Death Trap Rogue Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Death Trap Rogue Endgame Guide! This build focuses on spamming your ultimate skill unlike any other to deal with anything the game has to offer. While various traps may be included in any Rogue build, this one specializes in dealing damage almost exclusively by spamming Death Trap non-stop. This is achieved by stacking enough Trap, Ultimate or regular Cooldown Reduction to get Death Trap's cooldown to below 10 seconds and then triggering Preparation twice with one shot using Beastfall Boots and a pool of min. 150 Energy to instantly reset the skill. Thanks to Aftermath you can instantly fill your Energy bar again and repeat.
A big advantage of this playstyle is the constant resets of all of your abilities and the opportunity to pull enemies together at will with Prime Death Trap, which makes the build stand out and defuses the danger in most elite fights.
The key item that enables the build is Eyes in the Dark and it's recommended to acquire it from Varshan before transitioning to this build. These pants solve several problems at once and boost the ultimate's damage through the roof. While the best setups run the aforementioned Beastfall Boots combo, it's possible to get started without them by using the Exposure key passive to reset your traps, which is later replaced by Close Quarters Combat. Let's jump in and see what it's all about!
Requirements for this build
- Eyes in the Dark
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.
Witchcraft Powers
Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.
There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of four Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay, Psyche, and Lost), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.
Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers
- Soul Harvest - This Power dramatically increases our Core Stats based on monster density and is a reliably strong choice.
- Decay Augmentation - Death Trap inherits the Growth & Decay tags from Voice of the Stars, turning this Power into a direct Multiplier.
- Purging Touch - Similarly, Death Trap becomes an Eldritch effect thanks to Voice of the Stars. So, this Power starts off situationally powerful against Headrotten then becomes a multiplier against all enemies once leveled.
- Aura of Siphoning - You must equip one of the three available Witchcraft Auras to enable Voice of the Stars. This Aura is preferred for its Healing effect and Poison damage.
- Aura Specialization - For more Critical Strike Damage and higher Aura Radius.
- Vengeful Spirit Servant - For more defense.
Alternate Witchcraft Powers
- Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed. Unfortunately, it's ineffective against Bosses.
- Hex of Shattering - The Damage Reduction is great and it is the most consistent way to apply a Hex when paired with Voice of the Stars.
Occult Gems
Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.
Best-in-Slot Occult Gems
- Voice of the Stars - This Gem enables us to use multiple powerful synergies from our Witchcraft Powers by granting Death Trap all applicable tags.
- Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats improve your Skill Damage. Maximum Life improves overall defense. Becoming Unhindered helps you move through groups of mobs.
- Toadling's Wish - We use a number of Growth & Decay Powers in this build, and bolstering the effects of Soul Harvest and Decay Augmentation is extremely powerful.
Alternate Occult Gems
- Hungering Void - Yet another way to allow you to pull mobs together, but you pay a high opportunity cost to equip it.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Barrage is our core skill but barely contributes damage. Instead, it's used as a conduit to trigger lucky hit effects, activate Beastfall Boots for Preparation and to make enemies vulnerable. Once you have +Core Ranks on any of your items, you do not need to put any skill points into Barrage itself to equip it.
- Death Trap is our Ultimate Skill and main damage dealer. With enough cooldown reduction we can get to the point where we can alternate this and our core skill by emptying and filling our entire resource bar in tandem with the unique boots + Aftermath. In the early progression, we instead rely on Exposure to reset its cooldown and cast it less frequently.
- Smoke Grenade helps us stay alive, adds a powerful damage modifier.
- Alchemical Advantage is activated by Aura of Siphoning.
- Dash and Shadow Step grant us high mobility. If you're resource starved early on, replace one of these skills with Puncture or Invigorating Strike until later.
- Caltrops adds a powerful damage buff with Enhanced Caltrops. In most farming situations this ability is too slow and clunky, but it's very helpful to take down tanky bosses.
Skill Rotation
- Hold Force Attack + Barrage => Smoke Grenade => Death Trap => Repeat
- Dash or Shadow Step at least once every 8sec for Close Quarters Combat.
- (On Bosses) Start with Caltrops and keep them inside the area for Enhanced Caltrops.
- (On Bosses) Keep an eye on the stagger bar and prepare to nuke right when it fills as many of our damage modifiers rely on crowd controls.
Rogue Specialization
Preparation - Spend resources to reset your Ultimate Skill, which in turn resets all your other skills.
This choice is the key to the build in order to immediately reset Death Trap and with the rest of our abilities all the time.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Specialization Guide.
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.
Death Trap 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
- Explosive
- Ambush
- Turf
- Control
- Versatility
To Level 46
- Explosive
- Ambush
- Turf
- Control
- Versatility
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels: 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
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. The Death Trap Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Zan + Mot - Generates Dark Shroud without having to rely on Umbrous, freeing up that aspect slot. Use the aspect (e.g. on Helm, Chest, or Amulet) and another rune (e.g. Gar) until you get this combo.
- Cir + Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage and reducing cooldown of Death Trap and increase survivability with Dark Shroud.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Poc - We continuously gain and spend tons of Energy, so this is an easy activator.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Gar - To reach 100% crit more reliably.
- 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.
- Ohm - War Cry buffs us with helpful extra damage.
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
He provides us with more defense and Fortify through Shield Charge, which is important for Overpower Damage. We alsop gain extra damage through his Provoke.
Reinforcement: Varyana
We choose Bloodthirst for more attack speed.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Death Trap Rogue to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. 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 Endgame Stat Thresholds
- Sub 10 sec Death Trap Cooldown
- 60%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 50%+ Attack Speed
- 1000%+ Damage vs. Close
- 2500+ Dexterity
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 80%+
- 6,000+ Life
- 160%+ Movement Speed
- 150+ Max. Energy
- 1000%+ Stun Grenade Damage
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 Death Trap 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.
- Umbrous is an important survivability tool for many Rogue builds. As long as you haven't found it, use either Mot or Dark Shroud on your bar for extra defense.
- In order to spam our ultimate non-stop, we need to reach 150+ max. Energy and <10sec cooldown on Death Trap. Without Beastfall Boots and some masterworking this is impossible, so instead we play with Exposure to reset the cooldown until this combo is unlocked.
- Explosive Verve allows us to easily trigger Exposure with Caltrops, Smoke Grenade, Death Trap and the grenades from the key passive itself to ensure we have a good flow in the build.
- Instead of starting with Trap Cooldown Reduction, we first go with Innervation tempers on our jewelry to fuel the Barrage spam between Death Trap casts. If you find yourself running out of Energy too often early on, also try to add Resource Cost Reduction rolls on rings or replace either Dash or Shadow Step with Puncture to fill the gaps.
- Before unlocking the build's final setup, you may be stuck with your ultimate on cooldown from time to time. Use your Trap skills to activate Exposure to reset it. Otherwise, follow the general gameplay described in the sections above.
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
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
- Ring of Starless Skies is a big damage multiplier since there aren't many good tools available to boost Death Trap otherwise. It also helps us to cap resistances while wearing so many uniques.
- Since all of our Armor slots are occupied with Uniques, we need to use Mot to generate Dark Shroud stacks.
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.
Gear & Skills
- We don't make any adjustments for pushing in this build.
- 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.
Rogues don't have many sources of Unstoppable but a good way to break out of crowd controls or trigger Tibault's Will is with Shadow Step.
In the early game you may occasionally starve on resources before you get the full combo online. Investing more into Resource Cost Reduction (esp. on Crossbow) helps with this. Alternatively, you can replace a support skill like Smoke Grenade with Puncture until later and roll more Energy per Second on your gear.
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.
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.
- 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
- Rank 31: Invincibility
- With these unique boots equipped, it's possible to trigger Preparation twice with the same attack for a 10 second cooldown reduction.
- For unknown reasons, this effect occasionally bugs out and only rewards one proc even when spending way more than 150 Energy at once.
- 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 combo points 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.
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
Summary
The Death Trap Rogue is a fun to play, fast-paced tactical genius that performs well in almost any scenario. With a range of tricks and devices up your sleeve, and constant resets on all of your cooldowns, you can deal with anything.
- Invest into Energy recovery as much as possible early on so you can spam Barrage for Exposure until you can do the 150 Energy + Beastfall Boots combo.
- Endgame Mythic Rotation: Barrage => Smoke Grenade => Death Trap => Repeat
- Combine Death Trap with Poison Trap to pull in and crowd control all nearby enemies before decimating them.
- Use your crowd controls to deal more damage and stay alive with Dark Shroud triggered from Umbrous or Mot.
Credits
Written by M1PY
Initally written by wudijo