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Best Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations RANKED

This Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations Guide will teach you all about the best Rogue Specializations for Dragon Age Inquisition so you can maximize the potential of your party.

If you’re playing Dragon Age Inquisition, you’re going to have to decide which class you want your main character to be and also which party members to take with you throughout your journey. Since each class has 3 different specializations, you have a lot of choices at your disposal. This Best Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations Guide will help you pick the right Rogue Specialization for you.

The Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations available in the game are: Artificer, Assassin and Tempest.

To start, here’s a quick breakdown of all the different Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations: Artificers get skills that are related to traps and acts sort of like an extended version of the Sabotage Tree, which is available to all Rogues. Assassins get skills related to stealth and boosting damage out of stealth and acts as a sort of extended version of the Subterfuge Tree. Tempests are entirely different and get bonuses to consumables, potions, and a variety of powerful, unique potion effects.

Dragon Age Inquisition is not an incredibly difficult game, so ultimately you can easily get by just picking whatever class suits your interests the most, but the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations do vary in power, so if you’re interested in min-maxing you’ll want to know which are generally considered to be the best and which are the worst.

Here are the rankings, from worst to best:

3. Assassin – Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations

best dragon age inquisition rogue specializations assassin

Among the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations, Assassin comes in last place unfortunately. However, that doesn’t mean Assassin isn’t a good class. It certainly is. Not only are Assassins capable of dishing out a lot of damage on their own, their capstone skill, Mark of Death, is extraordinarily powerful and doubles the damage of your entire team for 8-12 seconds.

For that reason, an Assassin makes a great second Rogue because the power of Mark of Death is on full display when it’s amplifying not only your Assassin’s damage, but also your Tempest or Artificer’s damage, both of whom tend to outdamage the Assassin over time.

The reason Assassins don’t output as much damage as other Rogues is mostly because of playstyle. To get the most damage out of an Assassin, it’s important to stack crit damage and Dexterity bonuses on your gear and regularly use Stealth in order to take advantage of the Assassin’s ability to score automatic critical hits from Stealth.

This playstyle means the Assassin puts out big, chunky hits, but it also means it’s focused heavily on burst damage. On weaker enemies, that means it requires setup time to deal damage that often overkills enemies and goes to waste, and on bosses, dealing damage less regularly.

Out of all the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations, Assassin also requires you to pay the most attention. Where Tempest and Artificer can largely just spam powerful skills, Assassin makes you put in more work for less damage overall.

For that reason, Assassin is generally considered to be the weakest of the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations. But, again, a well-played Assassin is still a very powerful class and it really shines as a second Rogue party member due to its damage amplification ability.

2. Tempest – Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations

best dragon age inquisition rogue specializations tempest

The second of the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations, Tempest, is capable of spamming skills rapidly in order to pump out tremendous damage. It gets 3 unique ‘Flask’ skills: Flask of Frost, Flask of Fire and Flask of Lightning. Each of these skills has very potent effects.

Flask of Fire is the most important of the Tempest abilities as it makes your other abilities cost no stamina and have no cooldowns. While the Flask of Fire buff is active, you can easily spam your most powerful skills. As an Archer, you can use the multi-hit Leaping Shot or AoE Explosive Shot over and over again and as a Dual Wield Rogue you can repeatedly use whichever skill is best for the current situation.

Flask of Frost makes your Tempest Rogue nearly invulnerable to incoming damage. This is the weakest of the Tempest’s Flask skills (you’re not getting hit on your Rogue are you?), but you still have to use it in your rotation to get a duration and power bonus while your other Flasks are active.

Flask of Frost is a little more useful for Dual Wield rogues who might be susceptible to AoE attacks, but it’s not a good emergency button since you’re always putting it on cooldown for passive bonuses during your rotation and you have a Stealth skill already to use in dicey situations.

The final Flask skill, Flask of Lightning, stops enemies in their tracks and allows you to put the hurt on them while they’re frozen in time. It’s a significant bonus that’s almost as powerful as the Flask of Fire effect, so you’ll be wanting to take advantage of it as often as possible.

Because each Flask skill allows the Tempest to enter varying states of God-mode, it’s capable of pumping out extreme damage, especially if you properly gear your Rogue with a good mix of crit chance and crit damage.

What holds the Tempest back from being the best of the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations is that, like the Assassin, it tends to be good in bursts. Those bursts last longer, are more powerful, and don’t require as much finesse, but they’re bursts nonetheless.

1. Artificer – Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations

best dragon age inquisition rogue specializations artificer

Finally, number one of the best Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations is hands-down the Artificer, and it’s almost entirely because of a single skill. Artificer gets a skill called Opportunity Knocks, which reduces your cooldown whenever a team member scores a critical hit. When combined with the Sabotage Tree’s Looked Like It Hurt skill, which refills your stamina whenever you score a critical hit, this means Artificer’s essentially have the Tempest’s Fire Flask buff active all the time.

Fortunately for Artificer, that’s all they need to be the best Rogue specialization in town. The other Artificer skills are mostly useless, fairly weak and sometimes buggy to the point of being totally ineffective. However, if you’re able to get 60-80% crit on your Artificer, which is not difficult to achieve even early in the game with Bear Hides and Great Bear Hides, they effectively have no cooldowns and infinite stamina.

The way to play an Artificer to its fullest potential is, if you’re an Archer, to use Hook and Tackle to close-in on an enemy, then use Leaping Shot until you’re out of range, then use Hook and Tackle to close the gap again. Or, if a lot of enemies are close together, you’ll want to just spam explosive shot.

If you’re a Dual Wield Rogue, you can simply use your skill rotations as you see fit, keeping in mind that multihit skills which score a lot of crits with will reduce your cooldowns the most and give you back the most stamina.

It feels a little bit unfair from a design perspective that a single skill puts Artificer over the top, but it is what it is. Out of all the Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations, Artificer pumps out the most damage the most consistently. It deals as much or more damage than the Assassin and the Tempest do during their burst phases, and it deals that on demand, consistently throughout the fight. It also requires almost zero finesse. There are no skill rotations or stealth-setups. You just spam buttons until the thing you’re fighting dies.


That about covers it when it comes to the Best Dragon Age Inquisition Rogue Specializations Guide. Be sure to check out the Games Section or the Main Page for more game guides, or click here for more content related to Dragon Age Inquisition.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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