Osgard and Snorty pause for a quick picture with the Guardian Leaders in Sanctum
My dwarven pal, Osgard, has had many adventures across the MMO worlds, but perhaps his best known role was as a Dwarven Engineer in Warhammer Online. He also occasionally visits Azeroth in the form of a hunter. It seemed fitting then, to try to combine the two, and the result has worked fairly well so far.
Saboteur was an obvious base, granting him bombs and charges aplenty. While he rather misses his turrets and napalm, it does give him a good mixture of ranged options, and will eventually provide him with landmines. He hasn’t really bothered too much with the trap-side of Saboteur, as they seem a bit ineffective compared with his other options, but perhaps I should experiment with them a little more.
Many were the times in Warhammer that the only healing anyone in his group was likely to get was coming from Osgard’s barrel of Bugman’s Best, and he has continued this fine tradition of healer of last resort by taking just enough bard to give him two area heal-over-time abilities. They’re not particularly large, but they do hit rather a lot of people, so are good for generally keeping people topped up. Healing is typically rather scarce, so a rogue willing to help out with that is a useful fellow to have about!
As his tertiary class he has Ranger. That’s just for the pet, which you can get and upgrade without putting any points in. Having a snuffly friend willing to take agro off you is a major godsend when soloing, and Snorty does the job well. His damage output is negligible, but he’s right good at taunting.
It’ll be a bit indecipherable, I suspect, but here’s a picture of his Soul Tree for good measure. He has largely concentrated on choices that increase the effectiveness of his bombs and charges, though the Dexterity-boosting passive was a must-have also.
Osgard the Saboteur's Soul Tree
This isn’t actually much of a “Dark Moment in Character Building” compared with some of my previous entries in that series, as I suspect that a Saboteur/Bard, with unpointed Ranger, just for the pet, is probably pretty common. In fact I would not be at all surprised if over half of rogues have secondary bard and tertiary ranger, for the healing and pet, with a variety of primary class options, though I would imagine that works slightly less well with the melee souls.
At level 26, he’s well ahead of my other alts. Actually he’s rather farther ahead than I really want him to be, as he still has a great many things he wants to do in Silverwood (and Gloamwood too, which he’s almost finished the quests in), and I see this as something of a design flaw. There is no way that anyone would be anywhere near completing all Silverwood achievements by the time you outlevel the zone, and it feels a bit strange to have so many high level folks running around there also trying to get the various Colossal kills they need for achievements and the epic questline. We desperately need to be able to turn off xp gain, and this will become even more of a factor when the patch currently on the test server comes in to effect, increasing xp for Rifts and Invasions.
He’s not dabbled in PvP yet, partially because the last thing he needs is yet another source of xp. I really need to get around to that, but I keep putting it off, thinking that an xp-lock might be just around the corner. If one does materialise, I’ll be very tempted to start Osgard again. You know how I am with trying to do everything at as low a level as possible!
I’ll introduce you to more of my Rift alt-stable soon!