Diablo 4 Rogue BuildPenetrating Shot

Unique Items

No Unique items are used on this build.

Paragon Board Stat Requirements

• Already met.

Stat Requirements

• None, but high Lucky Hit Chance and Vulnerable Damage are needed before Victimize is stronger than Precision.

Affix Replacements

• Amulet: Ranks to Exploit can be replaced with Ranks to Malice or Ranks to Frigid Finesse.
• Sword: Dexterity can be replaced with Maximum Life.

Basic Skills

Puncture is integral to this build and fulfills many needs:

• It heals us constantly through Siphoning Strikes.
• It keeps targets Vulnerable after Exploit Glyph's 3 seconds are over.
• It procs Umbrous Aspect.
• And most importantly, it gives us Combo Points faster than any other Basic Skill.

Core Skills

Penetrating Shot is used for its high Base Damage and Lucky Hit Chance, on top of its incredible AoE potential. With Victimize, it is stronger than Rapid Fire on AoE and comparable on single target.

Agility Skills

Dash is used in the midgame version for more mobility.

Shadow Step is our Unstoppable skill.

Caltrops essentially functions as a huge damage multiplier through the Enhanced Caltrops Passive and the Deadly Ambush Legendary Node. Both of those damage multipliers double dip with Victimize.

Subterfuge Skills

Dark Shroud is used passively through the Umbrous Aspect and therefore does not need to be placed on our Skill Bar. Dark Shroud is an insanely powerful defensive skill in Season 4 because of it's parabolic scaling.

Level 5 Dark Shroud provides 48% DR at 5 stacks. Level 15 Dark Shroud provides 68% DR at 5 stacks. 1 - (1-68%)/(1-48%) = 39.5% effective DR increase. Level 19 Dark Shroud provides 76% DR at 5 stacks. 1 - (1-76%)/(1-68%) = 25% effective DR increase.

As you can see, the more we increase our Dark Shroud level the stronger each level gets.

Imbuement Skills

Cold Imbuement serves two purposes:

• It increases damage against CC/Frozen targets.
• It converts Penetrating Shot into Cold Damage, which enables Eldritch Bounty and Alchemist's Fortune.

Ultimate Skills

Death Trap is used to group enemies which is very important for Pits pushing.

Armor

As of Season 4, it's much easier to reach the Armor cap. Once you hit 9230 you are done.

Don't hesitate to grab extra Armor nodes on the Paragon Board to hit the cap when your gear is not optimal.

Resistances

The recipe to cap Resistance is explained earlier in the guide, below the gear on each variant.

Remember, if your gear is not ideal, don't worry about it and look to cap your Resistances/Armor any way you can.

Max Resistances are 70% and up to 85% with enough + Max Resistances. Remember that WT4 gives you a penalty of 50%. This means you need to get to 120% to soft cap your Resistances.

How it Works

Victimize is a Key Passive that scales with Vulnerable Damage and Lucky Hit Chance to a far greater extent than is immediately apparent.

Victimize = 0.23 x [1 + ((1 + Real Vulnerable Damage) x 1.2 x (1 + (0.03 x Ranks of Malice)) - 1) x 1.2]

As you can see, because of the weird way tooltip values are calculated, with damage multipliers baked in, the value of Victimize is higher than it should be.

On top of that, Victimize also Double Dips with many, if not most, conditional damage multipliers. But what does this mean? Let's take Control Glyph as an example.

Control Glyph states that you do [x]20% more damage against Frozen enemies. This means If you used to do 100 damage, now you will do 100 x 1.2 = 120 against Frozen enemies. If Victimize was scaled to 100% of your damage, then it should also do 120. However, the [x]20% multiplier gets applied to Victimize again, which means it will do 120 x 1.2 = 144 damage.

Known Double Dip Damage Multipliers

• Control Glyph
• Deadly Ambush Legendary Node
• Enhanced Caltrops Passive
• Malice Passive - this one triple dips
• Exploit Passive
• Exploit Weakness Legendary Node
• Chip/Canny Glyphs

How it Works

Dark Shroud is used passively through the Umbrous Aspect and therefore does not need to be placed on our Skill Bar. Dark Shroud is an insanely powerful defensive skill in Season 4 because of its parabolic scaling. This means that it gets stronger the more we invest in it.

Level 1 Dark Shroud provides 40% DR at 5 stacks. Level 5 Dark Shroud provides 48% DR at 5 stacks. 1 - (1-48%)/(1-40%) = 13.33% effective DR increase. Level 15 Dark Shroud provides 68% DR at 5 stacks. 1 - (1-68%)/(1-48%) = 39.5% effective DR increase. Level 19 Dark Shroud provides 76% DR at 5 stacks. 1 - (1-76%)/(1-68%) = 25% effective DR increase.

As you can see, the more we increase our Dark Shroud level the stronger each level gets. Going from 1 to 5 is equivalent to adding a 13.33% DR affix while going from 15 to 19 is equivalent to adding a 25% DR affix.

Although this guide shows the most optimal gear setup, it's not easy to acquire and generally compromises must be made. For that reason, it's important to understand how the different affixes rank in terms of Masterworking priority.

Breakpoint Affixes

These affixes and their exact Masterworking values are used to reach specific breakpoints.

• Armor
• All Resistances
• Attack Speed
• X Imbuement Lasts for X Casts
• Ranks to X Passive

Maximum Priority Affixes

These should be 3x Masterworking at all costs as they are incredibly powerful affixes.

• Ranks to Dark Shroud

High Priority Affixes

These should ideally be 3x Masterworking but are not an absolute necessity.

• Dodge on (Boots, Legs)
• Lucky Hit Chance (Gloves)
• Critical Hit Chance (Gloves)
• Cooldown Reduction

Medium Priority Affixes

These should ideally be 2x Masterworking, although exceptions exist when other affixes of the same priority level or higher co-exist on the item.

• Close Quarter Combat: Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies
• Precision: Critical Damage
• Victimize: Vulnerable Damage

Low Priority Affixes

These are mostly interchangeable 1x Masterworking affixes.

• Maximum Life
• Dexterity
• Movement Speed