Understanding Rogues/Vigilantes

[khy]

Help me out here a bit guys. I played the game religiously from issues 1 through 9, and far less after that. The rogue stuff is a bit unfamiliar to me.

 

From how I understand it, you pick a faction and play it until level 20 - then you get the chance to do 'morality' missions. And in doing so you can join an intermediate alignment (Rogue/Vigilante) where you can access zones from both hero side AND villain side.

 

That's where my understanding breaks down. Let's say I want to make my Arachnos Soldier into a rogue. Does this mean I now have double the content? I can access hero missions AND villain missions? There's no penalty for doing either? If so, why would I want to proceed past rogue into becoming an actual hero?

[Seraph]

In short, yes. Being Rogue/Vigilante means you can go from Paragon to Rogue Isles at will without much trouble.

 

As long as you don't take part in any of the morality-decision missions (the ones that upon completion put you Villain or Hero), you're good to go. This means if you're a Rogue, you can do Positron Taskforces (if I recall right, there was no restriction). So just be careful how you do your Newspaper missions, you can do morality missions fine but that final one you want to steer clear of and/or delete.

[Rumors]

If memory serves right Rogues can't do story arcs blueside and Vigilantes can't do story arcs redside since the contacts will tell them to go away.  They can always play other people's story missions though.

 

 

You can use Null the Gull in Pocket D to change alignments instantly, aside from the normal way.  It's a bird on a truck on the redside of the club.

[Mjolnerd]

Rogues/vigs can participate in missions on the "other side," but can't initiate them (since they don't have contacts there. Also, certain things such as the trials accessed via the LFG teleporter (Death from Below and Drowning in Blood) still see rogues as villains and vigs as heroes, so they won't allow them to join "enemy" versions of those trials.

 

The reason to stick with a "true" hero/villain alignment comes in the rewards for doing morality missions and "reinforcing" your alignment -- if a villain does a rogue morality mission, they become a rogue and get to do hero stuff, but if they do a villain morality mission, they earn villain merits that can be used to purchase all kinds of cool stuff.

 

Here's ParagonWiki's page on alignments, it does into more detail: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Alignment

 

Or that's how it was originally, anyway; I'm not 100% sure how the hero/villain merits stuff works currently since a lot of stuff is free now that didn't used to be.

[Seraph]

Or that's how it was originally, anyway; I'm not 100% sure how the hero/villain merits stuff works currently since a lot of stuff is free now that didn't used to be.

 

Same. There were limitations when Going Rogue first launched and I don't know if they lifted those towards the end.

[khy]

So if I understand everything here, if I wanted to be able to group with heroes and do hero shit but still progress through the villain storyline and get a patron, I'd want to go rogue and stay rogue until I get all the powers I want.

 

If I want to feel like I 'earned' the alignment change I do it normally, and if I don't care about that I can just use the magical bird in the dance dimension to change instantly.

 

Then if I want to see all the hero content I missed, I'd go full on hero, go to Ouroboros, and do all the previous arcs.

 

I think I have a plan now, fellows!

[Dr. Gemini]

Or that's how it was originally, anyway; I'm not 100% sure how the hero/villain merits stuff works currently since a lot of stuff is free now that didn't used to be.

 

From what I've seen so far everything you could buy with hero/villain merits you can now buy with reward merits. There's a 1 hero merit = 50 reward merits conversion option as well so I'm assuming you still get hero/villain merits, but it looks like its not as necessary as it used to be if you wanted the stuff you could purchase with them.

[Blackshear]

In terms of the tip mishes there's no sense being a rogue or a vigilante...you get 20 merits for the rogue or vig alignment mishes, whereas you in effect get 50 for finishing up a hero or villain alignment mish.

 

Of course, unless you're really stuck on the the alignment powers you can just let Null the Gull change your alignment to whatever you need it to be at a given time.

[Zombie Hustler]

Everyone hit all the high points about rogues/vigilantes here, so I'll only add this:

 

I24 had added the first Rogue and Vigilante contacts/story arcs. There were, if I recall correctly, one generic contact of each alignment (from whom you could get tip missions), and one story arc contact of each alignment. I don't recall a lot about either, as I only ran through them once each on test, but one of the two was decidedly more lackluster a storyline than the other (it was on par with the Villain intro story arc "Hearts of Darkness" which was very silly IMO; I believe that both were written by the same dev). I have not yet hit 20 in-game so I can't say whether those contacts were retained in I25 or not.

 

From what I recall of the developer's notes on future plans beyond I24, they were also going to add Rogue and Vigilante stories in Khallisti Wharf, and the I24 contacts were sort of an experimental attempt to gauge interest in developing more alignment-locked content for those sides.

 

Personally, I found it to be a really interesting area that I would have loved to see more exploration of, but I'm an avowed fan of Praetoria and the Loyalist/Resistance story arcs. Ideally, I think it would be great if both "Red" and "Blue" sides were somehow able to be better incorporated to allow play across alignments for all levels (or even just post-20) but that of course would be a very large project and something that was not on the radar for the Paragon Studios developers at any point.