Andariels Rogue Build Guide

When you obtain Andariels Visage.

Starlight can help you recover Energy before having access to Ring of Starless Skies. Other than that, drink an Elixir of Resourcefulness II and roll Resource Cost Reduction or Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource on your weapon(s) or temper it on your Rings & Amulet.

Elixir of Advantage II is the recommended Elixir to have an easier time reaching the 203.33% Lucky Hit Chance Breakpoint. If you are above it already, use Elixir of Fortitude II. If you find yourself struggling with Energy, drink an Elixir of Resourcefulness II.

Remember: Alchemical Advantage is mandatory to reaching breakpoints as explained below.

Alternatives for the other passives include:

• % Dexterity
• Lucky Hit Chance
• Deadly Venom
• Exploit
• Movement Speed if you like to go fast

Any of these stats will get you by until you can upgrade later on.

Remember Andariels Visage is a must for the build to function.

Fists of Fate and The Umbracrux and the Mythic Uniques are recommended, but you can play the build without them. If you do not have the Mythic Uniques, refer to the Starter Setup.

• If you do not have Fists of Fate, you can use Gloves with Attack Speed, Lucky Hit Chance and Critical Strike Chance. Temper Damage to Crowd Controlled and Lucky Hit: Chance to Freeze and use Noxious Ice.

• To replace Umbracrux, use a Dagger with Dexterity, Maximum Life and Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Resource. Temper Damage to Crowd Controlled, the 2nd Temper does not matter. Use Elements for this Dagger.

Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, you can gain shrouds through the Umbrous Aspect. It is used in this build to profit from the enormous damage reduction especially when you get hit infrequently. You gain stacks by hitting enemies with Barrage greatly benefitting from our high Lucky Hit Chance.

• The Attack Speed Breakpoint is 182.5% Attack Speed (11 Frames per Attack for Barrage) We can comfortably reach this by utilizing the following:
  • 100% Attack Speed from Gear
  • 82.5% Attack Speed from Aspects / Passives
• You can reach 100% Attack Speed from in Cap 1 just by having Close Quarters Combat's first 15% and Masterworking Andariel's Visage, Fists of Fate and Ring of Starless Skies to 12/12 without needing crits on them.
• You can reach 82.5% Attack Speed from Aspects in Cap 2 with High Velocity on Amulet, Close Quarters Combat 2nd part and 6 total Ranks in Alchemical Advantage.
• If you can not reach the 11 Frames per Attack Breakpoint at 182.5% Attack Speed, the next Breakpoint is 12 Frames per Attack at 157% Attack Speed.
  • That means, any Attack Speed gained between 157% and 182.5% does not decrease your time between Barrage attacks at all.
  • Thus, if you can not reach 6 Total Ranks of Alchemical Advantage, stick with 3 Total Ranks instead. Doing so means you need to compensate the missing Lucky Hit Chance otherwise though.
• For further information refer to the Attack Speed Mechanics Guide by Avarilyn.

• The recommended Lucky Hit Chance for the Andariel Rogue Build is at least 203.33%. This ensures each Bursting Venoms damage tick is a guaranteed Lucky Hit.
• Further, more Lucky Hit Chance also means faster staggers through Fists of Fate, more energy gained from Innervation and more Bursting Venom procs from Poison Imbuement with Barrage.
• It also helps resetting your Poison Imbuement Cooldown faster through Mixed Poison Imbuement in case Bursting Venoms does not proc.
• You can reach this breakpoint through:Ring of Starless Skies 24.375% without Greater Affix (GA) and 2x Masterworks (MW)
• Fists of Fate - 126.91% with GA and 2x MW
• An affix on your second ring - 8.7% without GA and no MW crits
• Alchemical Advantage - 45% with 9 ranks
• Alchemist's Fortune - 15% with 3 ranks
• The Lucky Hit Chance Total is as follows:126.91% + 24.375% + 8.7% + 45% + 15% = 220% (rounded).
• For further information refer to the Lucky Hit Chance Mechanics Guide by Avarilyn.

• The damage from Barrage itself does not matter, we only use it to proc Andariels Visage through Poison Imbuement.
• Therefore, a Bow is significantly better due to attacking faster than a Crossbow.
• Further, Weapon Mastery does not work for Andariels damage, so we do not get any downsides from using a Bow.

• Dagger vs Sword comes down to slightly faster animations for Shadow Step and a better implicit on the Daggers.
• Critical Strike Damage does not benefit Andariels so we try replace it with better stats.

Tyraels Might provides a bigger defensive boost than using a Chest with +Ranks of Dark Shroud. Especially increasing the maximum possible resistances to 85% is a significant damage reduction boost and the most dangerous things to this build are sources of elemental damage.

Increasing the Maximum Resistance from 70% to 85% (with two masterworking crits for example) provides a total of: (1-0.85) / (1-0.7) = 0.5 => 50% increased effective HP against elemental damage without even considering the additional 34% damage reduction against all sources from the other affix with one masterworking crit. Combined, this is significantly higher than even +8 ranks of Dark Shroud would provide.

We want to maximize our damage from the No Witnesses legendary node, providing us with a maximum possible bonus of 45%[x].

• We can reach 385% Ultimate Skill damage without major drawbacks.
  • We get 140% from the gems in our weapons.
  • The remaining 245% are exactly reached through the paragon.

The main portion of our damage in the Andariels Rogue Build comes from Andariel's Visage. Therefore, we do not want to buff Barrage damage, as it is only used to proc things through Poison Imbuement, which is also why we only have 1/5 Skill Points in Barrage. Additionally, we'd lose the very valueable Two-Handed Aspect slot to something that does not benefit us.

As of Patch 1.5.0, Deadly Ambush is bugged and increases any damage against trapped enemies, regardless of the attack being a Critical Strike or not. Therefore, it works to increase the damage of Andariel's Visage.

Damage per Dark Shroud Shadow is a very strong additive damage increase, that does not scale our Close Quarters Combat passive directly, yet still comes out on top mathematically. With our high Attack Speed and Lucky Hit Chance, we are constantly maintaining 4-5 Stacks of Dark Shroud as long as we keep attacking. Further, damage per Dark Shroud also helps us against Bosses that are not staggered, where Damage to Crowd Controlled would not benefit us. Overall, this results in a significant DPS gain.

• Dark Shroud stacks damage reduction additively for each active shadow. Due to the additive stacking, each increase in the skill's rank and active shadows boosts your survivability exponentially.
• At maximum stacks, increasing your total Ranks of Dark Shroud affects your effective hit points (eHP) against one-shots as follows:
  • Increasing Dark Shroud from:
    • Rank 1 to Rank 5: 15.3% more eHP
    • Rank 1 to Rank 11: 50% more eHP
    • Rank 1 to Rank 15: 87.5% more eHP
    • Rank 5 to Rank 11: 30.1% more eHP
    • Rank 5 to Rank 15: 62.5% more eHP
    • Rank 11 to Rank 15: 25% more eHP

• Things that work to scale Andariel's Damage:
  • Everything that is not listed below.
• Things that do not scale Andariel's Damage:
  • Barrage or Poison Imbuement Ranks (therefore only 1/5 Skill Points in each)
  • Critical Strike Damage (does not work with any Damage over Time effects)
  • +%Damage vs poisoned
  • Weapon Mastery
  • Caltrops (5% dmg only).
  • Trick Attacks
  • Fists of Fate's Aspect
    • But why are we using the Gloves then? Simply because of the absurd lucky hit chance and all the different forms of crowd control it applies.
• These lists only verified interactions which have been last tested on Season 5 PTR by the Rogue Game Mechanics Specialists (GMS) from the Sanctuary Discord.

So what scales the damage in this particular build?

• Dexterity
• +% Damage
• +% Damage over Time
• +% Damage to Crowd Controlled
• Ring of Starless Skies
• Creeping Death
• Concussive Strikes
• Frigid Finesse
• Unstable Elixirs
• Exploit
• Malice
• Exploit Weakness
• No Witnesses
• Deadly Ambush
• Cheap Shot
• Eldritch Bounty
• Control
• Fluidity
• Canny
• Bane
• Tracker
• Close Quarters Combat

The Umbracrux was nerfed so you do not utilize it for its damage echo anymore. The primary use case is to have an additional target to ricochet Barrage arrows from.

When facing the Infernal Hordes in Tier 8, you can swap out Umbracrux for a regular Dagger with Conceited to not have our totem eat all the arrows. Swap it back in, once you are facing the Council Bosses after the last wave to optimize your single target DPS. This swap is a pure min-maxing strategy and is not required to clear Tier 8. It simply is a bit more efficient for you to do so.

The totem eating arrows gives you more Andariel's Visage procs, but there are enough mobs around to gain those anyway. Further it also reduces your uptime on Creeping Death, due to being immune to any Crowd Control effects. The affixes of a legendary Dagger are better than those of the Umbracrux, especially when tempered. The aspect is also a non-negligible damage boost.

Due to the abundance of mobs in T8, energy recovery is not a concern even without the Ranks to Innervation from the Umbracrux.

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Rogues, these two caps are distributed in the following way:

Cap 1

• Gear rolls
• Paragon nodes
• Elixirs
• Flurry buff
• Close Quarters Combat (Cutthroat portion)
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine

Cap 2

• Close Quarters Combat (Marksman portion)
• Enhanced Heartseeker
• Alchemical Advantage
• Haste
• Accelerating
• High Velocity
• Asheara's Khanjar

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

• You can dodge most things in the game excluding Damage over time effects and certain boss-mechanics.
• Utilizing the high natural dodge chance of this build allows it to keep high stacks of Dark Shroud.
• Dodge Chance affixes are not additive, but inversely multiplicative instead.
• Dodge Chance aspects, such as Assimilation are additive.
• Agile is treated like an affix, so inversely multiplicative.
• Dodge Chance Calculation:
  • [Dodge % from Dexterity] + [100 * (1 - (1 - Dodge% A) * (1 - Dodge% B) * ... * (1 - Dodge% N))] + [Additive Dodge% A] + [Additive Dodge% B] + ... + [Additive Dodge% N]
  • Example: 16.6% Dodge Chance from Dexterity, 15% Dodge Chance Affix, 15% Dodge Chance Affix
  • 16.6 + (100 * (1 - (1 - 0.15) * (1 - 0.15)) = 44.35%
  • This would grant you 44.35% Dodge Chance, instead of 16.6+15+15 = 46.6 if it was additive.

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of Stagger Damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from CC of the same type.

Effectively, spamming just one type of CC is not very efficient. Instead use as many different types of CC as possible to stagger the Boss quickly. The types of CC we have in the Penetrating Shot Rogue are:

• Slow, Stun, Immobilize and Freeze from tempered affixes on our gear.
• Daze from Concussive Strikes.

After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regeneration is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again.