Welcome to the Rapid Fire Rogue Guide. This build is a great all-rounder suitable for any situation, with variations available for high-end content where the skill's massive single target damage really gets to shine.
Rapid Fire is an attack skill that unleashes a hail of arrows in a straight line sequentially. This naturally produces high damage output against bosses but makes dealing with packs of enemies difficult.
In order to solve this problem, the build puts a strong focus on Shadow Imbuement to wipe out surrounding enemies.
This setup is about optimizing your damage output at a safe distance so we take Smoke Grenade for more damage and to disable enemy attacks, Cold Imbuement for insane multipliers and to crowd control, as well as Combo Point Passive to buff the arrows output and fire additional arrows each cast.
If you like to play like a ranger, this is the build for you. Let's jump in and see what Rapid Fire Rogue is all about!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50+ Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Barrage Leveling Guide or Penetrating Shot Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Rogue playstyle, check out all of our Rogue Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.
Recommended Stones
- Tempest - To apply buffs and debuffs efficiently with its fast tick rates.
- Frigid Support - Applies chill, giving us easier access to freeze and other crowd control buffs.
- Breaking Support - Helps to keep up Vulnerable and remove Barrier from enemies in Nightmare Dungeons or monsters like Knights and the Butcher.
- Arcing Support - Allows Tempest to hit multiple targets for widespread buff and debuffs.
- Flash of Adrenaline - A free damage buff to boost our character further.
- Duration Support - To improve the uptime of the buff.
- Tactical Support - To improve the uptime of the buff.
- Safeguard Support - Free damage reduction.
Alternative Stones
Many other options are possible to support this build, including different Governing Stones to apply the effects. Feel free to experiment!
Governing Stones
- Autodefense - Great to increase survivability.
- Reconstruct - To recover health more reliably.
- Lightning Bolt - Decent damage with built in bounce attack
- Firefly - Nice sustain damage over the course of an encounter.
Tuning Stones
- Slowing Support - Great to help stay ranged.
- Poison Support - Can be combined with Debilitating Toxins for additional defense.
- Initiative Support - Helps keep your construct close to when it's off wondering and not doing anything.
- Resource Support - Helps to keep the setup smooth to play.
If you are lucky enough to get either Evernight or Genesis from Uber Malphas, you want to swap Breaking Support for Evernight and Safeguard Support for Genesis on your Construct for their powerful effects.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Forceful Arrow is our Basic Skill of choice for knockback, vulnerable proc and overall safety.
- Rapid Fire is your main ability. This Core Skill a stream of arrows in a straight line. With the Aspect Repeating, you gain additional ricochet opportunities which helps to clean up leftover monsters.
- Dash gives you incredible mobility to fly across the battlefield and an easy way to get out of tough situations.
- Smoke Grenade makes fighting tough engagements, especially versus elites, a bit easier.
- Cold Imbuement is a buff you use for Rapid Fire. It converts your damage to Cold and Chills the monsters. With enough hits, you can Freeze the monsters, increasing your damage substantially combined with Frigid Finesse while also increasing your survivability!
- Shadow Imbuement fills the last slot. Similar to Cold Imbuement it buffs Rapid Fire by converting it to Shadow damage. Both can't be used simultaneously. Its primary use is to blow up trash packs efficiently and improving Energy restoration.
Passives
- Precision is the Key Passive of choice, granting you a guaranteed critical strike upon consuming max precision stacks that gets exponentially stronger the more critical strike damage you have on your gear.
Alternatives
While the above is designed for optimal performance, there is wiggle room in the skill selection while keeping the core build intact. Smoke Grenade is not everyone's cup of tea and can be quite difficult to use. You can replace this for Shadow Step for more movement options or a Trap such as Caltrops or Poison Trap for more of a lure playstyle. Concealment with the new aspect can be used in place of Smoke Grenade or Dash.
heartseeker is also a great basic attack to use as it has a homing effect making it very easy to use and build combo points. Puncture is and will always be a strong option as well if you prefer to play a bit closer.
Gameplay
You play like a long-range Sniper. The general idea is to use whatever is at your disposal to keep distance while keeping up all of your buffs from various skills and passives. Forceful Arrow does a great job at stacking combo points easily from long distance and is the foundation of which this playstyle is built off of.
- Use Smoke Grenade to apply Daze, which makes enemies easier to deal with and elites unable to cast affixes. Dazed enemies also take 20% more multiplicative damage, which is a nice bump of damage to quickly dispatch tough situations.
- Forceful Arrow isn't used for DPS, but for its utility.
- Build 3 Combo Points with [critical strike chance, critical strike damage and attack speed, activate Shadow Imbuement, then fire Rapid Fire. Always activate Shadow Imbuement first when approaching a large pack of enemies, as it's really good at taking out big packs with AoE explosion damage. This also keeps your Energy full with Consuming Shadows early endgame and synergizes well with Edgemaster’s Aspect.
- Use Dash to get around the battlefield for better positioning with Rapid Fire and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly.
- For tougher enemies, especially those that may be above your character level, you activate Cold Imbuement when Shadow Imbuement is on cooldown to finish them off. For single target situations like bosses, swap the order and use Cold Imbuement first for Stagger effect. Always use an Imbuement when you can. Beware that Dash can be Imbued, so avoid wasting charges on it.
Rogue Specialization - Combo Points
Rogues choose one out of three special passives that enhance their playstyle. Rapid Fire can be played with any of the Specializations Though Combo Points fits the style of play we're going for here while proving the most safety and burst damage output. In this guide, we're going to focus on Combo Points.
Building up Combo Points with your Basic Skill gives you 3 additional arrows that also hit harder. This also works well with Cold Imbuement as more arrows per shot leads to more ricochets, thus more Freeze and more damage.
Later on you unlock further synergies that make this Combo Point playstyle even more powerful with Condemnation and Aspect of the Expectant. Rapid Aspect and attack speed rolls work well in building Combo Points quicker for faster burst, however it can make it difficult to manage your Energy.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Specialization Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
As with all Combo Point builds, resource management is rather easy as you're naturally regenerating Energy when you're not using Rapid Fire. Consuming Shadows, Combat and Energy cost reduction on gear all aid in resource management to where you don't have to think about it.
As for cooldown, you only have to keep up with Shadow Imbuement and Cold Imbuement. With cooldown reduction on helm, pants (imbuement cooldown) and neck, you can comfortably rotate between these 2 imbuements without much trouble. Due to the heavy investments in imbue stats, it is critical that you're always using an Imbue before firing Rapid Fire, otherwise your damage falls off hard.
Mobility
Feel free to use Dash whenever necessary to go faster. Usually it's best to use the first after a pack to reach the next one. When you see elites or mob types that have lots of crowd controls, it's best to keep one charge of Dash to reposition safely.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last two steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Exploit
- Combat
- Control
- Canny
- Ranger
Level 21
- Combat
- Control
- Ranger
- Canny
- Exploit
Alternative Glyphs
After finishing your main setup, you can also level up the following that can be useful:
- Infusion (for boss one shot variant)
- Devious
- Efficacy
There are a total of 225 Paragon Points. Starting with level 50 you gain 4 Paragon Points per level, including 20 from Renown, and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Gear & Skill Progression
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Rapid Aspect in Buried Halls (Dry Stepps)
- Eluding Aspect in Caldera (Fractured Peaks)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Edgemaster’s in Oldstones (Scosglen)
- Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
- Cheat's in Luban's Rest (Scosglen)
- Aspect of the Expectant in Underroot (Scosglen)
- Corruption in Renegade's Retreat (Kehjistan)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
- Aspect of Elements
- Aspect of Repeating
- Umbrous Aspect
- hectic
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
- Condemnation
- Skyhunter
- Beastfall Boots (For Boss one shot variant)
- Godslayer Crown (For Boss one shot variant)
- Banished Lord's Talisman (For Boss one shot variant)
- Tibault's Will (For Boss one shot variant)
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest
- Ring of Starless Skies
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Endgame
Speed Farm
Uniques
One Shot
Once you have completed the leveling process to 50, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup, you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- Unlock, Edgemaster’s Aspect, Rapid Aspect and Aspect of the Expectant in the Codex of Power.
- Continue using Dark Shroud on skill bar until you find Umbrous. Once acquired, use Smoke Grenade and drop Dark Shroud as shown in the original skills section of the guide.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects, allowing you to pilot a much stronger version of this build. Additional Legendary Aspects are used to fill slots that may be replaced with Unique items later on.
Gear
- Work on acquiring Umbrous Aspect as much as possible by gambling Chest or Pants with Obols. A good roll gives you nice uptime on Dark Shroud shadows which essentially gives you a free skill.
- Acquire Mangler's for boots. This is a great aspect for crowd control and helping you stay alive in battle.
- Acquire Hectic to greatly reduce our cooldowns and make our rotations feel much more fluid.
- Acquire Accelerating: Grants lots of extra Attack Speed for more damage output and lucky hit effects.
- Look for better rolls from Aspects that you may have used in the Codex.
- No skill changes
In this setup, you have access to all Unique items and Legendary Aspects. This allows you to pilot this build at its peak efficiency. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to implement them.
Gear
- Condemnation: This Dagger gives you extra damage that synergizes well with Combo Points. The 30% proc to generate 3 combo points is not important as you still have to stack 3 stacks of Aspect of the Expectant.
- Skyhunter: This bow gives you lots of critical strike damage, which synergizes well with Precision Key Passive. The reworked unique affix also provides a nice damage buff that also synergizes nicely with Precision
- No skill changes.
Speed Farming
Rogue naturally does well with speed farming early and endgame, so the normal build is technically the best speed farming setup. No changes here are necessary.
Skills
No changes are needed to skills.
Gauntlet is Diablo 4's brand new endgame competitive mode with leaderboards! This content is based around the difficulty of a Tier 70 Nightmare Dungeon. Success and climbing the leaderboards will be about decision making and understanding the Dungeon itself and less about how powerful your gear is. Things are subject to change as we learn more about the Gauntlet.
Gear
- This is a setup optimized for Gauntlet. Not much changes at all from the typical speed farming setup as Rogue is already an efficiently fast class. The biggest difference here is including shrine duration on Amulet and Boots and taking Shadow Step instead of Smoke Grenade for more movement.
- If you are not planning on min/maxing or try hard the content, but would rather casually get the rewards associated with the Gauntlet, ignore this setup and continue using the speed farming/endgame in the previous tab.
Gear with Ubers
- Since we don't need as much armor for the Gauntlet, we are able to be more free with unique choices here.
- Same as above, if you are not planning on min/maxing or try hard the content, but would rather casually get the rewards associated with the Gauntlet, ignore this setup and continue using the speed farming/endgame in the previous tab.
With the ability to target farm Uber Uniques from Duriel, many players may need to answer the question "How do I fit these items onto my build?". This setup makes use of the most valuable Uniques that are available for it in the game.
Note that this build does not require any uber uniques to be effective and only benefits slightly from wearing them. You can choose to ignore the Duriel farm and have a complete build that feels almost as powerful.
Gear
The Harlequin Crest "Shako" is an incredibly powerful addition to the build for maximizing our damage and added a ton of Damage Reduction.
Ring of Starless Skies is a powerful uber unique that's usually used for builds that spam a single skill, but can be used in this combo point setup. This is because there's a 3 second window to keep up the buff and combo point rotations can be tight due to utilizing a basic attack. If you find yourself dropping the buff often due to the short window, you should skip this uber unique all together for a regular ring with an aspect.
If you find a Doombringer you can wear it for additional toughness in place of Icy Alchemist. Unlike last season, Doombringer isn't a necessity due to being fully ranged and able to stay safe in most fights. In hardcore, definitely wear it if you found one, otherwise you'd have to gauge whether it's beneficial for you.
Here we talk about one shotting bosses with abnormal amounts of damage! While not particularly useful in other content, this is a great way to carry friends in 4 man Uber Duriel and Uber Malphas runs! It does require a good bit of changes to run the setup and the sequence can be tricky. Below is a variant that is user friendly with the least amount of changes/prep possible coming from the original Maxroll guide. Great thing is, no Uber Uniques are necessary or required!
Gear
- You want Godslayer Crown, Banished Lord's Talisman, Tibault's Will and Beastfall Boots uniques. Skyhunter is optional, though you should already have one at this point. Crossbow with the Elements works really well here too.
- Chest stats have to change due to the unique boots to cap your resist. We keep most stats the same, even if they're not relevant to the setup.
- We add Inner Calm for more damage.
Skills
- For skills, we're going to build around just Rapid Fire, as it's easier, requires less changes to the build to perform the one shot and is already part of the original build.
- We replace Forceful Arrow with Puncture.
- We pickup Shadow Clone to activate the Beastfall Boots
- Flurry is slotted mostly for convenience. It's only there as a cheap and fast way to spend Energy for the Banished Lord's Talisman as it shaves off a bit of time. You can drop this for a trap and the Ambush paragon legendary node if you prefer to one shot with a higher critical strike damage number.
Paragon
We try to keep the paragon changes as small as possible. We go with Infusion in place of Control. We pick up Tricks of the Trade legendary node.
Gameplay
Now comes the crucial part! It is important that you follow these steps in order to successfully pull off the one shot variant.
- Use Flurry (or Rapid Fire if you opt out of Flurry) to spend 300 Energy for the Banished Lord's Talisman effect.
- Stack Precision to 6 and Combo Points to 3.
- Do the first 2 steps before the Boss spawns.
- Use Shadow Clone to activate Beastfall Boots
- Use Shadow Imbuement
- Hit evade and then Dash through the Boss.
- Use Rapid Fire for instant Boss kill.
There are many different variants of the Boss one shot. Remember we're keeping it simple with the least changes and requirements.
Build Scaling, FAQ & Mechanics
The answer to many questions can be found in the following sections.
- Combo Points: With the Combo Point Specialization you can use Forceful Arrow up to 3 times to boost your next Rapid Fire. This is further enhanced by Condemnation and Aspect of the Expectant. You use the Rapid Aspect to build Combo Points faster and reduce downtime between your nukes. Building Combo Points allows you to keep your Energy high for the Edgemaster’s. Use and time Aspect of Elements for big burst damage, especially vs elites and bosses.
- Vulnerable: While not a major factor in this build, it's a good idea to have some sources of it as it is a multiplier. Exploit Glyph makes for easy procing for Vulnerable alongside Blended Shadow Imbuement.
- Crowd Controls: Cold Imbuement provides you with a way to Chill enemies, which opens up damage modifiers such as Damage vs Chilled, Damage vs Crowd Controlled and Damage vs Frozen.
- Critical Strike Damage: The key passive Precision scales well with Critical Strike Damage. Get as much of this stat on gear and paragon.
- Don't get hit: Snipe enemies from a distance and use Evade to stay out of danger.
- Defensive Legendaries: Aspect of Might and Cheat's Aspect are both great defensive aspects as you're always attacking and have access to a Crowd Control. Aspect of Disobedience is good too after you pick up a bit of attack speed. Umbrous Aspect is excellent as it gives you free Dark Shroud shadows just for attacking. The best defense however is not to get hit.
- Movement Speed: One of the most important stats you can get for defense. The faster you are, the easier it is to dodge and not get hit. Stack as much of this as you can with Haste, Subverting Dark Shroud, and movement speed stats on boots and amulet.
- Stack Defense on Chest and Pants: These 2 gear slots provide the most protection for your character, stats that are difficult to get elsewhere. If you feel squishy, it is probably because you're lacking defensive stats on these slots.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities & Gear Options
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
- Helm: Frostbitten
- Direct swap for Harlequin Crest if you find one.
- Cooldown Reduction
- Life on Kill
- Maximum Life
- Basic Attack Speed
- Dexterity
- Chest Armor: Umbrous
- Damage Reduction
- Any Resistance
- Total Armor %
- Damage Reduction From Distant Enemies
- Maximum Life
- Gloves: Rapid
- Ranks to Rapid Fire
- Attack Speed
- Dexterity
- Lucky Hit Chance
- All Stats
- Crit Damage with Imbued Skills
- Pants: Might
- Damage Reduction
- Armor
- Ranks to Dark Shroud
- Any Resistance
- Imbuement Skill Cooldown Reduction
- Maximum Life
- Boots: Hectic
- Any 3 Resistances
- Movement Speed
- Movement Speed on Elite Kill
- Dodge Chance
- Shrine Duration (For Gauntlet Only)
- Amulet: Repeating
- Use Elements if you don't have a Skyhunter
- 1. Ranks to Frigid Finesse
- 2. Cooldown Reduction
- 3. Movement Speed
- 4. Armor
- 5. Imbuement Skill Cooldown
- 6. Shrine Duration (For Gauntlet Only)
- Rings: Edgemaster’s & Expectant
- Critical Strike Damage
- Critical Strike Chance
- Maximum Life
- Critical Strike Damage with Imbued Skills
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Bow: Skyhunter
- Until you obtain Skyhunter, use regular bow with Repeating
- High DPS (Item Power)
- Critical Strike Damage
- Core Skill Damage
- All Stats
- Dexterity
- Critical Strike Damage with Imbued Skills
- Damage vs Distant Enemies
- Main Hand: Condemnation
- Otherwise Look For:Icy Alchemist's (Sword)
- Critical Strike Damage
- Core Skill Damage
- All Stats
- Dexterity
- Critical Strike Damage
- Critical Strike Damage with Imbued Skills
- Off-Hand: Elements or Accelerating if elements is on the amulet. (Sword)
- Critical Strike Damage
- Core Skill Damage
- All Stats
- Dexterity
- Critical Strike Damage
- Critical Strike Damage with Imbued Skills
This build benefits the most from the following consumables:
- Elixirs: Elixir of Cruelty, Iron Skin Elixir, Elixir of Fortitude, Heady Assault Elixir & Heady Precision Elixir
- Incenses: Song of the Mountain, Reddamine Buzz & Chorus of War
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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 feel squishy, how can I increase survivability?
My damage is too low, how can I improve it?
How to deal with Champions and Suppressor elites?
How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?
Mechanics
Dark Shroud Scaling
Video Guide
Summary
The Rapid Fire 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.
- Build 3 Combo Points with Forceful Arrow, then finish with Rapid Fire.
- Keep ranged while applying all buffs and debuffs for maximum burst damage and safety.
- Use Smoke Grenade to help deal with tough elites by disabling them and adding an additional multiplier.
- Use Cold Imbuement and Shadow Imbuement in tandem.
- Use Agility Skills cleverly to gain advantages in combat, rather it's positioning for keeping distant.
Hungry for more Guides?
Rogue Guides
General Guides
Credits
Written by DiEoxidE
Reviewed by wudijo