Another pass at Rogue

ErikPeter

Rogue (Classic)
10710 HP

Pummel 11 AP

Rogue pummels the enemy with uncanny superhuman strength. Deals 300 damage to a random enemy.

Rank 2: Rogue punches twice. Each attack deals 300 damage to a random enemy.
Rank 3: 3 attacks.
Rank 4: 4 attacks.
Rank 5: 5 attacks.
Max Level: Rogue punches 5 times. Each attack deals 1050 damage to a random enemy.

Absorb Power 10 AP ("The Gloves are Off")

Rogue touches a foe, momentarily stealing their psyche and abilities. Stuns the target for 1 turn and steals 2 AP from each of the enemies color pools.

Rank 2: Steals 3 additional enemy AP of random colors.
Rank 3: Stuns the target for 2 turns.
Rank 4: Steals 6 additional AP of random colors.
Rank 5: Stuns the target for 3 turns, and steals 8 additional enemy AP from random colors.
Max Level: Stuns the target for 3 turns, steals 2 AP from each color, plus 8 additional AP from random colors.

Energy Drain (PASSIVE)

Rogue's powers leave her opponents severely weakened. Whenever your team drains or steals enemy AP, deal 25 damage per AP drained.

Rank 2: Damage increased to 30 per AP drained.
Rank 3: Damage increased to 36 per AP drained.
Rank 4: Damage increased to 42 per AP drained.
Rank 5: Damage increased to 60 per AP drained.
Max Level: Rank 3: Deals 180 damage per AP drained. Rank 4: 210 damage per AP drained. Rank 5: 300 damage per AP drained.

Commentary: npxo
This is my third stab at Rogue (to see the first two, click the link in my signature). Although I only spent an evening on it, I'm pretty proud of this spec. This time I built her around her Energy Drain passive, with a general nod toward simplicity and fun synergies with other characters.

Rogue would be a strong addition to any team. Her Red isn't amazing (but she has the HP to make up for it), yet works well as a finisher and combos great with strike tiles. Her purple power is a good AP steal--especially if you can pop it early and drain most of one color--that can also deal good damage combined with her black passive. And Energy Drain is amazing when coupled with other characters that can destroy enemy AP. It adds to the effectiveness of any AP stealing power, especially Hood, Blade, and Psylocke. Also the new version of She-Hulk (yowza, with a lucky color hit it could do thousands of damage). With the drain being removed from X-force, that interaction is no longer super unfair. Interactions with Kingpin and OBW are mitigated by her steal being Purple.

Even though black seems really strong in some niche cases, I don't think it would be broken. First of all, there's the choice of what you give up: 3 red is quite mediocre and 3 purple significantly reduces the effectiveness of the power (and the Energy Drain). I think there's a cause for building her in different ways, depending on who you plan on teaming with.

Potential tweaks:
If Energy Drain's interaction between She-Hulk is too strong (though it's kind of a **** shoot whether you deal 900 or 6000 with that one) the power could be tweaked to only activate when you steal AP (and not when you just destroy it). This enforces the powerful interaction with Psylocke's Bewilder power, and the slow-drip awesomeness combo with Hood, Blade or Loki, but reduces the complexity a bit (and hopefully shouldn't cause confusion) because of fewer interactions to deal with. It could also just be toned down, damage-wise (but you don't want to make the damage insignificant, so go easy on it.)

There is some discussion to be had about color shifting, to balance some powerful synergies. E.g. She-Hulk is very strong (making 6 green do potentially lots of damage, occasionally); Changing Absorb from purple would probably break with OBW. If not, changing it to black (as Stun often shows up in black) would cause some overlap and reduce Hood/Blade/Psylocke's combo-ness.

Pummel might belong in green. That would boost Rogue's synergy with Psylocke, along with Blade (as you no longer need to match red to fuel it, feeding The Thirst). Also it would fit well in the category of finishers like CtS which generally deal a bunch of uneven damage to the enemy team. A build could work, and would admittedly fit her classic colors better.

Thoughts? Comments? Different ideas for Rogue? (Tinykitty, maybe I'll just post my older ideas below for completeness.)

ronin_san

How about granting her AT LEAST their match damage abilities when she takes the gloves off? what if Rogue stuns Beast, then suddenly her Green, Blue, and Yellow matches do more dmg?

What if the pummel does 3 punches at 1300 per, but can move onto the next target if the first is down? To be fair, that's more something Sabretooth would do.

OOH. Want to spec him out next?

Trilateralus

Pair her with Patch and for 9 green and 11 red you're doing 10K+ damage.

ronin_san

Trilateralus wrote:

Pair her with Patch and for 9 green and 11 red you're doing 10K+ damage.

20 AP in total for 10K? That's not broken to me. I see no wombo here.

Trilateralus

ronin-san wrote:

Trilateralus wrote:

Pair her with Patch and for 9 green and 11 red you're doing 10K+ damage.

20 AP in total for 10K? That's not broken to me. I see no wombo here.

Oh I'm not saying it's a problem, I would definitely use that.

Mawtful

Rogue has the "superman" powerset - super strength, invulnerability, flight - by itself, it's a fairly boring powerset. Fortunately, Rogue's "true" power is the ability to steal the memories and abilities of anyone she touches. This is the power which needs to feel "right" in order for Rogue to be successful.

Essence Steal (Active Blue, 8 AP)
With just a touch, Rogue can render her opponent unconscious and make their strength her own.
Target enemy is stunned for 1 turn. Add a temporary friendly Team Up from the target enemy's powerset.

Rank 2: Also steal up to 3 Team Up AP.
Rank 3: Enemy is stunned for 1 turn, plus 1 additional turn for each 3 Team Up AP stolen.
Rank 4: Steal up to 6 Team Up AP.
Rank 5: Rogue also receives a burst of X health.

This really was a little tricky to nail down, and I've got no doubt it would need some special coding to ensure players don't keep enemy powers after battle. However, I do think that Team Ups is the perfect way to simulate stealing powers.
It does mean that Rogue can't steal passives, unfortunately, but it also means that it's easier to determine what powers she will have access to. It also means that you can store up multiple powers, it doesn't require you to nurse a Countdown (like Control Shift), it uses a resource interaction which we're all already familiar with, and it keeps the cost of the power down since you still need the Team Up AP to fire off the power (no-one wants to pay 19 AP and only get a free Illusions from Loki).

After that, it's just a case of giving her an ability with a big hit, something slow but solid, and then probably something else which uses up Team Up AP.

Malcrof

Can't make a rogue character without an ability to use one of the enemies abilities against them. Instead of stealing, how about causing an enemy to target their own team?

ErikPeter

Mawtful wrote:

Essence Steal (Active Blue, 8 AP)

Yeah I was aiming for simplicity and general 'feel' for her powers (stunner, wild brawler) but your Essence Steal using TU is a clever way to let her really steal powers without too much overhead (e.g. the list of powers in this spec). I like it.

Der_Lex

My own take:

Power drain

Creates an X turn countdown tile on the board. Each turn this countdown tile is active, Rogue and target character are stunned, and drain X AP from a random color. When the countdown tile leaves the board, opposing character is stunned for one more turn and Rogue uses one random active power of the character against the opposing team.

(basically a variant of Colossus' Fastball Special, but stuns Rogue as well to prevent abuse and because it's thematically fitting. Leveling the power would increase the amount of AP drained and/or reduce the amount of turns on the countdown tile)

Goodnight, Sugah

Rogue deals X damage to the opponent and destroys a random block of 3x3 tiles. Does not generate AP.

(Simple hard punch, shamelessly borrowed from Grocket. Leveling increases damage and possibly tiles destruction amount.

Untouchable

Passive. Whenere the opponent inflicts match damage on Rogue, x % of that damage is returned to the opponent's character.

(a passive to reflect her energy draining skin. Leveling increases the % of damage returned. Only match damage because it represents 'touching')