Invigorating Strike Rogue Build Guide
Welcome to the Invigorating Strike Rogue Guide! This is a basic attack build designed for quick and fast gameplay that does well in both single target applications and density, thanks to many different multiplicative offerings to buff Invigorating Strike itself.
Invigorating Strike really starts getting good when you find the Shard of Verathiel. which is a hefty damage buff and a way to cleverly use the Preparation specialization to take this build even further.
We also use Preparation for damage reduction and to cast our ultimate skill often, giving us full uptime on a massive legendary node multiplier, No Witnesses.
Invigorating Strike shares a lot of similarities to Heartseeker and thus have similar strengths. The playstyle's are different, as Invigorating Strike plays like a true melee build that has no issues getting dirty up close. If you like the simplicity and speed of Heartseeker, but want to play an assassin like playstyle, then this build is for you!
Requirements for this build
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.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Beast in the Ice's Sleet - Easy synergy with Coldclip and does decent damage.
Modifiers
- Beastmaster's Training - A no-brainer for any build with Shadow Clone. This power serves as a direct multiplier of up to 150%!
- Sinerat's Flames - Free damage for having resistances.
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Having crowd control duration naturally on Cowl of the Nameless allows us to max this multiplier easily without investment.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Avarice's Explosive Ore - Good for wide AoE.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - Good way to add additional AoE as a sub power.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Invigorating Strike is our damage dealing Skill of choice that also procs Preparation.
- Shadow Clone procs No Witnesses legendary node. It also deals damage, like for real this time. It is actually useful.
- Poison Trap - Provides multiple benefits such as procing the second portion of Malice and a base multiplier. Caltrops is primary for tougher targets that will take a little longer to kill. This skill provides a massive buff while enemies are inside for long periods of time.
- Dash gives us incredible movement
- Smoke Grenade gives us quite a bit of utility from more damage to disabling enemies so that they cannot attack.
Passives
- Close Quarters Combat is the Key Passive of choice, which gives Invigorating Strike a lot of muscle behind each attack that is also mimic'd by your Shadow Clone.
Skill Rotation
The Invigorating Strike Rogue is a straight forward build. It's high in mobility and damage modifiers. Below explains how to best get the most out of each skill on your bar.
- Use Dash to get around the map really fast. Often times, you'll want to engage with this first to start off.
- Invigorating Strike is the main skill. You can start most engagements with this when dealing with just trash mobs.
- Use Shadow Clone to proc No Witnesses legendary node, unstoppable and a summon that's nearly comparable to your damage along side you. Use this as often as you can.
- Use Smoke Grenade whenever you see an elite pack to disable them. This also gives a nice multiplier which allows you to burst them down quickly.
- Approach with Caltrops as with Mired Sharpshooter's, it's needed to keep up Close Quarters Combat.
- Use Poison Trap also for tougher mobs to proc the second portion of Malice and an additional multiplier.
- Use Dash to get around the map really fast. Often times, you'll want to engage with this first to start off.
Rogue Specialization
Preparation - Spend resource to reduce your ultimate cooldown and gain 15% damage reduction.
For Invigorating Strike this requires Shard of Verathiel for it to spend energy to make use of this specialization.
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.
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
Level 15
- Turf
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
- Closer
Level 46
- Turf
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
- Closer
Learn more details 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 in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. Rapid Fire Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Poc + Thul - Great for crowd control, vulnerable proc and provides a 15% damage buff.
- Cir + Vex - Extra ranks to both our basic attack and ultimate.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cem - We evade often, so this is a good activator.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Yax - Good amount of offering for just drinking a potion.
- Lith - Great for stand still and shoot players at the sacrifice of mobility.
- Wat - Good choice for some damage reduction and a way to use another classes skill for the Xol rune.
- Yul - We have a lot of cooldowns in this build, so this rune is good for that.
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
We take Bastion for the shield, the unstoppable and decent damage buffs.
- Reinforcement: Varyana
Her Earth Breaker skill provides a knockdown to proc the second portion of Malice.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Invigorating Strike 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 not 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
- 800%+ Damage to Close Enemies
- 25%+ Invigorating Strike cleave damage
- 1500+ Dexterity
- 35%+ Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- 150%+ Movement Speed
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 Invigorating Strike 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.
Farming
Pushing
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.
- Coldclip and Shard of Verathiel are the foundations of progressing the build.
- Mired Sharpshooter's is absolutely necessary to proc the second part of our key passive Close Quarters Combat by giving Caltrops the Marksman tag.
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
- 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.
- Shard of Verathiel is a big pickup with its massive attack speed bonus and hefty multiplier for Invigorating Strike. Main reason we take this is to be able to spend energy to proc Preparation and No Witnesses, as well as the Second Wind passive.
- Cowl of the Nameless provides some additional passive damage while also granting a good chunk of lucky hit vs crowd controlled targets.
- Grasp of Shadow Gives us an additional clone that gets most of the benefits from the Ultimate.
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
- Shroud of False Death Is best in slot with the +1 to all passives. This chest however requires to shift things around to cap all resistances.
- Tyrael's Might is optional. It makes it much easier to hit your Armor and Resistance caps, even in high Torment difficulties. This allows you to min/max the setup further for example by removing such Paragon nodes and putting them into more damage.
- Heir of Perdition is optional. Gives us good all around stats with a massive multiplier and more emphasis on lucky hit chance.
- Ring of Starless Skies Makes for easier energy management while providing quite a bit of attack speed and a good multiplier.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
We drop Poison Trap to pick up Improved Flurry to be even more agile and move swiftly around the battlefield.
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
- 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.
- We make one change and that's trading Umbrous for Siphoned Victuals to replenish potions for Unstable Elixirs upkeep, specifically on bosses.
FAQ & Mechanics
Make sure you have innervation tempers in all of your jewelry slots. Resourceful Elixir also helps if you're struggling.
Elixir of Advantage II if you're low-balled on gear rolls or Elixir of Fortitude II once near min-maxed.
We want to scale the No Witness legendary node for a nice multiplier that ends up being worth more damage than slotting all Sapphires for Vulnerable damage.
Yes. Alternative stats that are decent are as follows:
- Unstable Elixirs
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Movement Speed
- Maximum Life
Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, you can gain shrouds through the Umbrous Aspect or the Mot rune. It is used in this build to profit from the enormous damage reduction especially when you get hit infrequently. You gain stacks by hitting enemies with Invigorating Strike greatly benefitting from Lucky Hit Chance.
Mechanics
Learn about the mechanical details that make the build tick.
- 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, increasing your total Ranks of Dark Shroud affects your effective hit points (eHP) against one-shots as follows:
- Increasing Dark Shroud from:
- Rank 1 to Rank 5: 15.3% more eHP
- Rank 1 to Rank 11: 50% more eHP
- Rank 1 to Rank 15: 87.5% more eHP
- Rank 5 to Rank 11: 30.1% more eHP
- Rank 5 to Rank 15: 62.5% more eHP
- Rank 11 to Rank 15: 25% more eHP
- Increasing Dark Shroud from:
- 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 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
- Shard of Verathiel
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
- You can dodge most things in the game excluding Damage over time effects and certain boss-mechanics.
- Utilizing the high natural dodge chance of this build allows it to keep high stacks of Dark Shroud.
- Dodge Chance affixes are not additive, but inversely multiplicative instead.
- Dodge Chance aspects, such as Assimilation are additive.
- Agile is treated like an affix, so inversely multiplicative.
- Dodge Chance Calculation:
[Dodge % from Dexterity] + [100 * (1 - (1 - Dodge% A) * (1 - Dodge% B) * ... * (1 - Dodge% N))] + [Additive Dodge% A] + [Additive Dodge% B] + ... + [Additive Dodge% N]- Example: 16.6% Dodge Chance from Dexterity, 15% Dodge Chance Affix, 15% Dodge Chance Affix
16.6 + (100 * (1 - (1 - 0.15) * (1 - 0.15)) = 44.35%- This would grant you 44.35% Dodge Chance, instead of
16.6+15+15 = 46.6if it was additive.
- Countering Smoke Grenade is required to reset the cooldown quickly. With sufficient Cooldown Reduction and Smoke Grenade Cooldown Reduction, you can reset the cooldown with 1 hit on a vulnerable enemy affected by it.
Video Guide
Summary
The Invigorating Strike Rogue is a superb allrounder with a toolkit that prepares you for all situations. It's a fun and mobile farming build that with a few tweaks can transform into a DPS powerhouse to take on the biggest challenges the game has to offer. I hope you enjoy a great build.
- Invigorating Strike is the main skill. You can start most engagements with this nearly off screen and kill trash mobs in the open world before they can get near you.
- Use Shadow Clone to proc No Witnesses legendary node and deal more damage overall.
- Use Smoke Grenade to disable elites and give a nice multiplier.
- Approach with Caltrops as with Mired Sharpshooter's, it's needed to keep up Close Quarters Combat.
Credits
Written by DiEoxidE