damage to enemies surrounding the primary target, which is essentially a free attack to any enemies in close proximity. It doesn’t take much stamina, and with the added ability of Chain Reaction the damage is increased by 25 percent for every additional enemy within range.

Flank Attack

• Skill Set: Double Daggers
• Damage: 200 percent of weapon damage per hit
• Number of Hits: 2
• Cooldown: 8 seconds
• Cost: 35 stamina

Rogue has several abilities that gain a damage bonus when flanking (attacking from the side) the target or attacking from behind. Flank Attack automatically strikes an opponent from behind with the need to reposition yourself. This works very well when combined with Sneak Attack and even Twin Fangs.

Long Shot

• Skill Set: Archery
• Damage: 200 percent up to 600 percent at 15 meters
• Cooldown: 8 seconds
• Cost: 50 stamina

Long Shot is one of the best skills for a Ranger Rogue as the damage of the attack increases the farther away you are from the target. The base damage is double that of your weapon, but if you’re 15 meters away it gets all the way up to 600 percent damage. Add the Archer’s Lance secondary ability and the attack hits any enemies it comes in contact with on the way to the target. As a Ranger Rogue, you should almost always be as far away from the action as you can get, which makes this ability ideal.

Pincushion

• Skill Set: Archery

In most cases, you’re going to attack a single target until it’s defeated. With Pincushion active, every consecutive attack to the same enemy adds a five percent damage bonus for 10 seconds. This works especially well during boss battles when the enemy has more health and there’s generally only one main target to focus on. However, this also works well if you pause the action with the tactical menu, allowing the rogue to target an enemy that no one else is attacking to make the most of this technique.

Poisoned Weapons

• Skill Set: Sabotage
• Duration: 10 seconds
• Damage: 25 percent of weapon damage per second (for 8 seconds)
• Cooldown: 24 seconds
• Cost: 20 stamina

This is arguably the best skill for a rogue of any kind. The ability is active for 10 seconds. During that time, every attack poisons the target. A poisoned target takes 25 percent damage per second for eight seconds. That’s an additional 200 percent damage every time you poison an enemy. In addition, with the Infected Wounds secondary ability, the poison damage is increased by 25 percent. Add Explosive Toxin and any enemy that dies from poison explodes, leaving behind a toxic cloud that poisons nearby foes. It’s a deadly series of poisonous attacks that can take down a group of enemies extremely fast.

Shadow Strike

• Skill Set: Subterfuge
• Damage: 400 percent of weapon damage (200 percent bonus for Stealth)
• Cooldown: 16 seconds
• Cost: 50 stamina

Shadow Strike is one of the single most damaging attacks in the rogue arsenal. It should always be used in conjunction with Stealth for the 200 percent additional damage bonus. That brings the total damage of the attack up to 600 percent. If you haven’t taken any damage for at least five seconds, you don’t even need to use Stealth to gain the additional damage bonus.

Stealth

• Skill Set: Subterfuge
• Damage: 50 percent bonus
• Duration: 30 seconds
• Cooldown: 24 seconds
• Cost: 20 stamina

Think of Shadow Strike as a 50 percent damage bonus for every attack you perform over the next 30 seconds. This is great to use before any big damage attacks such as Long Shot from maximum range. It’s active for 30 seconds, which is a decent length of time. Activate this technique at the beginning of a battle so you can use it again before the fight comes to an end.

Throwing Blades

• Skill Set: Sabotage
• Damage: 100 percent of weapon damage per hit
• Number of Hits: 4
• Duration: 8 seconds
• Cooldown: 12 seconds
• Cost: 50 stamina

Attacks that target multiple enemies are very useful in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and this is one of the rogue’s few multi-target attacks. It hits four times for 100 percent of your weapon damage with each hit. Couple this with Poisoned Weapons and the damage is even greater, but the main draw of this ability is that it hits multiple targets.

Unforgiving Chain

• Skill Set: Double Daggers

This skill increases your critical hit chance by one percent with each successive attack, resetting once you land a critical hit. This ability works very well with Sneak Attack, which doubles the chance of a critical hit when attacking from behind or either side. Couple these two abilities with gear that increases your critical hit chance and more often than not you’ll hit critical for big damage.

Ranger Rogue

Recommended Skills (in order of priority): Long Shot > Stealth > First Blood > Explosive Shot > Poisoned Weapons > Archer’s Lance > Chain Reaction > Pincushion > Full Draw > Fighting Dirty > Stunning Shot > Explosive Toxin > Evasion > Evade > Shadow Strike > Infected Wounds

A Ranger Rogue is basically an archer with a few additional abilities to enhance their long range attacks. The goal here is to stay as far away from the target as possible to maximize your damage. Rogues don’t have great defense, so you should always have a warrior in the party to keep enemies away from the rogue. This also makes it easier to stay away from the enemies, attacking with maximum damage from as far away as possible. You also shouldn’t move at all so attacks that require flanking or attacking from behind don’t work well with this build.

You want to get to Full Draw as quickly as possible, then use it as your first attack in many situations. With the various buffs from Stealth and Poisoned Weapons, it’s not difficult to chain together a series of abilities in order to inflict significant damage to your target. For example, a good rotation would be: Poisoned Weapons > Stealth > Full Draw for huge damage. Follow that with Long Shot for a second shot and even more damage.

Stealth Rogue

Recommended Skills (in order of priority): Stealth > Twin Fangs > Flank Attack > Poisoned Weapons > Bloodied Prey > Unforgiving Chain > Infected Wounds > Dance of Death > Sneak Attack > Throwing Blades > Deathblow > Fighting Dirty > Explosive Toxin > Evasion > Evade > Shadow Strike > Quick Blade > Thrill of Victory > Ripping Fangs

The Stealth Rogue fights with daggers and attacks out of the shadows as often as possible. The priority here is to position yourself to use these abilities to inflict as much damage as possible. That usually means attacking from the side or behind to maximize damage. Each new ability you unlock will add damage to your attacks, which means that by the time you reach level 15 you will inflict significant damage with every attack.

It’s important to have a good warrior to make sure the rogue does not gain the attention of his targets. For this reason, there’s very little need for skills that require the rogue to be attacked such as Parry or Evasion. However, if you’ve unlocked everything else, some of these techniques give you a Dexterity bonus when you unlock them, increasing your overall damage.

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