Penetrating Shot Azurewrath

The Penetrating Shot Rogue Build Guide teaches you about Gear, Skills, Paragon, Playstyle & Seasonal Mechanics in Diablo 4.

Penetrating Shot is the Skill of choice used to proc Lucky Hit Chance to Deal Cold Damage from Azurewrath.

• Cast Caltrops, Smoke Grenade for more damage on Elites and Bosses.
• Also Cast Poison Trap and Shadow Imbuement in the Pit Push variant.
• If you overlap a new Caltrops over an old one before it expires it will inherit the maximum 45% Damage Multiplier.
• Cast Shadow Clone every 5 seconds.
• It doubles your damage by doubling your Lucky Hit Chance Procs.
• It provides you with permanent Unstoppable uptime.
• It pulls in enemies with Celestial Surge.
• Spam Penetrating Shot.
• You should always try to line up our shots to hit as many enemies as possible.
• You should also be mindful of Walls to ricochet from once you acquire Eaglehorn.
• Cast Dash and Shadow Step for Mobility.

This Build combines Penetrating Shot and Shadow Clone to generate an incredible amount of Lucky Hit Chance Procs for Azurewrath.

You will want to utilize many items that provide high values Lucky Hit Chance such as Heir of Perdition/Cowl of the Nameless, Starless Skies and Fist of Fates. Once the build is fully online you will be able to Proc Azurewrath on almost every single hit.

Eaglehorn is used because it generates a lot of extra hits on maps with walls, has great affixes and will now ricochet to the Boss.

Azurewrath is presumably bugged and Attack Speed increases its damage, which means it double dips for this build; it increases the damage of the Proc and also how often we Proc it.

Leveling

You can't really level with this build as you need Azurewrath. I would recommend you level with the following DANCE OF KNIVES guide.

Horadric Spellcraft and Gems

Catalyst

You will use Celestial Surge as its ability to periodically drop Stars allows you to Proc your Arcanas consistently. It also provides you with a fairly large Pull effect.

With Celestial Surge you will use the following Arcanas:

• Fractured Core to disable the very annoying Damage Resistance Aura.
• Gleaming Conduit to increase your Pull radius.
• Bloody Charm to Execute non-Boss enemies.

Lastly, you will use the Nebulous Extract Infusion to provide you with more Damage Reduction.

Gems

You will use the following Hoadric Gems:

• Scornful Light will make you do more Damage at the cost of taking more.
• Idol From Below provides you with many useful Combat Stats.
• Luminate Eye gives you Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction.

Mercenaries

You utilize Subo with Molotov as it makes more Healing Potions drop to enable Unstable Elixirs.

You also use Cover Fire to provide a multiplicative Lucky Hit Chance bonus.

Raheir is used as a Reinforcement to provide Damage Reduction.

Runes

Early on, when you don't have access to Legendary Runes, you will use PocLum and CirThul.

PocLum provides you with a lot of Energy, which you will need before you have access to Starless Skies.

CirThul lets you Freeze enemies and get a Damage Multiplier.

Later on, when you acquire Starless Skies, you transition to TamThul and AhuQax.

Elixirs and Incenses

It's important to run Elixirs and Incenses at all times. Not only because they increase your Experience gain but also because they provide very strong combat boosts.

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

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

Mythic Priority Order

Shroud of False Death > Starles Skies > Heir of Perdition.

Amulet Affix Priority

Your Dexterity % should always be a Greater Affix when possible as a Greater Affix on a Passive Skill is only worth 1 Masterworking Crit.

Beyond that, Greater Affix, Affix and Masterworking priority is the same:

Alchemical Advantage until your next Attack Speed Breakpoint > Malice > Unstable Elixirs > Exploit/Frigid Finesse.

In practice, you need 4 Ranks of Alchemical Advantage between Shroud of the False Death and your Amulet.

Attack Speed Breakpoints

Because the game's server operates in frames (images), Skills can only be cast in a whole number of frames. This means, for example, that you can't cast a Skill in 10.2 frames. To extend this example further, that means that all Attack Speed values that lead to a cast time of 10.01 to 10.99 frames would mean you end up casting at 11 frames, effectively wasting all Attack Speed gains from 11 frames to 10.01.

In order to avoid wasting Attack Speed, you can calculate the Attack Speed Breakpoints for your skills using THIS SHEET.

You might be wondering how frames translate into actual Cast Speed. Because the server runs at 60 frames per second the way we translate frames into Cast Speed is with the formula: 60 / Frames = Casts per Second.

You should aim to get to 150% Attack Speed for the 15 Frame Bow Breakpoint.

Masterworking and Greater Affixes Explained

Masterworking

Masterworking (MW) enhances an item's stats. Each MW rank boosts all affixes by 5%. Ranks 4,8,12 give a 25% bonus to a random affix (MW Crit).

In this planner, the color blue on an item denotes that the affix got one MW Crit, the color yellow denotes that the item got two MW crits and the color orange denotes that the item got three MW crits.

For future reference the amount of MW Crits on an affix will be denoted by 1MW, 2MW, 3MW.

Greater Affixes

Greater Affixes (GA) on an item force the affix to roll at the top of it's range of possible values and then applies a 50% increase to its value. GA increases are additive with Masterworking increases.

In this planner, the yellow star to the left of an affix denotes that is a GA.

Example

To put it all in to practice, let's calculate what stat increase a GA Affix on a 12/12 Masterworked item with 2 MW Crits gets:

Ranks 1-3, 5-7, 9-11 all give 5% -> 9 * 5% = 45%

Two MW Crits -> 2 * 25% = 50%

GA = 50%

Total = 45% + 50% + 50% = 145%

Masterworking and Gear Affix Priority

Unless a certain amount of a stat is required and no more, like in the case of Attack Speed Breakpoints, Armor and Resistances, GA and MW priority should be easy to follow.

Guides, which follow a Starter -> Midgame -> Endgame progression, are structured such that the difficulty of the MWing outcome and amount of GAs on items also progresses as expected.

For example, a Starter variant will generally have 1GA items with three 1MW affixes. A Midgame variant will generally have 2GA items with a 2MW Affix and a 1MW affix. An Endgame variant will generally have 2GA/3GA items with a 3MW affix.

From this you can derive that the GA on the starter version is the most important, the second GA added is the second most important and the third GA added is the third most important affix.

In the case of Masterworking, 3MW = most important affix, the 1MW in the Midgame variant is the second most important affix and from the Starter variant with three 1 MW affixes you can know which is the third most important affix.

When GA and MW don't align you are most likely in the presence of a stat with a certain threshold you have to meet or a cap and those will be explicitly stated in the guide anyways.

In the case of Uniques GA and MW, progression standards are generally shifted by one as they are easier to MW because they have 4 affixes and also easier to acquire with multiple GAs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why am I Running Out of Energy?

This build is very Energy-intensive before Starless Skies. To fix it you need a combination of the following:

• PocLum
• Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Primary Resource Affixes
• Energy per Second Affixes
• Innervation Tempering Affixes

07/02/2025

Added in PocLum to solve Energy problems.

6/29/2025

• Updated for S9