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.

Your enemies are probably not Vulnerable! A source of applying Vulnerable for Victimize such as the Lucky Hit: Chance to Make Enemies Vulnerable affix is crucial. If you do not have it, you need to imprint Accursed Touch instead of True Sight as a band-aid solution. If you do not have Fists of Fate yet, you may imprint Accursed Touch on your Gloves instead as shown in the Starter Variant.

Dance of Knives scales its base damage with additional Attack Speed instead of throwing Knives faster. As Victimize damage is independent of the skill triggering it, Attack Speed is not useful for our build.

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.

You need to constantly keep moving to regain Charges through Enhanced Dance of Knives. Inner Sight also gives you unlimited Charges for the duration it is active. Make sure to get some +Inner Sight Duration Tempers! Whenever you use a Skill that is not Poison Imbuement while already channeling, you will stop and start the channel again after casting. So cast your stuff first, then keep spinning.

When Inner Sight is full and Shadow Clone is active, you start spinning significantly faster. This interaction increases your Attacks per Second to around 6 and therefore lets you throw more knives. Whether this interaction is intended is unclear as of Patch 2.0.2. This also depletes your Poison Imbuement Charges almost immediately, as the game thinks you are essentially casting Dance of Knives every 0.16 seconds. Therefore, we use Bursting Venoms to keep our Dance of Knives imbued throughout the omega-spinning.

Yes, so get Fists of Fate with as close to 300% as possible while still having high / Greater Affix Lucky Hit Chance.

Short answer: Because they are bad and in dire need of a redesign.

Long answer: We have unlimited charges with Inner Sight and if you do not start and stop channeling all the time, you will never run out of charges anyway. Standing around for 1.5 seconds to hit three times with a Basic Attack to build Combo Points is not fun and goes against the spin2win playstyle.

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
  • Chorus of War

• 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

• Damage Formula for Season 6:
  • Victimize% = (1 + 1.2 x ((1 + Vulnerable Additive) x [1.2 x Malice x (Vulnerable Legendary Glyph^Total)] - 1)) x 0.6
• Double Dipping
• Malice (triple dips during stagger), Legendary effects of Exploit, and Diminish
  • Even though Diminish double dips, we still use Headhunter instead as it is only slightly less damage but offers significantly more attributes. The reduced Physical Damage from Vulnerable enemies from Diminish is a very conditional defensive tool and not worth it.

Victimize Damage Scalers in Dance of Knives Rogue:

Interactions that do not work with Victimize

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are not functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

For more information about Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, check out the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

• The Key Passive has an internal cooldown now, but is backloading the damage that would have been dealt between the explosions.
• As an example, hitting 10 mobs and triggering 10 Lucky Hits on them will still only yield 1 explosion but deals the damage of 10 explosions.
• This means Victimize scales insanely well with density and Lucky Hit Chance now.
• The internal cooldown is estimated to be around 0.6 seconds which favors high Attacks per Second with high Lucky Hit Chance.

• We use it to gain additional target for Victimize procs and for evading through it with Flickerstep.
• The damage it deals itself is not super relevant, but can still ramp up quite well with big original explosions.
• Position your totem behind the boss to have your Knives from Star Shards caught by it.

Shroud of Khanduras

Shroud of Khanduras has a 100% Base Lucky Hit Chance on the explosion. This means that you want to reach at least +100% Lucky Hit Chance to guarantee a Victimize proc upon pulling the mobs together. This is easily done by equipping Fists of Fate.

+100% Bonus Lucky Hit Chance, is a 2x Multiplier to the Base Lucky Hit Chance.

Victimize base proc chance is 50% (0.5). With 100% (1) Base Lucky Hit Chance and +100% (2) Lucky Hit Chance Bonus, the following Formula derives:

100% Proc Chance = 0.5 * 1 * 2

Dance of Knives

Further Lucky Hit Chance still significantly benefits the build by increasing the chance for Dance of Knives to proc Victimize. A Blade from Dance of Knives would guarantee a Victimize proc at around +471% Lucky Hit Chance, which is practically unreachable, so get as much Lucky Hit Chance as you can without sacrificing other stats.

Victimize base proc chance is 50%. With 35% Innate Lucky Hit Chance on Dance of Knives and +X% Lucky Hit Chance Bonus, the following Formula derives:

1 = 0.5 * 0.35 * x

x = 1 / (0.5* 0.35)

x = 5.714

So around +471% Lucky Hit Chance Bonus.

With ideal gear and Ambusher from Subo, the Mercenary you can reach a total of around +310% without majorly sacrificing other stats for it.

• +139.9% from Fists of Fate
• +54% from Heir of Perdition (12/12 MW +3 Crits)
• +11.7% Ring 1 (12/12 MW no Crits)
• +11.7% Ring 2 (12/12 MW no Crits)
• +15% from Elixir of Advantage II
• +15% from Alchemical Advantage
• +15% from Alchemist's Fortune
• +10% from Paragon on Exploit Weaknesses
• x20% from Ambusher
• = +308.76%

You can use further methods to boost your Lucky Hit Chance, but this will usually result in a net loss of damage as you trade of other things. In fact, using +Ranks to Alchemical Advantage on the Amulet or Masterworking the Rings for Lucky Hit Chance instead results in a loss of damage output.

For more information about Lucky Hit Chance, check out the Lucky Hit Chance Mechanics Article by Avarilyn.

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.