High mobility ✔
Great all-rounder ✔
Machine gun playstyle ✔
Low gear requirements ✔

❌ Small AoE coverage
❌ Not the best at anything
❌ Difficult to play optimally
❌ Requires quick decision-making

Season 1 - The Malignant

• There are 32 Caged Hearts divided into 4 different colors, 1 color for each type:
  • Vicious: Orange, Offensive Power
  • Brutal: Blue, Defensive Power
  • Devious: Pink, Utility Power
  • Wrathful: Black, Super Power
• The first 3 must be socketed into their respective infested socket color, while the 4th can be placed into any infested socket.
• Once socketed, they cannot be removed. Instead they can be broken down into Invokers to target farm the Caged Hearts you want inside Malignant Tunnels.
• Higher powered Caged Hearts drop at higher levels.
• You can only use one Wrathful Heart at a time.

Best-in-Slot Caged Hearts

1. Caged Heart of The Barber: Allows us to trigger AoE explosions that multiply our damage in monster packs.
2. Caged Heart of Revenge: Adds tons of damage reduction that's always useful (the explosion effect is irrelevant).
3. Caged Heart of Cluster Munitions: Triggers stun grenades that can activate the Control damage bonus and even Freeze enemies with Frostbitten Aspect once you have found Penitent Greaves. This is a great combo to replace Accelerating Aspect when engaging high level monsters.

Alternative Caged Hearts

• Caged Heart of the Vile Apothecary: Powerful extra damage procs that help us in all situations.
• Caged Heart of the Malignant Pact: Cycles through great bonuses all the time.
• Caged Heart of the Dark Dance: Gives us free attacks every 5 seconds, helping with resource management.

The Barber Setup

• a short timer (best case 2.0 sec) for farming content
• a long timer (best case 4.0 sec) for high-end content

Skills

Rogue Specialization

Paragon Board

Glyphs

Placeholder Glyph

Glyph Leveling Priorities

Gameplay

Skill Usage/Rotation

• Use Dash or Shadow Step to engage a pack. Shadow Step is great to engage a pack by jumping right in the middle or to break free from crowd controls, Dash is useful for all-round mobility and repositioning in combat.
• Build 3 Combo Points with Puncture, position yourself in the middle of a pack, then unleash Flurry. Repeat the same combo until most or all enemies are defeated. If there are only low HP targets around, you can also choose to build fewer Combo Points if your damage is sufficient. This combo is what you use 90-95% of the time.
• Rapid Fire is your single target nuke. You use it roughly 5-10% of the time, but when you do, it really matters. This skill has several important use cases:
  • Defeating dungeon bosses significantly faster than Flurry could (roughly ~2.5-3x dmg).
  • Dealing with leftover enemies at a distance without having to move.
  • Finishing off high HP targets left after your Flurry.
  • Sniping priority targets such as an elite in a pack before it can use its abilities.
• Figuring out when to use Flurry vs. Rapid Fire is the main difficulty of this build and requires some time getting used to. If you follow the above list of use cases, you can figure out what is the right situation for Rapid Fire to speed up your runs. Similar to the rest of the run, you also want to build 3 Combo Points before unleashing your arrows unless you can be sure that fewer are enough to finish the target.
• Activate Shadow Imbuement whenever ready when you engage large packs of monsters. This way you can extend the AoE of your Flurry with extra Shadow damage explosions to clean the area more quickly. On bosses, you can also activate it near the end of the fight for the extra Critical Strike buff from Enhanced Shadow Imbuement and later on in the progression the damage buff from Mixed Shadow Imbuement.
• Puncture is used to generate Combo Points and with them gives extra perks to Flurry and Rapid Fire. For the former it adds an Attack Speed buff that accelerates subsequent combos, for the latter you gain more and stronger arrows for bigger burst damage. It's also an easy way of applying Vulnerable that will then spread to the rest of the pack with Improved Flurry.
• Later in the progression (when the Exploit Glyph is online to apply Vulnerable), Improved Flurry gets replaced by Advanced Flurry. This opens up a new strategy where you use Evade to engage and then Stun everything around you with a subsequent Flurry. This is a powerful defensive tool because you can instantly lock down entire packs and buff your damage through the Control Glyph. Thanks to Rapid Gambits the Evade cooldown resets very quickly.

Resource & Cooldown Management

• Switch from Close Quarters Combat to Momentum
• Drop Stutter Step for Shadow Crash (1) and Consuming Shadows (2)
• Roll Energy Cost Reduction on your Amulet and/or Boots
• Include Ravenous instead of Accelerating or Corruption.

Shadow Imbuement

Mobility

Endgame Gear & Skill Progression

Progression Goals

1. Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
   • Aspect of Encircling Blades in Forsaken Quarry (Fractured Peaks)
   • Rapid in Buried Halls (Dry Steppes)
   • 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)
   • Expectant in Underrot (Scosglen)
   • Wind Striker Aspect in Shivta Ruins (Kehjistan)
   • Corruption in Renegade's Retreat (Kehjistan)
   • Shadowslicer in Twisted Hollow (Scosglen)
   • Ghostwalker in Broken Bulwark (Scosglen)
2. Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
   • Mangler's: Gamble Boots
   • Accelerating: Gamble Swords
   • Ravager's: Gamble Boots
3. Find the following Unique items by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons & Helltides. Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with Obols!
   • Condemnation
   • Penitent Greaves

Progression Steps

Build Scaling

Stat Priorities & Gear Options

• Extra ranks for our main skills Flurry and Rapid Fire are the most important.
• Vulnerable Damage, Critical Strike Chance, Critical Strike Damage and unconditional additive damage bonuses such as Core Skill Damage or Damage to Close Enemies are huge damage boosts so stack them as much as possible.
• Core Stats: Dexterity is the best, followed by Intelligence and Strength. Avoid Willpower if possible.

• Royal Emerald into Weapons because our Vulnerable uptime is high.
• Royal Ruby into Armor for more survivability.
• Royal Skull into Jewelry for better defense and extra scaling with Disobedience.

• Elixirs: Elixir of Cruelty, Elixir of Fortitude, Iron Skin Elixir & Heady Precision Elixir
• Incenses: Song of the Mountain, Reddamine Buzz & Chorus of War

Hardcore Adjustments

• You can switch Close Quarters Combat to Momentum for extra damage reduction. This also allows you to replace Cheat's Aspect with Stolen Vigor for incredible healing.
• Add extra Armor & Maximum Life instead of damage nodes on your Paragon Boards.
• Include Eluding instead of Corruption to get out of crowd controls.
• Be more conservative with Shadow Step and keep a charge ready when you engage enemies that can crowd control you, for example Cold Enchanted elites, Snake mob types or if you need to get inside of Suppressor affix for a kill.

Level 100 Endgame Variants

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How can I improve my survivability?

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:

• Use defensive consumables such as Iron Skin Elixir and Elixir of Fortitude.
• Focus on improving your Chest & Pants with as many defensive stats as possible.
• Roll high Maximum Life values on Helm, Chest, Pants and Rings.
• Include more Armor & Maximum Life on Paragon instead of damage.
• Drop Shadow Imbuement for Dark Shroud or Smoke Grenade.
• Switch Close Quarters Combat to Momentum and replace Cheat's with Stolen Vigor.

How can I improve my damage?

Your main sources of damage are your weapons, in particular their item power that directly scales damage per second. This is the base for all further damage calculations, so make sure to focus on finding high level weapons. In addition, you want to stack offensive stats like Critical Strike Chance & Damage, Vulnerable Damage, Core Skill Ranks and others and level up your Glyphs to unlock even more power through the Paragon system. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.

How do Swords and Daggers compare?

Both weapon types are viable options for melee builds. The main difference lies in the bonuses gained by the Weapon Mastery passive. With Daggers, you are much more powerful when you are one-shotting enemies while Swords give you higher sustained damage output in longer fights. Ultimately the choice is up to you and depends on the content you're doing, but a better rolled weapon usually wins regardless of type.

How do Bows and Crossbows compare?

For pure ranged builds, both weapon types are viable options. In this case, we use ranged attacks quite infrequently and usually from a short distance, so the Crossbow wins with higher base damage per shot and the powerful Vulnerable Damage inherent stat.

How do Momentum & Close Quarters Combat compare?

Close Quarters Combat is a powerful Key Passive that improves damage output while Momentum grants extra speed, damage reduction and Energy. Both are viable options for this build and depending on the content you're running and what you need, you can freely swap between the two.

How do I choose when to run with Condemnation?

For Combo Points builds, Condemnation is nearly always a best-in-slot weapon choice. However, if you end up with a very low item power or low rolls on its stats, you may want to hold onto your legendary weapon until you find a better unique. As a rule of thumb, a well-rolled Condemnation beats legendary weapons even up to 50 item power higher.

What can I do when I struggle with Dungeon Bosses?

First of all, make sure that you play the 3:1 Puncture + Rapid Fire rotation properly. Aside from this, there are two options:

• Use Poison Imbuement instead of Shadow Imbuement to apply a strong damage over time effect.
• Drop Dash and Stutter Step to pick up Poison Imbuement without giving up Shadow Imbuement.

What about the Barber Heart in Season 1?

You can play with Caged Heart of The Barber, but it's not recommended because it breaks several on-hit effects such as the Vulnerable application of Puncture and Exploit, making prolonged fights quite slow. A great choice is Caged Heart of the Vile Apothecary because the build naturally runs with an Imbuement and triggering others for free helps out a ton as well. If you still want to run with the Caged Heart of The Barber, take a look at the Season 1 section above.

Why Rubies instead of Topazes in Armor sockets?

Percentage-based increases to Maximum Life (e.g. from Royal Ruby or Paragon nodes) scale multiplicatively. Each individual source of % life multiplies your base life (7959 total at level 100), but does not affect flat life bonuses from gear.

• With 5x Royal Ruby and no flat life bonuses, the total benefit is 1.04 ^ 5 = 1.2166 for a total bonus of 21.7% effective hit points (EHP).
• With 5x Royal Topaz you gain 1 - (0.9 ^ 5) = 41% damage reduction while crowd controlled, which leads to an increase in EHP by 1 / (0.9 ^ 5) = 69.5% but you don't have any other benefits.

This means that while you are crowd controlled, you are ~39.3% more tanky when running 5x Royal Topaz over 5x Royal Ruby in your armor sockets. Considering how rarely monsters crowd control you, it's usually better to just go for more life all the time but ultimately both remain viable options depending on the content.

The main downside of running Royal Ruby is that with a bigger life pool, there is also more health you need to heal up again after taking damage, so your overall recovery goes down. However, many healing effects are % based such as your Health Potion or Siphoning Strikes so that this is generally not a big problem.

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, the total increase in survivability against one-shots scales in the following way:
  • Rank 1: 40% damage reduction -> 66.7% more toughness
  • Rank 2: 42% damage reduction -> 72.4% more toughness
  • Rank 3: 44% damage reduction -> 78.6% more toughness
  • Rank 4: 46% damage reduction -> 85.2% more toughness
  • Rank 5: 48% damage reduction -> 92.3% more toughness
  • Rank 6: 50% damage reduction -> 100% more toughness
  • Rank 7: 52% damage reduction -> 108.3% more toughness
  • Rank 8: 54% damage reduction -> 117.4% more toughness
  • Rank 9: 56% damage reduction -> 127.3% more toughness
  • Rank 10: 58% damage reduction -> 138.1% more toughness
  • Rank 11: 60% damage reduction -> 150% more toughness
  • Rank 12: 62% damage reduction -> 163.2% more toughness
  • Rank 13: 64% damage reduction -> 177.8% more toughness
  • Rank 14: 66% damage reduction -> 194.1% more toughness
  • Rank 15: 68% damage reduction -> 212.5% more toughness
  • Rank 16: 70% damage reduction -> 333.3% more toughness
• The differences between the most common rank values are:
  • Rank 1 to Rank 5: 15.3% more toughness
  • Rank 5 to Rank 9: 18.2% more toughness
  • Rank 9 to Rank 13: 22.2% more toughness
  • Rank 13 to Rank 16: 26.6% more toughness

Penitent Greaves

• Penitent Greaves apply Chill roughly once per second on an enemy, adding to the stagger bar.
• The Chill lasts for three seconds. This prevents Aspect of the Umbral from triggering again on the same target for that duration.
• The Damage to Chilled Enemies is multiplicative with other sources.

Video Guide

Summary

• Build 3 Combo Points with Puncture before using Flurry or Rapid Fire.
• Hit as many enemies as possible with Flurry + Aspect of Encircling Blades.
• Switch to Puncture + Rapid Fire to finish off elites, bosses and ranged targets.
• Use Evade, Shadow Step and Dash to reposition in combat.
• Use Shadow Imbuement for extra AoE or to boost your boss damage.

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Credits