Barrage Rogue Endgame Build Guide

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 an uber 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.

Skill Tree & Gameplay

Gameplay

Since Barrage is a versatile skill, you start off at mid range to maximize arrow spread and then you move close to cluster all of your arrows into any single target that is left. Blasting all of your arrows into one target is known as shotgunning. On tough affixes like Suppressor and Damage Resistance, you want to switch the order and take them out first and shotgun it down.

• Spam Barrage as often as possible for maximum output.
• Use Caltrops to keep monsters in position and apply chill and freeze.
• Use Shadow Step to stay close and shotgun more difficult targets. It gives you Tricks of the Trade Legendary node buff.
• Use Dash to get around the battlefield for better positioning for Barrage and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly.
• Use Smoke Grenade for more damage and to keep enemies, especially elites from attacking you.
• Use Rain of Arrows For No Witness legendary node buff and to proc Retribution aspect. It can also cast twice due to the Skyhunter Marksman projectile effect.

Rogue Specialization - Preparation

Rogues choose one out of three special passives that enhance their playstyle. Barrage can be played with any of the specializations, but for this setup we're choosing Preparation for some ultimate skill benefits! This Specialization allows you to have a much higher uptime on an Ultimate skill while giving you additional damage reduction.

Resource & Cooldown Management

Resource management is a big deal in this setup as we're attempting to spam Barrage as often as possible. Passives like Innervation help immensely. Top it off eventually with a Ring of Starless Skies and you have energy for days or Starlight aspect until then.

As for cooldown, this build doesn't rely heavily on it. Preparation handles the things you want cooldown for just fine.

Mobility

Feel free to use Dash on an enemy whenever necessary to go faster. Rogues naturally have a lot of movement speed, so getting around the open world and the battlefield is never an issue.

Paragon Board

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!

Glyphs

We need to level up our Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.

Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last two steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

Endgame Gear & Skill Progression

When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.

Progression Goals

Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

1. Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
   • Rapid Aspect in Buried Halls (Dry Stepps)
   • Eluding Aspect in Caldera (Fractured Peaks)
   • Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
   • Edgemaster’s in Oldstones (Scosglen)
   • Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
   • Cheat's in Luban's Rest (Scosglen)
   • Aspect of the Expectant in Underroot (Scosglen)
   • Corruption in Renegade's Retreat (Kehjistan)
   • Retribution in Abandoned Mineworks (Kehjistan)
   • Branching Volleys in shadowed-plunge (Hawezar)
2. Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
   • Aspect of Repeating
   • Umbrous Aspect
   • Concussive Strikes
   • Moonrise
   • Accelerating
   • Frostbitten
   • High Velocity
   • Conceited
   • Retribution
3. Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
   • Cowl of the Nameless
   • Crown of Lucion (Optional)
   • Skyhunter
   • Shroud of Khanduras (optional)
4. If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Mythic Uniques, they're useful for the build.
   • Tyrael's Might
   • Ring of Starless Skies

Progression Steps

Hardcore Adjustments

Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to be successful in this game mode:

• You can replace Dexterity and Dodge with Maximum Life on gear.
• Focus on acquiring Doombringer and include it instead of an offensive aspect.
• Take more defensive minded aspects in place of utility aspects on Chest and Pants.

Build Scaling

Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.

Stat Priorities & Gear Options

To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.

Recommended Stat Thresholds

Fill your item's sockets with the following:

• Royal Diamond into Weapons to scale the No Witness Legendary node.
• Royal Ruby into Armor for more survivability.
• Royal Emerald/Royal Topaz/Royal Ruby or Royal Skull in rings depending on what you need capped/variation you are playing.

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.

WTF, why are we taking Damage Per Dark Shroud Tempers?

We take this over Critical Strike Damage tempers to make our damage more consistent when the Precision Key Passive isn't active (Precision is only active 1 out of every 3 shots). This will lead to better clearing and boss damage overall since Damage Per Dark Shroud's value is similar to Critical Strike Damage value.

So instead of doing "bad, bad, great" damage as Precision only procs every 3rd cast, we do "good, good, great" damage due to the switch of tempers.

If you already have Critical Strike Damage tempers on your gear already from the previous version of the guide, then leave it as it is. Do NOT throw it away. Only make the swap as you are upgrading those pieces of gear.

I was following the old guide. What gives?

The updates should make barrage more fun to play as well as more effective for the types of content in the game. If you want to play the old setup, it's listed as a tab under progression steps with the full planner, skills and paragon board.

No more Umbracrux?

After several tests with this setup, Umbracrux was actually hurting our damage overall, including on single targets. We dropped it in favor of more damage in general and has provided better results.

Preparation instead of Combo Points?

People like spamming Barrage, so I made it happen :)

I feel squishy, how can I increase survivability?

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.

How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?

Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, there are two ways to gain shrouds: Enshrouding Aspect and Umbrous Aspect. The latter is used in this build to profit from the enormous damage reduction especially when you get hit infrequently. For it to work, you don't even have to invest any points into Dark Shroud on the skill tree, but you can if you want to profit from a higher damage reduction value or its enhancement and upgrade options.

Mechanics

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.

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 and when to shotgun single targets
• Use Agility Skills cleverly to gain advantages in combat, rather it be positioning or keeping distant.
• Spam Rain of Arrows 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