Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader (CRPG)

I think some of my issues were depending on her sniper gun too much. that longlas was falling behind a bit. But, there's nothing actually forcing me to use it.
got a nice flamer with 1 ap attack, that is a long line area attack, 22 damage hit.
alot of these on crit buffs too, sniper 1 or 2 hits per, but if I used a bolter burst, could be like 8 crits. I'll try this a bit, see how it goes.

also swapped back to the stabilizing gaunts. the +(BS/2) added damage when using run and gun ones. as I look at the math, I think that added damage is more then, the 5% crit/5% damage ones I was using.

May rollback a save. Since I bet the game won't let me, address it directly.


I also find Heinrix and others chastising about xenos a bit weird. cold trading, etc. I'm a rogue trader, dealing with xenos and xenos artifacts is literally in the job description. instead of constantly telling me how its illegal[iconoclast], I should be getting prompts about [Dogmatic] bagging and tagging xeno shit.

Yeah, but again, thats specifically the one thing Rogue traders are tasked with, no one else is. Dealing with, setting up trade with xenos that benefits the Imperium is specifically in the powers of a Rogue trader.

it'd be like playing an Inquisitor, and everyone telling you you can't investigate, or study chaos!

like I get point of view characters. Argenta saying it makes sense. but, heinrix should know its 100% in a Rogue traders purview, even if he advises against it. and the [dogmatic], [iconoclast] choices should also reflect it, and don't often. as a rogue trader, collecting xenos artifacts should be dogmatic, depending on what you do with them. bag, tag, send to inquisition/mechanicus? dogmatic. keep for yourself, iconoclast. keep for yourself abdominal xenos? heretic.

more, lack of origin reactions. Found the crashed black ship. Henrix has a moment of ptsd... but the player character sanctioned pysker doesn't react at all.

not going to use her, cause I don't like her. but man jae is pretty busted too.

Two unique traits that are pretty beast/busted.

never play fair. lets her use Fellowship for all int checks. also reroll commerce checks once.
making tech use, lore imp, xeno, warp, medicae, logic all fellowship. in addition to commerce, coercion, persuasion.
massive skill monkey.
its nuts. only ath, awareness, carouse and demo are left.

Cold traders Acumen is also crazy too. "rogue traders rep level with traders, gives Jae additional bonuses"

drusians: +1 rep level to resistance tests, and 2x rep to lore imp
explorators. +rep level% to armor, and 2x to tech use.
kasballica +rep level % to dodge, 2x to commerce.
fellowship of th void. % to crit hit chance, 2x to coercion.
imp navy % to cover eff, 2x to persuasion.

officer and tactician all scale with fellowship too.

interestingly, the "argenta is falling behind" seemed to resolve itself. she did pick back up and was moving up my list for most kills/damage again. partially the +1ap at 20, and me realizing I didn't HAVE to use the longlaz. I could snipe with it, and use the hotshot las for burst fire.

that said, i still wanted to try out bolter. so swapped to this build. I do actually think the sniper version is stronger. bolters just miss so much without super damage to justify it.


crpg bros are all kindof out of date, but much of the info is still mostly relevant. this one, I do think I found something he was just plain wrong, or undervaluing. Arch-militant heroic action, "steady superiority". when picking upgrades, he says, "it doesn't matter, you will just be using solder, or finest hour.". man thats so wrong. Steady superiority is much stronger then firearm mastery.
baseline, steady superiority is a free attack costing 0 ap every turn, including the turn you cast it. which sure, doesn't sound great at FIRST. just one free attack? and how long does combat last, to justify this attack every round? except it doesn't say, every round. it says every turn. including finest hour, and officer "bring it down" free turns, and officer free turns, etc.

Caliane said:

interestingly, the "argenta is falling behind" seemed to resolve itself. she did pick back up and was moving up my list for most kills/damage again. partially the +1ap at 20, and me realizing I didn't HAVE to use the longlaz. I could snipe with it, and use the hotshot las for burst fire.

that said, i still wanted to try out bolter. so swapped to this build. I do actually think the sniper version is stronger. bolters just miss so much without super damage to justify it.


crpg bros are all kindof out of date, but much of the info is still mostly relevant. this one, I do think I found something he was just plain wrong, or undervaluing. Arch-militant heroic action, "steady superiority". when picking upgrades, he says, "it doesn't matter, you will just be using solder, or finest hour.". man thats so wrong. Steady superiority is much stronger then firearm mastery.
baseline, steady superiority is a free attack costing 0 ap every turn, including the turn you cast it. which sure, doesn't sound great at FIRST. just one free attack? and how long does combat last, to justify this attack every round? except it doesn't say, every round. it says every turn. including finest hour, and officer "bring it down" free turns, and officer free turns, etc

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CRPG Bro is rarely wrong (although Owlcat does relentlessly fuck up his builds) so are you sure it isnt just a difference between whatever difficulty you're on and Unfair which is what he targets all his builds at?

yeah, I suspect its a product of how strong alphastriking and ap regen. he was completely overlooking it. on paper, when you first read it, it does sound weak. finest hour=6-20 attacks right now! (still op, and the strongest), firearm mastery, no mp.. but reload, and single "shoot" attacks equal to rate of fire. 3-12 or so.
so its easy to see why, "oh its just a single attack for free right now" seems weaker. and you forget all those sources of extra turns, not realizing it procs on those too.

small update. almost just notes for myself, for when done to possibly make a forum post.

space battles. this system could use some work. the lack of scouting, and difficultly factor. battles are preset, so you can't farm. but, also, laid out in like this, "correct" order. but again, not labeled at all.

colony system. I wish the colony menu included all the minor colonies. the random small ones, that you can't build up. they should still be listed, and even provide small tithes. +1 profit, +1 people, etc. it would help sell the "millions of worlds of the Imperium", and "empire" when you can count your colonies on one hand, it doesn't quite sell the scope its supposed to represent. Even a rogue trader should have a hard time keeping track of the worlds in their care. and no ONE world should be really THAT important.

loss of crew on the void ship from warp travel should have a larger impact. its narratively stated, but not a real mechanic, which really undermines it. Even if the crew were replaced upon visiting a colony for free, it would still have meaning if you did actually need to do that.

moving along, another update.

starting act 3. this game does the thing Tyranny did with the hyperlinks and lore which is fun. lore stuff in the text can be hovered over to read. I forget which started it. pillars of eternity? divinity? Tyranny has a great bit where a mind reading/thought controlling character speaks to you through the lore hyperlinks.

did the yrliet mediation thing.. again this is another point my sanctioned pysker really should have some things to say.. the psyker should already know how to do it. do it on the regular. their mind should be a steel trap. They have to mind/soul battle warp entities nonstop. Also the Emperor should literally be there. soul bound.

Now that I can finally comment from experience with the game rather than guesswork, I can state with pretty much 100% confidence that any issue you're having with CRPGBro builds is because every single damage dealer build of his revolved around breaking the AP economy and all of that shit has been nerfed into the ground. No more infinite plasma from pasqal, no more wildly broken officer heroic action, etc. I feel like burst argenta is much more viable post-officer nerf than sniper argenta.

Even worse than the standard Owlcat bugginess imo is the absolute absurd state of balance of abilities when the game released. Most of that shit shouldn't have even needed live testing to know how broken it was and it definitely should never have made it out of beta. Uncapped willpower gain on Cassia every time someone gets an extra action when tons of her shit scales on willpower and getting extra actions is a major aspect of combat? wtf

yeah, I knew about that nerfs and was taking that into consideration.

I swapped to burst argenta for fun. chugga chugga of bolters do sound nice. atm, I am leaning on sniper argenta actually being stronger though. sniper overpen is better, 3 attacks/round, with one shot/one kills of sniper. much less friendly fire. way less missing. no missing..

flamer or melta argenta might be best atm. AM for movement/kick. her melee range talents.

cassia and extra turns are still totally busted. And heroic actions in general.

Oh yeah Cassia is still amazing, I can't even begin to imagine how absurd she was when mastery of time had no cap.

Idira is hilarious. The combat that starts after you talk to the liege of footfall the first time, her very first minor power (so zero veil degradation at the time) summoned a fucking bloodletter.

Man this has probably already been gone over in the thread before but the game makes it so hard to rationalize keeping Idira around no matter what morality path you're following.

I don't think I talked about game balance here yet? been a few reddit discussions on the matter.

this game is easy. too easy. I started on the +1 difficulty, "daring". "normal" here applies debuffs to enemies, buffs to the player. the daring is the zero mods version.
there is a hard, and unfair above it.

even on Daring, theres several problems.
1. its too easy to just ignore all the mechanics. Like, in pathfinder, you needed to actually pay attention to buffs, AC, touch AC, dex, "immune to death, mind effecting, prone" etc. these all matter, and you need to actually target weaknesses.
here? nah. just build correctly and NONE of that matters. cover, doesn't matter. I never bother to read the enemies char sheet. the only time I even bother to swap things up is when using my pyskers telepath or purge soul, which requires a mind or soul., so need other spells versus robots.
but built correctly, you can just ignore enemy dodge, shred armor, shred deflection, give yourself 200% dodge, etc.

2. Heroic actions are OP, and way way too easy to charge up. even with the nerfs, you can on the regular get a HA up by the 3rd or 4th team member to go in a round. then depending on which it is... often can chain that HA into 1 or 2 more in the same round.
There would be a few ways to fix this. nerf resolve. less momentum per kill/turn. nerf momentum per kill, but keep it the same for turns. so turns matter more then kills. extend the momentum bar, and assign tiers for HA. instead of 250 cap, have it cap at 500. Finest hour is t3, requiring 400 momentum. Disarm is t1 requiring 100 momentum. and so on.
momentum is supposed to go down when you take damage.. but you never take damage due to master strat going first, and 200% dodge.

finest hour is s+ tier.
into the breach s tier.
steady superiority is A+ tier. S tier if 2 officers in party to feed it extra turns.
firearm mastery b.
orchestrated firestorm is b tier. its not bad. but can do friendly fire, making it not great. and limited to specific targeted location.
unyeilding beacon d- tier.
disarming attack d tier.
psyker ults. d-

3. Cassia op. too many godly talents. her large aoe lidless stare procs stun.. Godly Navigator staves. its even hard to decide which one is most busted. Castigating -5 too all stats stacking debuff. applies on all nav skills, including non attck ones. so you can hit targets with -15 to -20 all stats per turn right from level 1. this flattens most early game enemies and bosses. devastating.. lets her do multiple attacks per turn with bonus damage.. infusing. +7/9 to all stats to allies. doesnt require los, or range. the warp buff is aoe. so, will hit the entire party with +7 all stats. not AS cheezy as previous stuff.. but still, can pump the entire party to astronomical values quickly and easily.

4. even abelard is a gg tank right from the get go.

5. officer still op with finest hour, voice of command, and bring it down.

6. warp corruption is not dangerous enough. I'd eliminate the cap, or raise it significantly. like 100 cap. and things would just get worse and worse. 30 warp max hp is reduced to 75%. 50 warp its reduced to 40%. 60 warp -25%, 70 warp 10%. 40 warp demon spawn every round. 55 warp 2 demons every round. 65 warp 4 every round. also add warp fuckery. chance for target to teleport and dodge. chance for target to teleport and swap places with an ally, the ally taking the hit. etc.

7. with that. demons and space marines are not powerful enough.
they do a great job setting up that first boss for example. heinrix, "if one of you should manage to survive, inform the inquisition..." he straight up says, he is going die here, and so are the rest of us. one of the others also says something along those lines. you're party expect to die against that first boss. he is too easy. should have WAY more armor/deflection.
same with the demon engine. and all the demons we fight/spawn. a chaos spawn should ruin our party. There should be gap between human, xenos, and then demons/space marines.

Gavinmad said:

Man this has probably already been gone over in the thread before but the game makes it so hard to rationalize keeping Idira around no matter what morality path you're following.

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Idira is 100% a "do you understand the lore?" character.
shes very friendly, nice. 100% chaotic good, fan favorite in any other setting. Seelah+lindzee.. But chaotic good does not exist in Warhammer. Chaotic good is still chaotic, and thus the domain of Slaneesh and Tzeentch.

she can not end well for herself, or anyone even remotely near her. And even that, with possession, or her dumb ass listening to the warp entities for advice, can do damage to the entire sector.

Don't really agree on the overall difficulty complaint, WotR on Core difficulty was pretty much faceroll for me from about lvl 4 on, I even unlocked sadistic game design without really trying for it. If anything RT on daring feels maybe just a little harder than WotR core.

That first chaos marine forced me to reload, power level seemed about right for a dark heresy marine.

Ulfar is disappointing. poor early game talent/archetype choices. weaker then Argenta at burster, and no real ability to go melee tank or melee dps. I'm going to try making him viable with melee/bolt pistol dw. but, honestly its not going to be as good as abelard's buffs/taunt.

Also, small silly moment. I just spent like 20minutes trying to figure out how to rescue a party member, and looking to see if its a bug, or what not.
In general not a fan of much of act 3. not for the same reasons most people complain about. loss of gear/party. nah. I don't like it for canon reasons. We should all be executed. Only the space marine could come out of this pure.