Penetrating Shot Rogue Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Penetrating Shot Rogue Endgame Guide! Are you looking for a "nuke the entire screen"-playstyle for Rogue? Well, this is it! A relatively easy to understand, powerful build which scales well into the endgame.
Penetrating Shot is a Core Skill that fires one massive, piercing arrow. The Trickshot amplifies your Area of Effect. As with most Rogue skills, maximizing its potential requires good positioning because you deal increased damage the more enemies you hit in a line.
We use Penetrating Shot with Preparation to maximize your Shadow Clone. Yes, Shadow Clone is no longer Shadow Clown. It actually deals damage this time, I am for real.
This is a very satisfying and rewarding build that requires some planning ahead to maximize its potential. This guide teaches you the best way to tackle endgame with the Penetrating Shot Rogue!
Requirements for this Build:
- Trickshot
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
Grigoire's Lightning Square - Easy activation by just casting a core skill for 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.
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - We easily proc vulnerable in this build, so this gives us a nice multiplier for casting our main boss power.
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
Skills
- Penetrating Shot is your main ability.
- Shadow Step gives you incredible mobility to fly across the battlefield and an easy way to get out of tough situations.
- Dash gives you incredible mobility to fly across the battlefield and an easy way to get out of tough situations.
- Caltrops for chill and eventually freeze. Also great for an overall damage buff the longer enemies are in the trap.
- Smoke Grenade helps you to crowd control enemies and adds a powerful damage modifier.
- Shadow Clone Is our ultimate that grants us unstoppable as well as trigger No Witnesses. It also procs the cutthroat part of Close Quarters Combat.
Skill Rotation
The general idea is to gather enemies together to take advantage of Penshot's innate ability to deal more damage the more targets it shoots through. We accomplish this with the Kry rune.
- Spam Penetrating Shot as often as possible for maximum output.
- Use Shadow Step to reposition for better shots and to get out of sticky situations
- Use Smoke Grenade for more damage and to keep enemies, especially elites from attacking you.
- Use Dash to get around the battlefield for better positioning with Penetrating Shot and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly.
- Shadow Clone Is our ultimate that grants us unstoppable. This also triggers No Witnesses legendary node, so you want to use this whenever its off cooldown.
- Use Caltrops on tougher targets to add damage multipliers and to take them down quickly.
Rogue Specialization
Preparation - Spend energy to reduce the cooldown of our ultimate skill, Shadow Clone
Casting Shadow Clone resets our other cooldowns and provides us 15% damage reduction for 10 seconds due to Preparation
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
- Fluidity
Level 46
- Turf
- Devious
- Control
- Headhunter
- Fluidity
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 into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Penetrating Shot Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Kry - Gives us a pull to enhance our damage.
- Cir + Vex - Gives additional ranks to your skills, including Shadow Clone ranks.
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 frequently so that is a good alternative to Noc.
- Yax - We drink a potion frequently to keep Unstable Elixirs up, so this rune can also be beneficial.
- Lac - Invokes Challenging Shout for more defense.
- Kry - Helps with grouping up mobs.
- 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: Raheir
He has a lot to offer us from a defensive standpoint. Skills like Valiance and Bastion help protect us from heavy hits and grant Unstoppable. Iron Wolf Call is amazing for buffing the damage of Rapid Fire.
- Reinforcement: Varyana
We take Earth Breaker for the continuous knockdown for Malice procs.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Penetrating Shot 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:
- 9+ total Penetrating Shot Ranks
- 3+ total Dark Shroud Ranks
- 1500+ Dexterity
- 800%+ Damage to Close Enemies
- 4+ Innervation Ranks
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- 150%+ Movement Speed
- 35%+ Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Penetrating Shot 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 Penetrating Shot 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.
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.
- Penetrating Shot is difficult to sustain without multiple Innervation tempers and lucky hit via Fists of Fate, so we take Inner Sight Specialization while still building towards Preparation.
- Use Elixir of Resourcefulness II for easier sustain.
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.
- Fists of Fate help us greatly with its massive amount of lucky hit chance, which helps with energy sustain.
- Cowl of the Nameless provides some additional passive damage while also granting a good chunk of lucky hit vs crowd controlled targets.
- Eaglehorn offers utility and a bit of extra flare with the bounce that enhances the fun factor without gimping the build. Does really well in tight areas.
- Pick up Penitent Greaves for a nice multiplier that has high uptime.
- Shroud of Khanduras gives us another reliable pull to scale our damage.
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 and should be the first mythic to chase due to the +1 all passives and the massive amount of health it gives. This also means that it becomes difficult to cap resistances and armor, so be mindful of your surrounding gear when you put this on. The endgame paragon board and gear stats are tailored with this chest in mind.
- Heir of Perdition is best in slot. Gives us good all around stats with a massive multiplier and more emphasis on lucky hit chance.
- Tyrael's Might is optional. 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.
- Ring of Starless Skies is optional. Damage potential is evident, at the cost of not being able to spend enough resources to maintain Second Wind for crucial defense, especially against damage over time effects.
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 Clone.
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
- 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
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
- 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)
- 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 to keep high stacks of Dark Shroud.
- Dodge Chance affixes are not additive, but inversely multiplicative instead.
- Dodge Chance aspects, such as Crowded Sage 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, 8% Dodge Chance Aspect
16.6 + (100 * (1 - (1 - 0.15) * (1 - 0.15)) + 8 = 52.35%- So a total of 52.35% Dodge Chance, instead of
16.6+15+15+8 = 54.6if it was all additive.
Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) 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 CC of the same type.
Effectively, spamming just one type of CC is not very efficient. Instead use as many different types of CC as possible to stagger the Boss quickly. The types of CC we have in the Penetrating Shot Rogue are:
- Slow, Stun, Immobilize and Freeze from tempered affixes on our gear.
- Daze from Concussive Strikes.
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 regeneration is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again.
Video Guide
Soon...
Summary
The Penetrating Shot Rogue is a powerhouse that excels at destroying packs of monsters with impactful explosions rewarding good timing and positioning.
Penetrating Shot Rogue initially is a tough to manage build. Patience in learning is required to master the rotations. Once you do, you shall unleash its true power!
Credits
Written by DiEoxidE