Barrage Rogue Endgame Build Guide
If you've been looking for a Multishot style build on Rogue, here it is! The Barrage Rogue is a very versatile skill that fires multiple arrows which fan out starting from the center. It leaves a really cool shadowy after effect which looks even cooler when stepping away after an attack.
Barrage Rogue is a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none build, as you pick which distance is right for the situation, making it a true hybrid build. Cast the skill at mid range to spread your arrows out for massive AoE, or Shadow Step towards the elite left over to shotgun all arrows into a single target for great damage. Branching Volleys and High Velocity crank up the AoE madness and allows for insane pack clearing potential.
This is a straight forward build that's super fun to play and this guide teaches you the best way to tackle end game with Barrage Rogue!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Rogue Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Grigoire's Lightning Square - Easy activation by just casting a core skill for decent damage.
Modifiers
- Beastmaster's Training - A no-brainer for any build with Shadow Clone. This power serves as a direct multiplier of up to 150%!
- Wandering Death's Chest Beam - Synergizes well with the main boss power for quick kills.
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - We easily proc vulnerable in this build, so this gives us a nice multiplier for casting our main boss power.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Avarice's Explosive Ore - Good for wide AoE.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - Good way to add additional AoE as a sub power.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Barrage is your main ability. This Core Skill fires a cone of arrows that expand outwards.
- Shadow Step gives you incredible mobility to fly across the battlefield and an easy way to get out of tough situations.
- Caltrops makes keeping positioning easier while providing some nice damage buffs and chill/freeze. For speed content, you'll want to drop this and run Dash.
- Dash is for efficient movement around the world and to be agile on the battlefield.
- Smoke Grenade gives us quite a bit of utility from more damage to disabling enemies so that they cannot attack.
- Shadow Clone Is our ultimate that grants us unstoppable as well as trigger No Witnesses. It also procs the cutthroat part of Close Quarters Combat
Passives
- Close Quarters Combat is the Key Passive of choice, which helps scale our main boss power for more damage.
Skill Rotation
Since we're using Close Quarters Combat key passive, we want to remain relatively close to the monsters.
- Spam Barrage as often as possible for maximum output.
- Use Dash to get around and reposition in battle.
- Use Shadow Step to stay close and shotgun more difficult targets.
- Use Smoke Grenade for more damage and to keep enemies, especially elites from attacking you.
- Caltrops should be deployed on tougher enemies such as elites and bosses that takes more than a few seconds to kill.
- Shadow Clone Is our ultimate that grants us unstoppable. This also triggers No Witnesses legendary node, so you want to use this whenever its off cooldown.
Rogue Specialization
Preparation - Spend energy to reduce the cooldown of our ultimate skill, Shadow Clone
Casting Shadow Clone resets our other cooldowns and provides us 15% damage reduction for 10 seconds due to Preparation
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Class Overview.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Turf
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
- Fluidity
Level 46
- Turf
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
- Fluidity
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. Rapid Fire Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cir + Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage and overall quality of life.
- Tam + Thul - Great for crowd control, vulnerable proc and provides a 15% damage buff.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage, damage reduction (Dark Shroud) and overall quality of life.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Yax - Good amount of offering for just drinking a potion.
- Lith - Great choice for plant and fire players.
- Bac - Excellent choice for mobile players.
- Yul - Build uses a lot of cooldown skills, so this is a decent activator.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Raheir
We take Bastion for the shield, the unstoppable and decent damage buffs.
Reinforcement: Varyana
Her Earth Breaker skill provides a knockdown to proc the second portion of Malice.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Barrage Rogue to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed, and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Stat Thresholds
- 9+ Ranks to Barrage
- 3+ total Dark Shroud Ranks
- 1500+ Dexterity
- 800%+ Damage to Close Enemies
- 90%+ Chance for Barrage to cast twice
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- 150%+ Movement Speed
- 4+ Innervation Ranks
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Death Trap Rogue, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Barrage Rogue from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
- Barrage is difficult to sustain without multiple Innervation tempers and lucky hit via Fists of Fate, so we take Inner Sight Specialization while still building towards Preparation.
- Use Elixir of Resourcefulness II for easier sustain.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Fists of Fate help us greatly with its massive amount of lucky hit chance, which helps with energy sustain.
- Cowl of the Nameless provides some additional passive damage while also granting a good chunk of lucky hit vs crowd controlled targets.
- Windforce is bis here, so grab this as soon as possible.
- Pick up Penitent Greaves for a nice multiplier that has high uptime.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Shroud of False Death Is best in slot with the +1 to all passives. This chest however requires to shift things around to cap all resistances.
- Tyrael's Might is optional. It makes it much easier to hit your Armor and Resistance caps, even in high Torment difficulties. This allows you to min/max the setup further for example by removing such Paragon nodes and putting them into more damage.
- Heir of Perdition is best in slot. Gives us good all around stats with a massive multiplier and more emphasis on lucky hit chance.
- Ring of Starless Skies really helps with sustain and an overall damage boost.
- Here you also want to work towards reaching the frame 14 attack speed break point by obtaining 90.6% in Cap 1 and 75% in Cap 2, while using Elixir of Advantage II.
- While not a Mythic, we do pick up Grasp of Shadow in place of Fists of Fate now that Ring of Starless Skies helps with energy management.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Nothing changes for speedfarming from the Mythic variant.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your damage done goes way down and they can freely retaliate.
- In high tier boss fights, beware that many of your conditional damage and damage reduction modifiers cannot activate outside of stagger phases. This means they generally deal more damage against you than regular monsters and you have to prioritize dodging the attacks from shadow bosses while you can barely scratch them outside of stagger bursts.
- This is typically not a build that does well for Pit Pushing, but for those that want to achieve a personal best, use the Mythic variant.
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Yes. Alternative stats that are decent are as follows:
- Unstable Elixirs
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Weapon Mastery
- Movement Speed
- Maximum Life
We want to scale the No Witness legendary node for a nice multiplier that ends up being worth more damage than slotting all Sapphires for Vulnerable damage.
The build naturally includes some strong defensive choices on skill tree, paragon and through legendary aspects. Outside of that, good item rolls are a primary factor in increasing your survivability, in particular your chest and pants armor pieces. Make sure to focus on these and stack stats like damage reduction, maximum life and armor as much as possible. To go even further, you can also roll defensive stats on your amulet. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.
Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, you can gain shrouds through the Umbrous Aspect or the Mot rune. It is used in this build to profit from the enormous damage reduction especially when you get hit infrequently. You get all of the benefits from the points you invest into Dark Shroud
Mechanics
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
- 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.
Video Guide
Summary
The Barrage Rogue is a versatile hybrid capable of tackling all situations. It takes some time to get use to knowing when to stay back and when to go in for the kill, but overall it's a really fun build to play and brings back the glory of Multishot!
- Pick your positions wisely. Know when to spray AoE semi close range and when to shotgun single targets.
- Use Agility Skills cleverly to gain advantages in combat, rather it be positioning or keeping distant.
- Spam Shadow Clone when it's off cooldown to maintain buffs and utility.
- Use Caltrops and Smoke Grenade to keep control and scale your damage on harder targets such as elites and bosses.
Credits
Written by: DiEoxidE
Reviewed by: Tenkiei, Wudijo