Twisting Blades Leveling

The Twisting Blades Rogue Leveling Build Guide teaches you about the Gear, Skills and Playstyle to reach the Endgame in Diablo 4.

Twisting Blades is a Leveling build for those who do for some reason not want to play Dance of Knives and want to level as melee. It is still fun and strong but it's really hard to beat Dance of Knives when it comes to leveling.

Not sure how to level quickly? Check out our Efficient Leveling guide.

This guide is work in progress and more updates are coming in as we get more information closer to the Lord of Hatred launch.

1. Cast Dark Shroud for Damage Reduction and Movement Speed.
2. Cast Shadow Imbuement.
3. Cast 3x Puncture -> 1x Twisting Blades
4. Cast Dash and Shadow Step for Mobility.

Later on when we can spam Twisting Blades, we drop Puncture and add Shadow Clone for more damage.

Remember to press your Health Potion for Unstable Elixirs and Yax + Gar.

How to Level

Leveling in Diablo 4 is usually best done in areas with high monster and elite density, on the highest difficulty you can still mostly one-hit kill monsters. To level efficiently, you want to follow these steps:

1. Begin on Hard difficulty (or on Normal if Hard proves to challenging).
2. Start the Seasonal Questline to unlock the Seasonal Reputation Track.
3. Complete a Dungeon with a Whisper Bounty for 5 points.
4. Farm Helltide up to level 15, earning an additional 5 points toward a Whisper Bounty so you’re ready to cash it in.

• Open Helltide chests only after reaching level 15; opening them earlier won’t grant you ‍Sigil Powder.

5. Switch to Penitent difficulty and turn in your Whisper Bounty at the Tree of Whispers.

At this stage, you should have 60 ‍Sigil Powder so you can craft a Nightmare Dungeon (NMD) Sigil at the Occultist. The Whisper Bounty provides 30, and opening Helltide Chests should yield the remaining 30. If you’re short on ‍Sigil Powder from the Helltide Chests, you can complete an open-world Local Event to make up the difference.

6. Craft your Nightmare Dungeon Sigil and complete the NMD, receiving another Sigil upon finishing it. Sigils with the Forgotten Wisdom affix are your top priority, though it’s still worthwhile to run NMDs without this affix to keep your character progressing.

• It’s important to note that the Forgotten Wisdom affix causes enemies to drop experience orbs. Because these exp orbs grant significant amounts, it’s usually better to complete Forgotten Wisdom Sigils on lower rather than higher difficulties so you can defeat enemies faster, despite the lower base experience. Therefore, only run these on higher difficulty if it does not take you much longer to clear.

7. Continue farming NMDs until approximately level 55. At that point, you can wrap up your leveling by either clearing a few Strongholds outside of the Nahantu region or, if you have plenty of Forgotten Wisdom Sigils, continuing to run those.
8. Consider lowering the difficulty if needed to complete Strongholds more efficiently. Most of the experience comes from Stronghold completion itself, which is unaffected by experience boosts.
9. Don’t forget to start repeatedly crafting Elixirs at level 10 and Incenses at level 45 and beyond to help speed up your leveling.

Runes

Early on, when we only have access to Magic Runes, we will use CirLum and YaxGar.

CirLum will allow us to keep up with our Energy demands and YaxGar will provide us with a lot more damage.

Later on, we will transition to PocLum, which is a better CirLum, and CirThul to Freeze and get [x]15% more Damage.

Elixirs and Incenses

You should always try to use Elixirs and Incenses while leveling as they increase the Experience you gain and give you powerful stat bonuses.

For Elixirs we use Elixir of Advantage for Lucky Hit Chance and Attack Speed.

For Incenses we use Spiral Morning for Dexterity, Song of the Mountain for Armor and Soothing Spices for All Resistances and more Armor.

Endgame Builds

You can find Endgame builds to transition to HERE.

11th of December 2025

• Updated for Season 11 - Patch 2.5.0