Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Guide! This build combines fun, speed and raw power into one package to cruise through all challenges the game has to offer! Constant spinning, potent explosions and incredible pace are the on the menu for Dance of Knives!
Dance of Knives feels very fluid and satisfying to play. You spin through Dungeons, Helltides and the Undercity indefinitely, sprinkling in zoomy Dashes and Smoke Grenades to bring the fight to your foes.
Your main skill is Dance of Knives with Star Shards. Through stacking a lot of Attack Speed, you can scale the damage incredibly high. As Dance of Knives spends Charges instead of Energy, resource management is a lot easier than on other builds.
All of this is backed up by Shadow Clone which significantly amplifies the lethality with which you strike down your hellish adversaries.
If you have used the Dance of Knives Rogue Leveling Build before, ensure to follow the changes in the Ancestral and Mythic Variants thoroughly.
Let's Spin2Win!
For Season 8 we do not utilize any snapshots. Thankfully, the previous patches have allowed this without sacrificing any damage.
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.
Endgame Boss Powers
Main Power
Wandering Death's Chest Beam is an excellent choice because Dance of Knives is a channeling skill. The damage amplification is very strong, but keeping the beam on target can be tricky. Look out for World Bosses to claim this power as early as you can!
Modifiers
- Beastmaster's Training - The top choice for summons, and Shadow Clone is classified as one.
- Sinerat's Flames - A simple yet effective damage increase for elemental damage, which we deal through our Imbuements.
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - Another damage bonus, easy to maintain as we apply Vulnerable constantly through Thul and Cold Imbuement.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Torusk's Rage - If you do not have Harbinger of Hatred's Volley yet.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste - Is a solid replacement until you get Wandering Death's Chest Beam.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
Essentials
- You pick up points in Blade Shift to advance the Skill Tree.
- Dance of Knives is a channeling ability that throws knives at a constant rate at your enemies. Attack Speed does not influence the speed at which you throw the knives, but instead increases your base damage with them.
- Dark Shroud is your main defensive tool and also provides you with necessary Movement Speed.
- If you are coming from the Leveling Guide, Concealment is no longer used and replaced with Caltrops instead. You swap the upgrade to Methodical Caltrops once you get more Critical Strike Chance on gear through Cowl of the Nameless or Heir of Perdition.
Imbuements
- Cold Imbuement allows you to freeze mobs constantly and apply Vulnerable to them.
- Alchemical Advantage is activated by Smoke Grenade dropped by Quickening Fog from Dash granting you more Attack Speed in Cap2.
Ultimate and Key Passive
- Shadow Clone is our Ultimate of choice because it greatly amplifies our damage.
- Momentum is our Key Passive and we stack it up quickly through Dance of Knives. It also provides us with defense and movement speed.
- You pick up damaging passives such as Impetus. Frigid Finesse increases your damage against Frozen enemies and is activated by Cold Imbuement and Thul.
You should not worry about running out of Charges as the build does not utilize Snapshots anymore in Season 8. You should not be spinning longer than 10 seconds for optimal damage output anyway, as explained below.
Optimal Rotation
The order and situation in which you use your Skills is very important to allow you to perform well with any given build. Dance of Knives Rogue utilized snapshots in the past, but even without those being required anymore, sticking to the proper rotation helps a lot. Therefore, the optimal order is as follows:
- Always enshroud yourself with Dark Shroud.
- Engage enemies with Dash, dropping Smoke Grenade on them via Quickening Fog.
- Drop Caltrops on Elites and Bosses.
- Remember to swap to the Methodical Caltrops upgrade once you reach the Ancestral variant.
- Activate Cold Imbuement to freeze mobs and deal more damage against frozen enemies.
- Activate Shadow Clone to reset your cooldown and deal more damage.
- Start spinning with Dance of Knives.
Shadow Clone deals nearly half of our damage and enables many damage multipliers such as:
- Vehement Brawler's
- No Witnesses
- Impetus
- Unto Dawn
Therefore you should use it as soon as it is off cooldown.
Even your longest lasting damage buffs run out after 10 seconds. Therefore, you want to cast Shadow Clone anywhere between every 6 and 10 seconds to refresh them. This requires significant investment in Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction Tempers on your Rings and Amulet.
Rogue Specialization
Preparation
Preparation refreshes all of your Cooldowns after using your Ultimate.
Using Shadow Clone to do so allows you to keep moving fast and your buffs stacked. The damage reduction is also a nice bonus.
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.
Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Paragon
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
To Level 15
- Versatility
- Canny
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
To Level 46
- Versatility
- Control
- Devious
- Canny
- Headhunter
Learn more 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 into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Dance of Knives Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cir + Vex - With this combination you gain increased ranks to all skills, which also helps to reduce the Cooldown of Shadow Clone.
- Neo + Thul - Mystical Frost Nova is very strong, it freezes, amplifies damage and applies vulnerable. The activation is very consistent with Neo as you do not get hit very often.
Alternative Choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Zec - This allows you to reduce the cooldown of Shadow Clone. Ideally activate Shadow Clone first.
- Lac - Invokes Challenging Shout for more defense.
- Tam - If you get lucky and drop this, you can use it instead of Neo.
- Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows an execute at 10% HP, can be combined with Xol in your other Runeword to generate large amounts of offering.
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: Subo
Allows you to see enemies and materials on the Minimap. Ambusher helps you to stagger faster and to have an easier time applying Crowd Control effects.
Reinforcement: Varyana
Bloodthirst is excellent to increase your Attack Speed and consequently your Base Damage of Dance of Knives.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Dance of Knives 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 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:
- 2500+ Dexterity
- 30%+ Lucky Hit Chance
- 300%+ Critical Strike Damage
- 100% Critical Strike Chance (buffed)
- 100% Cap1 Attack Speed
- 100% Cap2 Attack Speed
- 6+ Total Ranks of Impetus
- 10+ Total Ranks of Dance of Knives
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- 6,000+ Life
- 200% Movement Speed (buffed)
- 90%+ Chance for Dance of Knives to Deal Double Damage
- 90%+ Chance for Shadow Clone to deal Double Damage
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Dance of Knives 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 Dance of Knives 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.
Remember to swap Caltrops to Methodical Caltrops once you get more Critical Strike Chance on gear later on.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% to all Resistances and it is recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70%+ Resistances) at all times. As you unlock higher item 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.
- Umbrous is an important survivability tool for many Rogue builds. As long as you have not found it, use Mot and/or Dark Shroud on your skill bar for extra defense.
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.
Remember to swap Caltrops to Methodical Caltrops. With the Ancestral Gear, you should have enough Critical Strike Chance to get close to 100%, rendering the Critical Strike Chance upgrade unnecessary.
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.
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.
If you have not swapped Caltrops to Methodical Caltrops, do it now. With the Mythic Gear, you should have more than enough Critical Strike Chance to get to 100%, rendering the Critical Strike Chance upgrade unnecessary.
Gear & Skills
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.
These are the key changes:
- Tempering Lucky Hit Chance to Daze instead of Movement Speed on the Boots.
- Remember to use Consumables when Pushing:
- Elixir of Advantage II to reach Cap 1 Attack Speed.
- Elixir of Fortitude II if you have trouble surviving.
- Queen's Supreme
- Soothing Spices
- Song of the Mountain
Gear & Skills
- 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.
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.
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. Refer to the Optimal Rotation section further above.
Through Cold Imbuement and Thul.
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.
Smoke Grenade dropped by Quickening Fog from Dash 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.
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 or which transmogs you like more.
You need your Shadow Clone Cooldown to be under 12 seconds for very fluid gameplay. You can reach this by getting more Ranks via Grasp of Shadow or better Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction Tempers on your Rings and Amulet.
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 170%+ 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
Mechanics
For more even more in-depth information about specific Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, check out the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.
- 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.
- Cooldown Reduction is inversely multiplicative with each other.
- Example: You have two Cooldown Reduction rolls, each being 20.2%.
- Your actual Cooldown Reduction is not 40.4% now, but 36.3% instead.
- The formula for this is as follows:
0.363 = 1 - (1 - 0.202) * (1 - 0.202)
Shadow Clone has undergone a massive rework with the summoning tag change in Season 7.
At this point, more interactions work with it than don't but it would still be too many to list here. But it shows that Shadow Clone has improved significantly.
Noteworthy interactions that do not work:
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.
- Corruption with Poison Imbuement
- Apogeic Furorwith Poison Imbuement
- Consuming Impetus does not increase the Clone damage
- Trick Attacks cannot be stacked by the Clone
- Weapon Mastery (Bow and Daggers)
- Momentum cannot be triggered by Clone
- Precision cannot be stacked by the Clone
- Alchemical Admixture
- Enhanced Caltrops generated by the Clone.
- No Witnesses does not double dip for Clone with Poison Imbuement.
- Beastfall Boots
- Shadow Clone Double Damage (with Poison Imbuement)
- Potency Stat for Poison Imbuement
- Ultimate Damage with Poison Imbuement
- Does not generate Combo Points
For a complete list of interactions, visit the 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!
Cap 1
- Moonrise
- Close Quarters Combat (Cutthroat)
- Flurry
- Elixir of Advantage II
- Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
- Andariel's Visage
- Ring of Starless Skies
- Culler
- Nimble
- Artillery Shrine (100% AS)
Cap 2
- Close Quarters Combat (Marksman)
- Alchemical Advantage
- Accelerating
- Asheara's Khanjar
- Rapid
- Haste
- Basic Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
- High Velocity
- Enhanced Heartseeker
- Cutthroat Attack Speed (Tempering)
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.
Video Guide
Updated Video Guide is coming soon.
Summary
The Dance of Knives Rogue is a fun to play, fast-paced and explosive build that performs outstandingly well in almost any scenario. With high mobility and tankyness you will best any challenge thrown at you.
- Engage with Dash, activate all your skills and start spinning!
- Spin and zoom through Helltides, Dungeons and the open world as fast as you can!
- Stack Attack Speed and Ranks to Dance of Knives!
- Activate Shadow Clone as soon as it is off cooldown to maintain your damage buffs!
- Always be on the move while channeling Dance of Knives to not run out of Charges.
- And most importantly: Spin2win!
Credits
Written by M1PY