Arrow Storms Rogue Build Guide

Welcome to the Arrow Storms Rogue Specialized Guide! This build focuses solely on the two legendary aspects, Arrow Storms and Vengeful, to deal damage. As such, we don't invest into scaling any of our skills and instead only include raw damage multipliers, lots of Attack Speed and Lucky Hit Chance in order to get the most out of these effects. This is a formidable season starter build as both aspects can be found from dungeons for the Codex of Power and they start scaling their damage as you improve your weapons. Not only that, but the entire setup has lots of similarities with the very potent Andariel Rogue Build that you can transition into as soon as you acquire Andariel's Visage with only a few adjustments. Let's jump in and see what it's all about!

Requirements for this build to function:

• Arrow Storms & Vengeful (both unlockable from Dungeons)
• Stacking Attack Speed & Lucky Hit Chance bonuses

Paragon

Look below for the selected Paragon Boards, Paragon point allocation, and the correct Glyphs you should use for the Arrow Storms Rogue. Note: The Paragon Boards below are the final setup with no steps.

Level 15+ Glyphs required: Control, Fluidity, Turf, Chip, Pride, Ambush

Season 5 - Infernal Hordes

In Season 5, the Season Theme brings your hero back into the bowels of Hell, in the Infernal Hordes endgame activity. You're first introduced to Hellbreach Dungeons, miniature Horde-like micro-dungeons that teach you the new mechanics and rewards systems. As you slay more powerful Demons and Bosses, you're rewarded with the new Reputation progression that comes with amazing rewards. These include Crafting Materials, unlocking Season's Journey tiers and even the coveted Resplendent Spark, needed to craft a mythic unique.

Follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the Reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 5 guide for more information.

Gameplay

The Arrow Storms Rogue has a very simple rotation with a few situational tools:

• Make enemies vulnerable with Puncture for extra damage and to trigger Vengeful.
• Spam Puncture to create Arrow Storms on enemies.
• Throw Smoke Grenade on elites & bosses to disable them, increase damage taken and trigger our Poison effects like Alchemical Advantage and Debilitating Toxins.
• Activate Caltrops against the toughest enemies, especially on bosses, to trigger extra damage taken and Deadly Ambush. You can follow up with Evade (press it mid-air for a longer jump), Flurry, Dash or Shadow Step to close the gap immediately.
• Use Dash freely to move around and get a crit buff.
• Dark Shroud is an optional skill you can put on the bar once you acquire Shroud of Khanduras, which is very helpful for higher tier Pit runs as it allows you to get a 3 second invulnerability on demand. Alternatively, you can simply include Shadow Step to go even faster (with and without the item). To do so, remove points from Smoke Grenade, Dash or Debilitating Toxins.
• Flurry is a secondary mobility tool that you can use to dash from pack to pack. In addition, we are constantly building Combo Points so you can get a 45% Attack Speed buff from pressing this skill ca. every 3 seconds. Especially against elites and bosses this is a valuable buff to speed up your procs.
• With Unstable Elixirs , our potion becomes an active damage cooldown. Try to build the muscle memory and press it once roughly every 10 seconds unless you risk running out of charges in a boss fight.
• Note that bosses (and unstoppable elites) take significantly less damage until they are staggered as we are forced to include many conditional damage multipliers such as Concussive Strikes, Retribution, Frigid Finesse and more in order to scale our damage.

The Arrow Storms cap & scaling explained

• You can only have max. 7 Arrow Storms active at a time, each lasting 3 seconds.
• If you exceed the limit, the oldest Arrow Storm will disappear.
• This means there is an optimum of Attack Speed + Lucky Hit we need to reach before scaling more becomes worthless, which is roughly 2.33 procs per second.
• The combined chance to trigger Arrow Storms from both aspects is 50%, so we need ~466% total Lucky Hit per second to trigger them 2.33 times.
• Puncture with Fundamental Puncture has a base total Lucky Hit of 105%. With 100% Chance to Cast Puncture Twice that's 210%.
• Dividing 466 / 210 = 2.219 which is the total multiplier of Attack Speed & Lucky Hit bonuses we need to go for at a minimum to reach the cap. Most of this comes from easy to get sources like Alchemical Advantage or some rolls on our gear.
• It's still worth to go for more than this number because not every fight is perfect where we can just stand still and DPS. In addition, triggering all 7 Arrow Storms quickly at the start of each encounter is still helpful, so it's good to overcap a bit anyway.
• Despite being worded that way, Arrow Storms are not in fact damage over time and instead simply produce 4 hits per second which can crit.

Gear and Stat Requirements

The Arrow Storms Rogue requires specific Aspects, Affixes, Masterworks and Tempers on your gear to perform well. See below:

1. Legendary Aspects:
   • Arrow Storms
   • Vengeful
   • Umbrous
   • Elements
   • Retribution
   • Rapid (until you get Fists of Fate)
   • Shared Misery
   • Might (until you get Cowl of the Nameless)
   • Inner Calm
   • Pestilent Points (for leveling only)
   • Concussive Strikes (for leveling only)
   • Moonrise (for leveling only)
   • Juggernaut's (for leveling only)
2. Uniques:
   • Cowl of the Nameless (mostly for Trick Attacks ranks)
   • Fists of Fate (for lots of Lucky Hit Chance and random crowd control procs to stagger bosses)
   • Shroud of Khanduras (use Assimilation until then)
3. Mythic Uniques:
   • Tyrael's Might (optional for tons of damage reduction but you lose the ability to group up enemies with Shroud of Khanduras)

Recommended Stat Thresholds

Crossbow setup with Heartseeker:

Once you have really good gear, you can also play this setup with Heartseeker instead of Puncture. In order to play this, you need to free up two points for Enhanced Cold Imbuement to apply vulnerable via Coldclip (e.g. from Dash or Smoke Grenade). The advantage of this setup is that the base damage of Crossbows is ~22% higher than that of Swords. Since we are capped at max. 7 Arrow Storms anyway and procs use the currently held weapon for its damage calculation, we can squeeze out more total damage per tick as long as we still reach that number reliably.

The total Lucky Hit of Heartseeker together with the ricochet arrow is relatively comparable so it mostly comes out as a loss in Attack Speed you need to make up for. With a good amulet that has multiple ranks in Alchemical Advantage this is easily overcome though. An added benefit is that you also gain +15% crit chance for free so your total damage improvement over using Swords is roughly 30% once you have this setup online.

FAQ & Mechanics

When I can transition to this build?

As soon as you acquire the two codex powers Arrow Storms and Vengeful and imprint them. If you are low on materials on your first character, imprint Amulet + Rings as you don't replace them often.

Which Elixirs are the best?

Elixir of Advantage II gives us the most benefit as we really want to maximize both of these stats. Once you reliably cap out at 7 Arrow Storms, you can also go with Elixir of Fortitude II for more survivability.

How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?

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 critting enemies, increased by our Lucky Hit Chance.

Mechanics

Learn about the mechanical details that make the build tick.

Dark Shroud Scaling

• 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

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

Dodge Mechanics

• 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.

Stagger

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, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible.

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 regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again.

Gameplay Video

Credits

Written by wudijo