WH 40K: Rogue Trader Convictions System Explained - All Buffs & how it impacts your playthrough

everybody this is Leroy from Leroy gaming and in today's Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader video we're going to go ahead and talk about the convictions system and Rogue Trader which basically if you're trying to compare it to like a DND system this is a belief SL alignment system of sorts but it works a little bit differently uh so I wanted to go over that I'm going to talk to you about what it impacts why it's important what the benefits are for going down any given path so that if you are just getting ready to play this game you can plan ahead and not be surprised uh By Any Given pathway so this game does in a nutshell give you technically three distinct ways to play if you really wanted to min max any One Direction but in a way you can play in such such a way that you're a bit of a mix of the different directions and I'll explain exactly what that means within this video so again if you end up finding this video helpful make sure to drop a like subscribe if you want to see more RPG content including Rogue Trader content from me and if you want to help get this video in front of other people dropping comments below questions or feedback is very very helpful with the algorithm now let's go ahead and talk about the conviction system basically this has been renamed a few times but in the release you basically have dogmatic heretical and iconic clast so dogmatic is kind of the Imperial pathway it's generally good you could think so but it's kind of like an authoritarian path playthrough uh you're playing where you are all about protecting humanity and the emperor and you're kind of racist to be honest with you um they're anti-enos and zenos is anything that's alien and the whole idea of down this pathway if you make choices in the game that are dogmatic in nature you're going to be anti- aliens anti obviously the void and and demonic creatures and pro Humanity which sometimes will be very positive and kind of a good guy role but sometimes you may end up making some questionable decisions uh for the good of mankind quote unquote the second pathway is the iconic class and this is kind of if you're talking about alignment I would say chaotic good um you're all about Freedom um helping people sacrificing for the greater good and this pathway is also very xenos friendly uh compared to the other Pathways so you're okay with human life obviously not okay with demons but this is uh the most goody tou of the three playthroughs if you make decisions down this path and then you have heretical which is definitely the chaotic evil methodology you can feed into the corruption you can uh like I am doing on this playthrough be pretty messed up uh and this game is very very dark so we're talking about sacrificing people torturing people uh heretical actions you know somebody pisses your main character off you may just execute them on the spot or make him suffer as much as possible so it's very very very dark now first thing I want to point out is what making these choices impact so you are going to have sometimes small decisions sometimes giant decisions that impact colonies worlds Etc that can be everything from dogmatic heretical and iconic class and whenever a decision will impact and give you points towards a direction as you see here like I'm 30 out of 75 towards point2 and dogmatic but I'm 203 out of 300 towards phase 4 of heretical it will in parenthesis say this is a dogmatic decision this is like an iconic class decision and so forth and then if you decide to make that choice you're going to get anywhere between one four six or more points uh in that direction now the main things that this will impact is story-wise from my experience playing numerous standpoints um the main arcs of the or story at least for the first two acts still head in the same direction you're not going to have a completely different experience but what happens to certain populations certain NPCs will change there are also pieces of equipment that require you to have a certain amount of progress towards dogmatic iconic class or heretical otherwise you cannot wear them or they may have additional benefits if you are of that conviction the next thing uh that I want to point out is there are major decisions when it comes to colonies and definitely watch my Colony video that's going to be coming out to learn more about this but you can impact how you manage your colonies and some of those decisions are very heretical or maybe very dogmatic and there's going to be different benefits you're going to get depending on what you choose and they are always mutually exclusive so you either pick one or the other so it allows you to shape how you rule your expans your your region of the Galaxy here uh depending on what you choose and then finally the other thing that this is going to impact is that as you hit these different tiers you're going to get different Buffs and I will go over them right now now as of 1.0 release my opinion is Iconic class probably has the best quote unquote Buffs but you can let me know what your thoughts are so let's go ahead and take a look what the Buffs are so we're going to go ahead and start with dogmatic pathway and tier one once you get tier one you get Grim determination Rogue Trader and their allies gain a 10% chance to survive one wound instead of falling unconscious if you get to tier two you're going to get Absolution as you see here in the first sh of combat all Critical Hits scored by the Rogue Trader's party inflict burning and an all fire damage suffered by enemies is increased by plus one for each conviction dogmatic Rank and this explains down below there as you can see what burning means and so it's plus one damage and notice you can have up to five ranks so that could be up to Five Points next level three is path of redemption any momentum expenditure by the Rogue Trader and their allies including heroic actions is reduced by minus 20 so again I'll do a different video on this but momentum in short is basically you you build up this meter and you can if it gets high enough you can use superpowers basically heroic ax as they say here um to really dramatically impact the flow of any battle and this makes it that when you spend those points to use those powers for example that it's not going to drop as far so you can get back to Max score again uh much quicker so that's actually quite good then on four you have piercing resolution once per battle the Rogue Trader may choose an ally including themselves for one round all the targets weapon attacks ignore enemy's armor that can be quite powerful but again it's only for one round so depending on what kind of weapon you use uh and whether you can use a heroic act during that time or not uh that could be quite powerful and then level five here instrument of the will until the start of their next turn the Rogue Traders becomes immune to any attacks from demon zenos and all demons and zenos in a 5 foot radius consider them a priority Target can be only be used once per battle so this is like a giant AOE taunt and then any attacks from those kind of creatures will do no damage so that's dogmatic now if you go down heretical the polar opposite tier one is resource preservation uh Rogue Trader and allies gain 20% chance to save combat stimulants or medkits after use it's a one in five chance to save um these resources now if you're playing on normal difficulty or lower you may not even be using those quite as much but on higher difficulties where things hit a lot harder and you're going to be using more resources to minmax this could be potentially helpful tier two is destroyed a week for the first round of combat everyone Rogues Traders party gains 25% chance to gain one action point after killing an enemy however triggering this effect immediately manifests psychotic phenomenon does not reset the cooldown of attacks and abilities so if you don't understand what psychotic phenomenon are I again will be doing um a video on basic psych attacks but this is what you need to know when you use a lot of psychic abilities it fills up a specific bar and when it gets high enough bad things can happen so you could just take random damage you could summon a demon that attacks you and you have to deal with uh and various other effects now if you go heretical you actually have Feats that you can take where you're going to get positive benefits when you practice psychic phenomenon so they're not always bad if you build your characters to benefit from Psychic phenomenon so this is very situational again if for example you play heretical but for some reason don't pick the right Feats this could be all bad but again if you build correctly disability could be quite useful uh for procing more psychic phenoma uh more quickly and hence potentially giving you more benefits level three is gift of the warp so any psychic phenomenon again increases the momentum of the Rogue Trader Party by 2 to 10 instead of decreasing by 1 to5 so again traditionally if you're a good guy when psychic phenomena happens momentum you can think of it like morale in battle drops but here because you're heretical and you're like on the side of the Void pretty much when this stuff happens all of a sudden your momentum goes up dramatically more and so you're able to use more of your heroic powers and so forth so again really leans into using more psychic powers um and having the proc and you know taking a risk of possibly bad things happening to you but at the benefit of having positive side effects as well level four is going to be uh demon uh demon pathy uh once per battle Rog Trader may choose an ally including themselves and Grant them plus 20 bonus to all their characteristics for two rounds but after the effect Fades the Target Falls prone so you can get a nice boost to Stats but the falling prone is pretty rough here's what you need to know about falling prone when you fall prone you have to waste the whole round to get up that's pretty brutal it's not like D and D where you lose half your movement you can still act when you have to get up in this game you are quite literally missing a turn pretty rough so there's a big negative to that side and at number five power from Beyond the Veil all weapons on a battlefield become warping be for one round gaining bonus damage equal to plus Veil degradation level an additional plus 5 time Val agregation percent armor piercing can only be used once per combat do you notice uh I haven't tested this out yet but it say all weapons so this could also backfire uh and because it's powering up enemy weapons as well Veil degreg is basically that score I mentioned that bar as you Ed more psychic powers the higher that gets the more likely those psychic events are to happen so again the more psychic energy the more chaos energy is in the battlefield the bigger a buff you're going to get from this power and then finally we have um the iconic class pathway so tier one above the Thundering Gods the Rogue Trader and two random allies start combat with temporary wounds equal to their own resolve resolve uh again as a quick note is how much of that momentum you get just for starting your turn for each character they have unique resolve stat some will have more than others and there's Feats you can take to improve that so depending on what kind of build you have if you have a lot of high resolved characters this could be additional wounds and again think of wounds as health so it's saying additional uh temporary health that you get not bad for a tier one then we have master of command in the first round of every combat Rog Trader and allies gain uh Rogue basically uh two plus Rogue Traders iconic class last rank additional MP which is movement points so you can move more at the beginning of combat position a little more effectively and get the jump on the enemies tier three is courage and steel Rogue Trader and her allies need 30 less momentum to activate a heroic act this is huge uh basically you need less morale you're able to proc hero acts more often um and again for tier three this is probably the best tier three of all of them my opinion because heroic acts literally make or break your combat a lot of times and on higher difficulties procing heroic acts as often as possible is the way of beating really overwhelming odds then you have tier four transcended potential once per battle the Rogue Trader may choose an ally the target Ally May immediately use their heroic Act without spending momentum not applicable to allies whose heroic Act is on coold down this is important because you can traditionally only use one heroic act per battle per person there is an exception uh for one of the classes um but generally this is very useful because you can utilize this use a heroic act and then immediately do another heroic Act of another character so to really double dip and that could be the difference between wiping out a whole encounter that's why I said this is probably the most powerful singular effect of any of these uh Pathways and then number five Excellence any attacks from allies that may hit other allies will be dodged if possible any Allied ability that may Target an ally and has a resistance test will be resisted by allies basically this game has Friendly Fire and what it's saying is if you have a weapon ability that could damage somebody they're going to dodge it and resistance is as important because if you have to do a resistance test if you fail that resistance test you're going to take damage for example or a debuff so this means that and this is at any time which again super powerful um you're going to be immune from any FL friendly fire so needless to say as I mentioned especially tier four and tier five for iconic class um the most powerful I don't know if they did this on purpose because the iconic class is the most goody tou pathway I don't know if it just they're trying to get give you more incentive to uh play the side but again I don't feel like these are as balanced as they could be these are super super powerful now do notti as I mentioned you can't you don't have to make just singular decisions so here I they have very little bit on Icona class but you'll notice actually I've unlocked tier one benefits from dogmatic and tier three of the heretical the amount of points you need to level this up does increase quite dramatically as you go up into tiers um so if you really want to max out level five this is going to you're going to want to lean into that pathway I also do want to point out and again I want to keep the spoilers minimum but things on your ship on your Void ship will change dramatically depending which path where you go so again I don't want to spoil it but there'll be new NPCs new areas of the ship will transform uh and have different kind of interactive or for for flavor and RP purposes items as well so there is a variety of differences if you were to just play in the middle and do a little bit of everything I feel like you would miss out so my recommendation is pick a pathway and really lean into it now a final thing I want to point out and talk about our Companions and their own preferences so you'll notice outside of Zeno's characters which don't have a preference currently everybody else will have a preference to different levels so idra is heretical tier to CIA is dogmatic too and so forth you can most definitely have a party of mixed characters however here's a big however there is an at least one incident that I've run into where uh if you choose a certain pathway you will permanently lose a character you can also just choose if let's say you are dogmatic and you don't like zenos characters you can talk to one of the NPCs um again I won't spoil it and say hey I hate the Xeno trash get rid of them and you can literally remove your characters so you can lose characters if you want to rpse on purpose with certain exceptions for the majority of the game you can though have a mixed crew you it may seem literally heretical to have dogmatic and heretical people play together but I have done it with that being said if you want to kind of roleplay and get into it I could totally see people uh building a a team of individuals that have very similar uh beliefs don't forget you can create custom characters if again you really want to lean into this and uh have a team that's all just one conviction pathway if you don't have the main characters main companions that can meet that need because again from everything I found so far through two acts there's a pretty even representation of dogmatic heretical and iconic class except I've only found one heretical so far so keep that in mind hope this has helped you understand the conviction system a little bit better if you did make sure to drop a like again subscribe to the channel for more RPG content um and let me know if you have any questions in the comments below that being said thank you for all the support guys as always I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Leeroy Gaming

Views: 5,829

Keywords: warhammer 40k rogue trader, rogue trader, wh40k rogue trader rpg, owlcat games, rogue trader convictions, convictions system, wh40k rogue trader, rogue trader 40k, wh40k rogue trader owlcat, warhammer rogue trader, warhammer 40000, rogue trader heretic, rogue trader heretical, rogue trader dogmatic, rogue trader iconoclast, rogue trader convictions and companions, rogue trader character creation

Id: YCJJZwTaqNc

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023