Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Build Guide

The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:

• Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
• Use defensive consumables.
• Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
• Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.

As a Rogue you do not have many sources of Unstoppable but a good way to break out of crowd controls is with Shadow Step. Shadow Clone also makes you Unstoppable for 5 seconds.

You are probably not using your Skills in the correct order. The order and situation in which you use your Skills is very important to allow you to perform well with any given build. As a Dance of Knives Rogue this is even more important, because Dance of Knives snapshots certain buffs for the entire duration of your channel, irrespective of their regular duration. Refer to the Optimal Rotation section further above.

Through the Lucky Hit: Chance to Freeze Temper and through Fists of Fate.

Dance of Knives scales its base damage with additional Attack Speed instead of throwing Knives faster. Through the Cutthroat Attack Speed temper and various other rolls on gear and buffs, we can scale its damage extremely high.

Aura of Siphoning activates this for us, granting us the benefit of more Attack Speed in Cap2.

Because of No Witnesses.

Both weapon types offer the same DPS (damage per second) value at any given item power. This leaves four main differences between them:

• 1) Attack Speed (1.20/s Daggers, 1.10/s Swords)
• 2) Average Weapon Damage for Dual-Wield: (496 Daggers, 519 Dagger + Sword, 542 Swords, 800 item power)
• 3) Implicit Attribute (Close Damage on Daggers, Critical Strike Damage on Swords)
• 4) ‍Weapon Mastery scaling
  • 7%[X] vs Healthy and Injured per Rank and Dagger vs 3%[X] per Rank and Sword
  • When Dual-Wielding, these bonuses are both multiplicative

Healthy and Injured only applies to 55% of the total damage you deal to kill an enemy.

• Double Dagger is best for Speedfarming, where you want to One-Hit the mobs.
• One Dagger and one Sword leads to better Average DPS when enemies stay alive longer, e.g. when pushing deep into the Pit.

Asheara's Khanjar is a significant source of damage due to giving 40% Cap 2 Attack Speed, and many ranks to Weapon Mastery.

More details for Weapon Mastery and other Rogue interactions can be found in the Rogue Class Compendium, written by Avarilyn.

Vulnerable Damage and Critical Strike Damage both have identical value to this build as they are just additive damage bonuses in a giant bucket of additives. We just pick whichever number is higher.

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Include a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Preparation restores all charges.
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

The Kurast Undercity allows you to target farm for Amulets with +Passive Ranks through the Tribute System. The Stat Priorities List also shows alternatives to the Best in Slot affixes.

• Elixir of Advantage II for more Lucky Hit Chance.
• Elixir of Fortitude II if you have trouble surviving.
• For Pit Pushing use:
  • Queen's Supreme
  • Soothing Spices
  • Song of the Mountain

• 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.
• Shadows have a 1.5 seconds cooldown between losing stacks, but the damage reduction still applies depending on how many are active at all times.
• At maximum stacks, your effective hit points (EHP) scale as follows in these examples:
  • Rank 1: 66.6% more EHP
  • Rank 5: 92.3% more EHP
  • Rank 10: 138.1% more EHP
  • Rank 15: 215% more EHP
  • Rank 20: 354.5% more EHP

• Attack Speed scales Dance of Knives Base Damage linearly.
• If Dance of Knives has a Base Damage of 100% Weapon Damage, adding 50% Attack Speed puts it at 150%. This is a relative increase of 50%.
• If Dance of Knives has a Base Damage of 200% Weapon Damage, adding 50% Attack Speed puts it at 300%. This is a relative increase of 50% again.
• This means Attack Speed does not have diminishing returns and will always scale 1:1.

Confirmed Snapshots for Dance of Knives:

• Qax Rune
• Attackspeed from Cap 2 (Ashearas, Alchemical Advantage, etc.)
• Aspect of Synergy
• Concealment Crit + Vuln

Other Snapshots

As of Season 6, where I verified the behavior of over 50 different interactions, all damage bonuses that were tested applied to Dance of Knives dynamically. Attack Speed increases that were in Cap 2 as listed above, did not apply dynamically and have to be snapshotted to work. Worthy to note that Momentum and No Witnesses apply their damage dynamically, so you do not need to restart the channel to gain their benefits.

Shadow Clone has undergone a massive rework with the summoning tag change in Season 7. The following list is not a complete list of interactions due to the limitations of the PTR, and they are subject to change until we see it go live.

Working Interactions

• Close Quarters Combat gets generated by the Clone
• Retains Marksman/Cutthroat tags from the skill used by the player
• Improved Barrage is used by the Clone
• Enhanced Penetrating Shot is cast by the Clone
• Trick Attacks damage stacks benefits the Clone
• Unstable Elixirs
• Exploit
• Enhanced Smoke Grenade
• Deadeye (Based on player position and not Clone position)
• Impetus buffs the Basic, Agility, and Subterfuge skills cast by the Clone
• Unto Dawn
• Precision
• Moonrise
• Edgemaster's breaks after depleting the full Energy bar once though
• Expectant stacks from the Clone
• Inner Calm
• Coldclip damage works, but it does not Chill
• Encircling Blades damage works, but does not turn Flurry into a circle
• Branching Volleys appears to be working
• Star Shards
• Extra Arrows from Combo Points
• Ring of Starless Skies
• Shadow Clone can trigger Lucky Hit effects such as Victimize

Broken Interactions

• Momentum cannot be triggered by Clone
• Fundamental Forceful Arrow cannot be triggered by Clone
• Enhanced Caltrops and Enhanced Poison Trap generated by the Clone does not carry over the damage increase
• Weapon Mastery does not work for the Clone
• Trick Attacks cannot be stacked by the Clone
• Consuming Impetus does not increase the Clone damage
• Precision cannot be stacked by the Clone
• Cunning Stratagem extra arrows does not work for the Clone
• Scoundrel's Leathers extra traps cannot get triggered by the Clone
• Bladedancer's does not work for the Clone
• Artful Initiative does not track energy spent on the Clone
• Repeating does not work for the Clone
• Periodic targetting issues with skills

Again, this list is incomplete, but it shows that Shadow Clone has improved significantly in Season 7. Once Season 7 goes live, a more careful list will be created for the Compendium.

Find out more about Rogue Interactions and Mechanics in our Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

Attack Speed% is capped at 200% and further divided into two individual caps of 100%. For the sake of this article, we will call them “Cap 1” and “Cap 2”. That means that if you have 200% attack speed from Cap 1, you will only benefit from 100% of that attack speed. At the end of this section, you can see what Attack Speed sources belong to what cap. Make sure that you check what attack speed sources you have so you do not go over the cap!

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects 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 a 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 unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.