The Most Fun Way to Play the Rook

By OMG_Splitshadow on January 1, 2010 5:11:16 PM from

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Build Order

Level 1: Power of the Tower I

Level 2: Archer Tower

Level 3: Save

Level 4: Power of the Tower II

Level 5: Boulder Roll And Tower of Light

Level 6: Hammer Slam I

Level 7: Power of the Tower III

Level 8: Trebuchet

Level 9: Hammer Slam II

Level 10: Power of the Tower IV

Level 11: Boulder Roll II

Level 12: Hammer Slam III

Level 13: Hammer Slam IV

Level 14: Save

Level 15: Dizzying Force and Boulder Roll III

Level 16: God Strength I

Level 17: God Strength II

Level 18: God Strength III

Level 19: Poisoned Arrows

Level 20: Stats

Strategy:

Your job as Rook is to hold lanes and deal quick bursts of damage in group fights. You're a tank in terms of hitpoints, but don't forget that you have incredibly low armor. The longer a game goes on, the stronger you are going to become. A lot of characters like TB and QoT just kind of lose steam after level 10, but Rook has two great skill lines and a stun that continuously increases in duration. If you have an unclean beast, I would cede the mana flag to him on cataract. An over-leveled rook is almost as intimidating as an unclean beast, and he's more of a gank machine than he's given credit for. Try to save mana for boulder rolls and encourage your teammates to frequently port in when you can get a kill. Remember that kills are not the most important thing in the game, but they will give you money, and more importantly, they will let you farm warscore, gold, and experience while you knock down towers. On cataract, you can safely put pressure on the enemy's mana flag if you so wish by placing your towers in a line. Don't let the flag go yellow unless you feel you can capture it completely. Your enemies will get experience if you only cap it half way and then back off, don't forget it. But what you can do is pin them to their portal with your tower farm.

Items:

Nothing special here.

Favor: Blood of the fallen, staff of renewal, or dark crimson vial

Start with scaled helm and banded armor. On your first trip back, buy vlemish faceguard and a teleport scroll if you can afford it.

Next, buy unbreakable boots followed by nimoth chest armor. When the money is available, switch out scaled helm and banded armor for a plenor battlecrown and eventually a narmoth's ring or If you want to get some kills or are having trouble escaping, buy the wand of speed. If you have tons of cash even after upgrading the citadel, go for an orb of defiance and use it to burn through the cooldown of an enemy's sigil, or when your allies need time to get to you.

Whenever possible, try to buy fortified structures I, experience I, and creep upgrades. (don't buy priests too early though). Buy teleport scrolls, sigils, and capture locks as needed.

Dark Crimson Vial

This is a very good favor item if you're an aggressive rook player. If you take DCV, I suggest that you push your lane partner really hard and try to force them to shop so you can take down a tower before FS1. I suggest hammer slam at level 3 so that you can nuke the tower while killing a creep wave and keep pushing hard.

A replay that loosely follows this build is attached.

+29 Karma | 75 Replies

True. Lowest armor in the game...wtf?

Anyway, I've found a modified version of janooks build to be the best although spookies pure Hammer build is always fun. We have similar builds, but I spec way more on towers and get roll later(for mana conversion mind you).

I've found treb to be a pretty good skill actually(although it doesnt buff your other shoulder upgrades! It does buff ALL towers, including neutrals=D) but really a lategame skill since it's not as usefull as boulder/hammer/tower.

I will sometimes pour more points into towers if the game is moving along and my opponent doesn't purchase giants. Why does the trebuchet buff towers, and in what way? Also, boulder roll is the most fun skill to use ever. You can be more annoying than regulus if you use it on them every time there's a creep wave. (Plus it helps enormously to pull off hammer slams.)

Plus it's hilarious to watch those fat ass priests get mowed over.

Yep, that's why I took a screenshot and meticulously cut him out to forever preserve that beautiful image of those morbidly obese suckers flying majestically through the air.

Priests lawl

lmfao. Priests are my favorite looking character in the game. Walking chairs cause their tiny little legs probably don't work.

ChromeQuotedForTruth

Wow, I'm flattered to see my ancient build referenced in your guide. Your build is pretty solid, and I agree with the changes that you've made. I also usually put 3 points in Power of the Tower and use the Amulet of Teleportation. Nice guide!

Quoting Splitshadow,

reply 27

I will sometimes pour more points into towers if the game is moving along and my opponent doesn't purchase giants. Why does the trebuchet buff towers, and in what way? Also, boulder roll is the most fun skill to use ever. You can be more annoying than regulus if you use it on them every time there's a creep wave. (Plus it helps enormously to pull off hammer slams.)

Read the skills description? anyway it makes your shoulder towers better not the ToL's.

You really shouldn't skip or even delay Trebuchet, especially not for God's Strength.

I believe Trebuchet hits DGs for 250, so with good armor that's still going to be 150+ damage and it fires every 5 seconds. Most of the time you'll be hitting for at 180+, it has small radius splash damage against creeps, and it strikes structures for 500. The ability targets DGs first, towers second, and others third, so it will lock onto a hero in a busy fight unless it's already locked onto a tower before the hero enters into range (which is a good thing, since it lets you siege without leaving or extending your tower farm).

Generally you'll hit a DG 3-4 times between every hammer slam up until very late game when both you and your enemy are ballsy enough to stand in melee range through the full duration of slam's (or possibly boulder's) cooldown. By that point you should have maxed out hammer slam regardless though.

There's virtually no other ability that will gives you that kind of mileage, generally it's even better than taking the next rank of Hammer Slam, though of course it's not the on-command splash damage hammer provides. The notion of taking God's Strength, which hits for only 50 per hit pre-armor (so about 30 per swing with decent armor) every 2 seconds or so and only when in melee range, is ridiculous.

Also how many times does it have to be said that towers do excellent damage late game, especially against creeps? They hit for about 190 on creeps. If you have 8 towers up (not that you always will) they will deal about 1500 damage every two seconds, or 750 DPS for those not mathematically inclined.

They two-shot giants that aren't fully or nearly fully upgraded with a second valor flag and players only mitigate about 40-50% of their damage in most cases. The idea that 300+ DPS is an example of poor scaling is hilarious. That's comparable to the damage you're doing with hammer slam and autoattack combined, it's higher than ooze+spit, not to mention you dramatically decrease the odds of your tower falling apart halfway through an ally's teleport.

Ever since I dropped the point in early god strength, my Rook has been much better. The only reason I ever originally took it was for Aoe, but as Obscen pointed out to me, you get AoE anyways. It is a deceptively bad skill to take early.

You must never miss boulder roll at 5, and treb at 8.

With treb, even if you can't tether your ToL farm down the lane to the enemy towers because of DG resistance, the tower is still eventually going to go down. Own your flag, kill the creeps, and build your farm a safe distance, but within treb range.

It's also funny to get a kill steal with treb. You can shurg your shoulders and go "What! I don't control it" hehe.

get more tower. Drop treb adn strenght.

They arent good enough, get em later.

Trebuchet isn't a guarunteed hit. Also, I can't see anything in his build order that is worth skipping for trebuchet. I mean, you could consider Power of the Tower II "free" bonus damage for the first two towers.

Also how many times does it have to be said that towers do excellent damage late game, especially against creeps?

Catapults outrange towers, and with a minion build also in the mix it makes it easier to overwhelm a tower farm.

Late game you have max rank hammer slam, not that it takes rank more than rank 2 to wipe out a cluster of catapults anyway though. You can one-shot the minon waves, they practically become a non-issue and when you cap an enemy portal and camp it creep waves are a non-issue. Regardless though it's not like anyone but Oak or QoT doesn't also see a massive effectiveness reduction when they have a full creep wave wailing on them anyway.

More towers. If you can get towers IV you're golden since you dont have mana problemss any more(or only minor ones).

Tower of Light IV takes most of your time to make, 10 second cooldown * 8 towers = 80 seconds of setup and 1600 mana.

It is much more fun to run around hammerolling every time your cooldowns are up, and you will succeed in dealing tons of damage. I also find that the later the games go on, the less enemy demigods need to approach your tower farm. When all the towers are gone, mobility > standing around playing in your farm.

Lategame tower rook:

1. Build farm

2. Farm Creeps

3. Enemies attempt to kite and destroy towers from a distance, limited success

4. Try to capture a portal flag

5. Get attacked without farm

6. OMG RUN

Lategame hammerroll rook:

1. Teleport around for ganks, or to save your allies

2. Capture flags and fight 1v1 anyone who tries to stop you (throw up an occasional tower to make a tele spot)

3. ???

4. Profit!

thats why u get staff of renewal on rook.

Lategame tower rook:

1. Build farm

2. Farm Creeps

3. Enemies attempt to kite and destroy towers from a distance, limited success

4. Try to capture a portal flag

5. Get attacked without farm

6. OMG RUN

That's a bad late game tower rook. A good one can take a portal and sit on it indefinitely, forcing the other team to go at least 2v1 but more often than not 3v2 or 3v1 to defend/retake it.

It is much more fun to run around hammerolling

Definitely play however's fun for you, it's a game afterall. I don't mean to say your build isn't fun or that it can't work, I just wanted to make a few corrections on some things that were said about tower rook.

I cant decide which build is best on Rook any more. I used to play with 0 towers for a very long time going pure slam build. Its tough to take out enemy base towers though. Now I fit in Tower I at level 1 for a stronger early game and to assault enemy base towers, but still have trebuchet + slam IV + roll II by level 10 (by dropping god's strength).

Problem is I am often tempted to take Tower IV, but this skill is not so good with blood of the fallen which is the standard slam rook favor item, and only really works well with staff of renewal.

If you take staff of renewal though, you will be needing to go full tower build to survive early game without blood of the fallen.

I always preferred hammer builds because they were a lot more fun, the strength relies on getting hammer slam IV levelled up as fast as possible to take out enemies before they have a chance to stack hp. With the tower build you can still take slam, but you won't get slam IV until lvl 12/13, and everyone will have 6k hp+ by then.

I find minion builds quite difficult to combat as any rook really (especially erebus). If you go towers, they can send in minions first to take no damage from towers themselves. If you go slam, it still usually isn't enough damage to kill all the minions in one go, and you will be dead before the cooldown comes back up.

I think without a doubt the tower rook build with staff of renewal, vlemish + plenor, orb of defiance and 3 random hp/armor items is mathmatically the strongest rook build. Build a tower farm super fast, stun + slam -> orb -> stun + slam.

But hammer builds are more fun.

anyone ever tried going slam IV, power of tower IV, roll II by level 10?
i.e. 0 shoulder weapons

staff of renewal

banded armor
scalemail
vlemish
plenor
nimroth

?

I did. Turns out Archers and Light helps more than I expected at killing escaping demigods. It's a good build, and one I'll definitely get back to, but for now I'm conent with my pals archers and light crystal.

Egads, double post!

Yeah, the main problem with it is that while you can put a ton of pressure on them when they stay and fight, the pressure stops completely when they decide to run. Rook is a deceptively hard target to run from with ind weapons.

mm it uses a butt load of mana.

thats one of the problems taking towers in a slam build, it costs so much mana to maintain towers that you won't have enough mana to roll + slam.

it is also hard to take out enemy base towers when there are 2 that can fire on you at once i.e. all the towers on cataract after the outer towers. that is where trebuchet comes in handy.

rook is actually suprisingly versatile and balanced.

all of his skills are useful, and balanced enough so that a variety of builds are technically viable, and his slow move speed and inability to chase is a massive weakness to make up for all his strengths. worst thing ever is if an erebus swarms next to you from out of sight, bites you, and an UB comes steaming towards you with spit + ooze + slow + stun, there is no way a rook can escape from that combo even with tp's / fakecasting.

i think a solid all round build would be:
1 point in power of the tower at lvl 1 - ability to assault enemy towers early, and so allies can portal to you
max slam by lvl 10 - burst finishing move (to make up for lack of chasing ability)
trebuchet by lvl 8 - long range tower siege, effective at taking out areas where 2+ towers would fire on you, or a running enemy
boulder roll 2 by lvl 10 - so slam cant be interrupted

optional:
1 point in structural transfer (at some point - probably not until after lvl 10 though) - for emergency healing or enemy tower offense

lvl 10+
max power of the tower if you want a tower focused build
pros - more dps than god str / stats, towers fire whilst you are stunned
cons - costs a **** load of mana

or

max god str + stats for auto-attack build
pros - increases dps, 0 mana cost
cons - not as much dps as towers, additional dps negated by stuns

i think a solid all round build would be:
1 point in power of the tower at lvl 1 - ability to assault enemy towers early, and so allies can portal to you
max slam by lvl 10 - burst finishing move (to make up for lack of chasing ability)
trebuchet by lvl 8 - long range tower siege, effective at taking out areas where 2+ towers would fire on you, or a running enemy
boulder roll 2 by lvl 10 - so slam cant be interrupted

optional:
1 point in structural transfer (at some point - probably not until after lvl 10 though) - for emergency healing or enemy tower offense

I agree with the majority of this. I think there are too many strong skills to take before level eight to take trebuchet, but it is good enough to take at 11. I wouldn't knock off the early Tower of Light II though, in my experience it makes you much stronger during the transition to hammerroll rook. I always want to take structural transfer, but if you do something must be kicked out. (Not to mention, as you health stack the skill line heals you less and less)

max god str + stats for auto-attack build

That sounds like a bad idea. The rook is too slow to AA anyone. I like how the tower of light, archer towers, and trebuchet all give the rook a way to attack although he's slow and can't get to his enemies. What people sometimes forget is that they take a buttload of added damage when chasing. (you get a lot of kills when running away, turning around and hammerolling them next to towers)

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The Most Fun Way to Play the Rook