Penetrating Shot Rogue Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Penetrating Shot Rogue Endgame Guide! Are you looking for a ranged, "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 Combo Points to maximize the damage you and your Shadow Clone do. 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.
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
- Firebat Servants - This power provides a stun, which is nice for Trick Attacks, while working towards 3 Eldritch powers for Witching Hour Gem.
- Hex of Flames - Taken to reach 3 eldritch powers for Witching Hour Gem.
- Purging Touch - We take this to increase the damage of our core skill.
- Aura of Siphoning Used for Aura Specialization.
- Aura Specialization - Free Critical Strike Damage Multiplier that scales well with Trick Attacks.
- Piranhado - This is used as a way to group up mobs, making lining up your shot a bit easier.
Alternate Witchcraft Powers
Soul Harvest - Strong power, but requires you to gather around a lot of mobs in melee range, which hurts other multipliers in this build.
Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Aura of Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed.
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
- Dust Stone - We have both hex and aura powers, and we get a damage bonus for having these using this Gem.
- Witching Hour - This Gem combined with Purging Touch Witch Power provides massive damage buff for your core skill.
- Moonlight Ward - Great for Defense
Alternate Occult Gems
- Aura of Misfortune - Nice for those that need more movement speed.
- Vengeful Spirit Servant - Good for Hardcore.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
Skills
- Penetrating Shot is your main ability.
- Heartseeker is our Basic Skill of choice for building combo points and Precision stacks quickly and providing various buffs.
- 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.
- Cold Imbuement Buffs your Penetrating Shot with more damage by chilling and freezing, as well as a chance to make enemies Vulnerable.
Skill Rotation
The general idea is to use whatever is at your disposal to keep some distance while keeping up all of your buffs from various skills and passives. Heartseeker does a great job at stacking combo points easily while providing much needed utility benefits.
- Heartseeker isn't used for DPS, but for its utility to build Combo Points.
- Build 3 Combo Points before firing Penetrating Shot always.
- Always use Cold Imbuement on your Penetrating Shot before firing to maintain buffs and big damage.
- Use Dash to get around the battlefield for better positioning with Rapid Fire and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly.
- Use Shadow Clone when off cooldown to assist in dealing more damage.
Use Caltrops on tougher targets to add damage multipliers and to take them down quickly.
Rogue Specialization
Combo Points - Use basic attack to fill up your points, up to 3 maximum, for additional benefits.
For Penetrating Shot, this means more damage and considerably more lucky hit per point stacked. You should always try and build 3 stacks before casting your Penetrating Shot for maximum output.
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.
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
- Combat
- Devious
- Canny
- Control
- Headhunter
Level 46
- Combat
- Devious
- Canny
- Control
- Headhunter
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 into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Penetrating Shot Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cir + Ohm - Invokes War Cry.
- Igni + Mot - Provides us with free Dark Shroud.
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. 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
- 5+ total Dark Shroud Ranks
- 1500+ Dexterity
- 1500%+ Critical Strike Damage
- 6+ Cold Imbuement Charges
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- 150%+ Movement Speed
- 70%+ 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.
- We use Umbrous to proc Dark Shroud until we're able to get the Mot rune.
- Temper Cold Imbuement charges on pants and boots so that all of your combo point Rapid Fire shots are always imbued.
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.
- Skyhunter sky rockets your damage output when obtained. This also allows you to switch from Primary Heartseeker to Fundamental Heartseeker since we are guaranteed to crit on the first shot with Skyhunter, allowing us to stack Precision in 3 shots or less.
- Cowl of the Nameless is a very powerful helm. You only care about Trick Attacks and Unstable Elixirs here, but both of these passives are so strong that it makes the helm worth using.
- Condemnation is for the damage portion of the unique affix. We don't care about the chance to proc 3 combo points as we're not using a basic attack that uses that weapon
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.
- 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.
What can I do to improve survivability?
How can I trigger Unstoppable?
Mechanics
Dark Shroud Mechanics
Attack Speed Caps
Cooldown Reduction Scaling
Dodge Mechanics
Stagger Mechanics
Video Guide
Soon...
Summary
The Penetrating Shot Rogue is a ranged powerhouse that excels at destroying packs of monsters with impactful explosions rewarding good timing and positioning. Due to its safe ranged playstyle it is also able to push high tiers without much trouble. It is also fun to play!
Penetrating Shot Rogue initially is a tough to manage build. Depending precise positioning and active buffs that must be maintained to deal damage, it can put you in danger if you are not careful. Patience in learning is required to master the rotations. Once you do, you shall unleash its true power!
Credits
Written by DiEoxidE