Poison Trap Rogue Endgame Guide
Welcome to the Poison Trap Rogue Endgame Guide! We utilize Bands of Ichorous Rose to create a brand new trap playstyle. These gloves enable many ways to build and play Poison Trap. We'll be using Inner Sight, which you typically never see in other endgame builds.
This build not only deals damage over time, but also burst damage with satisfying poison explosions thanks to Contamination. This wouldn't be a true trap build without Death Trap pulling in all enemies and helping us send them back to hell!
We'll be spamming Poison Trap because the cooldown is 0 seconds whilst Inner Sight is active. This can be done whilst moving, which not only improves our speed but also looks hilarious. If you enjoy poison and off-meta builds, you're going to love this one!
Requirements for this build
- Bands of Ichorous Rose
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.
Season Theme
The Season 9 theme is the Sins of the Horadrim. This season allows you to craft unique Horadric Spells using three different components: a Catalyst, an Infusion, and three Arcana. You earn Catalysts and Infusions through the Seasonal Questline, and Arcana can be found while exploring Nightmare Dungeons. You choose a Skill as the trigger for your Horadric Spell. Once in Torment I or higher, Horadric Jewels can be crafted, which replace the Gems in your Jewelry, adding additional power to your build.
Leveling Horadric Spell
Catalyst
You use Astral Pillar as it pulls enemies in by applying Taunt, which also counts as an additional crowd control effect for Creeping Death.
Infusion
You use Nebulous Extract as the Infusion to reduce incoming damage.
Arcana
- Bloody Charm allows you to execute non-elite enemies. This speeds up your ability to clear most content in the game.
- Fractured Core removes those pesky Damage Resistance Auras from monsters.
- Tendrilous Bundle applies yet another crowd control effect (Immobilize) to increase your damage gained from Creeping Death.
Optional Arcana
- Sapping Crux - Makes you have higher Vulnerable uptime if you don't have the Lucky Hit: Chance to Make Enemies Vulnerable affix on your ring just yet.
Best-in-Slot Horadric Jewels
- Idol From Below - Offers a terrific stat line and periodically spawns Elites for additional Pit progression.
- Scornful Light - A glass cannon choice that provides a big elemental damage multiplier at the cost of you taking increased damage.
- Myriad Stone - Increases your Attack Speed by 30%. A no-brainer for many builds.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Penetrating Shot serves the simple purpose of activating Inner Sight. It also gives us 10% Critical Strike Chance through Improved Penetrating Shot and triggers Exposure to help reduce our Poison Trap cooldown during the 4 second downtime of Inner Sight.
- Poison Trap - We deal all of our damage by casting this skill as much as possible.
- Death Trap is our ultimate skill that pulls in our enemies for us, and Prime Death Trap increases all of our trap damage by 20%. Its cooldown is reduced very quickly with Exposure.
- Caltrops adds a powerful damage buff and is a great critical strike chance against our enemies.
- Smoke Grenade - Easy 25% damage increase on enemies we hit with it. It also prevents Elites from hitting us for a few seconds.
- Dash is a great mobility tool to avoid dangerous attacks and move fast between packs of monsters.
Skill Rotation
- Use Dash to position yourself in range of your enemies.
- Drop Death Trap to pull in all monsters and activate No Witnesses and Vehement Brawler's.
- Cast Smoke Grenade and Caltrops every 5 seconds (on Elites and Bosses) to increase your damage to them.
- Cast Penetrating Shot once or twice to activate Inner Sight if it's not already active. This also ensures that your Poison Trap uses your Ranged Weapon and thus deals more damage.
- Spam Poison Trap for the entire Inner Sight duration.
Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
Rogue Specialization
Inner Sight - This removes the Poison Trap cooldown, increases our critical strike chance and our damage because of the paragon node Leyrana's Instinct.
Remember, this choice is made possible because of Bands of Ichorous Rose.
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.
Poison Trap Rogue Endgame Paragon
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Bane
- Fluidity
- Tracker
- Snare
- Ambush
To Level 46
- Fluidity
- Tracker
- Snare
- Ambush
- Bane
Learn more 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. The Poison Trap Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Ahu + Qax - Massively increases our damage, and the downside is negated since we don't really use our Primary Resource in this build.
- Cir + Ohm - Buffs us with extra damage from War Cry.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Thul - A great option for this build because it instantly freezes, applies vulnerable, and increases our damage by 15% thanks to Mystical Frost Nova.
- Kry - Use Kry to help pull monsters together!
- 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.
- Vex - We benefit a lot from ranks to all Skills, because of the damage increase for Poison Trap and increased tankiness from Dark Shroud (we generate Dark Shroud Shadows through the Umbrous aspect).
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 grants us 15% resistance to all elements (Raheir's Aegis), which can help us reach our cap in World Tier 4. We also gain extra damage from Inspiration.
Reinforcement: Varyana
We choose Bloodthirst for the occasional boost to our attack speed.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Poison Trap 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 Endgame Stat Thresholds
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 75%+
- 2000+ Dexterity
- 10,000+ Life
- 250% Poison Trap Duration
- 200% Ultimate Damage (No Witnesses)
- 230% Core Damage (Leyrana's Instinct)
- Sub 30 sec Death Trap Cooldown
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Poison 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 Poison 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.
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.
Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
Gear & Skills
- I highly recommend you do everything in your power to acquire the Contamination aspect to increase your damage output!
- 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, 75%+ 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.
- Use the seasonal power Sapping Crux to help apply Vulnerable.
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.
Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
Gear & Skills
- You can swap to the Ancestral Variant pretty quickly. There are no crazy breakpoints or specific gear requirements for this build.
- The uniques Godslayer Crown and Scoundrel's Leathers are NOT required, but are nice options and provide a smooth transition to the Mythic Variant.
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.
Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
Gear & Skills
- Using Ring of Starless Skies makes the build stronger BUT harder to play effectively, as we need to either use our core skill every ~3 seconds (or proc Qax) to maintain the 5 stacks from the ring.
- Heir of Perdition is a very powerful helm for this build, since Poison Trap becomes a Core Skill when we have Scoundrel's Leathers equipped.
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.
Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
Gear & Skills
- We swap out our ultimate Death Trap for Shadow Clone to maximise our damage. We use Kry instead of Ohm to make up for the lack of pull.
- Also remove Dash for the 12% damage buff from Shadow Imbuement.
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.
Scoundrel's Leathers makes Poison Trap a Core Skill and allows it to benefit from the additional Ranks.
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.
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
- 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.
Video Guide
Summary
The Poison Trap Rogue is a new, different, and fun way to play the Rogue in Diablo 4. We're pulling monsters together and bursting them down with poison explosions.
- First acquire Bands of Ichorous Rose + Contamination to make the most out of this build.
- [Important] Only cast Poison Trap when Inner Sight is active! (Current bug prevents us from using Poison Trap if it's on cooldown when Inner Sight procs)
- Pull in as many monsters as possible with Death Trap and make them pay by spamming Poison Trap.
- Make sure you maintain 5 Dark Shroud shadows at all times to help you survive (by using the Umbrous aspect).
Credits
Written by Mattias