Rain of Arrows Rogue Guide

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

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.

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.
• Voice of the Stars - This Gem combined with Purging Touch Witch Power provides massive damage buff for your Ultimate skill.
• Wicked Pact - Increases Purging Touch power and thus making Rain of Arrows even more powerful.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Moonlight Ward - Extra defense. Great pick for Hardcore.
• Raging Enigma - Allows your Doom Orb to deal extra damage.

Skill Rotation

The general idea is to cast Rain of Arrows whenever its off cooldown. With the changes and bug fixes to Precision stacks, we go with Heartseeker and Shard of Verathiel for an easier, less convoluted way of getting Rain of Arrows off cooldown. The tryhard version that squeezes a tad more output but with a considerably more complicated rotation is coming in the build progression tab later.

• Use Heartseeker to stack Precision stacks quickly. After a Rain of Arrows cast, it takes around 6 Heartseeker to bring Rain of Arrows off cooldown again to be able to cast, assuming greater affix roll on Rain of Arrows Cooldown on Word of Hakan. We have an insane amount of attack speed in this setup, so those 6 shots go by quick.
• Use Dark Shroud to keep up your defense and movement buffs. This resets often due to Preparation, so it's easy to have 5 shadows up at all times. You can also use Dark Shroud to activate Danse Macabre, which is a very important buff for tougher fights.
• Use Dash to get around the battlefield and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly.
• Use Smoke Grenade for more damage and to keep enemies, especially elites from attacking you. This skill also procs Danse Macabre. In order for the Danse Macabre to activate, you must cast Smoke Grenade or Dark Shroud right before casting Rain of Arrows. This is important for the tougher battles asDanse Macabre is a massive buff, and can be tricky to get use to in a rotation. Be careful to not cast any other skill between either Smoke Grenade or Dark Shroud before casting Rain of Arrows, otherwise Danse Macabre doesn't work and that paragon board in general is vital.
  Use Caltrops on tougher targets to add chill and freeze multipliers and to take them down quickly.

Rogue Specialization

Use the slider to see the progression steps. For the Rain of Arrows Rogue Guide, 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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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. Rain of Arrows Rogue focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Poc + Ohm activates warcry for 15% damage bonus and movement speed.
• Cir + Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage and overall quality of life.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Xal - For extra defense.
• Yax - Good amount of offering for just drinking a potion.
• Lith - We evade often.
• Bac. Decent as we're always moving.
• Yul - Build uses a lot of cooldown skills, so this is a decent activator.

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. Aegis is great for capping all resistances and inspiration is a nice buff every time he performs ground slam.

• Reinforcement: Aldkin

Field of Languish gives a nice 20% damage reduction when active.

To enable the Rain of Arrows 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

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Rain of Arrows 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.

This section is designed to guide your Rain of Arrows 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.

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.

I keep running out of energy! Help!

Rain of arrows takes a bit to get into due to the item requirements. Check and see if you have Innervation ranks on both rings. If you do, make sure you are hitting something, as you don't generate energy if you don't hit something. Other means of troubleshooting below:

• Having GA cooldown on Word of Hakan is practically necessary. Without it, you have to cast Heartseeker too often, thus the higher chance of you running out of energy before you can cast rain of arrows again. Quick fix is to run Primary Heartseeker instead of Fundamental Heartseeker for the extra hit/chance to generate energy from Innervation.

• Run the Lum rune with Poc rune. This will help with energy for now until you can get the stats necessary.

• Elixir of Resourcefulness II. If you're running the build now, you have enough mats to craft quite a bit of these. This will help with energy consumption, but will slow preparation proc in the process, the reason why we don't run Ring of Starless Skies in the setup. Use this as your last resort.

• Beastfall Boots. The energy trick still works with Coldclip for Heartseeker.

Why are we no longer using Flurry? Why Shard of Verathiel What happened?

Flurry no longer stacks Precision when it would crit. That was part of the bug and the main reason why Flurry worked. Keeping Flurry now and doing 1:1 now means you'll get Precision proc every 4th Rain of Arrows (Rain of Arrows itself grants 1 stack), which is horrible, and we ruin the new 50% multi on Ammy being in close range.

Other solutions come with their own set of problems. You can do away with the basic attack and go with lets say Barrage, but Barrage can consume the Precision stacks, so keeping track of your stacks in the middle of a battle when it's already hard to see it is not feasible for a guide. You also run into a resource issue after casting Rain of Arrows with Beastfall Boots, so the 2nd and 3rd Barrage shot takes a bit longer to happen, making Heartseeker with shard a more effective option despite losing the sword slot (we gain the boots slot back, no need for Beastfall Boots)

Then there's the ultra try hard way (coming soon in progression tab) in which we keep both Barrage and Heartseeker. Use Barrage only after a Rain of Arrows cast to trip Beastfall Boots, then shoot 2 heartseekers, then a Smoke Grenade for Danse Macabre , then Rain of Arrows. This way, we keep the sword slot and no accidental Precision procs on Barrage, but this rotation is very complicated and is prone to errors just trying to remember the order. While this is the most optimal way, it's only slightly better than Heartseeker with Shard of Verathiel and requires a lot more work. This is definitely not something I could recommend as the main version of the guide.

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, 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

Imbuement Potency

• The "increased potency" effect of Prime Rain of Arrows and on the amulet effectively raises all numerical values of any imbuement applied.
  • Poison Imbuement ticks for more damage.
  • Shadow Imbuement explodes for more damage.
  • Cold Imbuement chills for more.

Precision Key Passive and Trick Attacks Scaling

Old Formula - New additions!
([1+ Crit Damage Additive] x [1.5 x Trick Attacks x (Crit Damage Legendary Glyph^Total)] - 1) x 0.15 + 0.5

Double Dipping
Precision continues its old double-dipping issues with the new Legendary Glyphs and Trick Attacks. These affect the precision multiplier and the final product, making any precision build multitudes better than it should be.

The Rain of Arrows 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. It is one of the most fun builds and playstyles in the game. I hope you enjoy a great build.

• Stack Precision with Heartseeker.
• Cast Smoke Grenade and Caltrops in rotation on elite packs to annihilate them.
• Use Rain of Arrows whenever it's off cooldown when you arrive to a pack of enemies.

Written by DiEoxidE