Rapid Fire Rogue Endgame Build Guide
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.
The Scoundrel's Kiss ring alters this skill a bit, giving it some much needed area of effect explosion on impact based on where your mouse cursor is set. Rapid Fire truly becomes an all-rounder with the new unique ring.
This setup is about optimizing your damage output at a safe distance so we take Combo Point Passive to buff the arrows output and fire additional arrows each cast.
If playing like a ranged bomber sounds good to you, then this is definitely the build you should play! Let's jump in and see what Rapid Fire Rogue is all about!
Requirements for this build
- Repeating
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
Avarice's Explosive Ore - Easy to gain excess resource. Great damage relative to the other powers and synergies with the build's rotation. Good AoE as well.
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.
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Having crowd control duration naturally on Cowl of the Nameless allows us to max this multiplier easily without investment.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - We have high uptime on vulnerable, so this is pretty decent as a main boss power.
- 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
- Heartseeker is our Basic Skill of choice for building combo points and Precision stacks quickly and providing various buffs.
- Rapid Fire is your main ability. This Core Skill a stream of arrows in a straight line.
- Dash gives you incredible mobility to fly across the battlefield and an easy way to get out of tough situations.
- Shadow Clone Actually does damage now. No, seriously, it does. I'm not kidding. Use it.
- Caltrops for chill and eventually freeze. Also great for an overall damage buff the longer enemies are in the trap.
- Cold Imbuement Buffs your Rapid Fire with more damage by chilling and freezing, as well as a chance to make enemies Vulnerable.
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 and paragon.
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 Rapid Fire always.
- Always use Cold Imbuement on your Rapid Fire 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 Rapid Fire, this means more damage and an additional arrow per point stacked. You should always try and build 3 stacks before casting your Rapid Fire for maximum output.
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
- Combat
- Devious
- Canny
- Control
- Headhunter
Level 46
- Combat
- Devious
- Canny
- Control
- Headhunter
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 in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. Rapid Fire Rogue focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Cir + Zec Helps reduce Shadow Clone cooldown to provide more uptime.
- Igni + Ohm Gives us warcry skill, which provides 15% movement speed and damage.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage, damage reduction (Dark Shroud) and overall quality of life.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Yax - Good amount of offering for just drinking a potion.
- Lith - If you don't mind not evading after every Rapid Fire cast, this is a good choice.
- Yul - Build uses a lot of cooldown skills, so this is a decent activator.
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 Rapid Fire 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
- 15+ total Rapid Fire 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
- 25%+ Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Rapid Fire 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 Rapid Fire 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.
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.
- Repeating is a must have aspect. Since it is not a codex power, some luck is required as a drop. It is very difficult to farm with this build without this aspect.
- 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.
- Acquiring Scoundrel's Kiss amplifies your AoE and gives additional chances to proc more arrows. This is necessary to progress your build.
- 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.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- No changes necessary from the Mythic variant.
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.
Gear & Skills
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because your damage done goes way down and they can freely retaliate.
- In high tier boss fights, beware that many of your conditional damage and damage reduction modifiers cannot activate outside of stagger phases. This means they generally deal more damage against you than regular monsters and you have to prioritize dodging the attacks from shadow bosses while you can barely scratch them outside of stagger bursts.
- This is not a build you would consider pushing pit seriously with. Use the Mythic variant for pit pushing.
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.
Heartseeker feels great with being able to use Fundamental passive and allows you to play a bit further out, like a ranger. Puncture feels great to play up close and will have a little quicker rotations due to quicker frame break points, thus more output over time. Choosing which to use and what style is up to you, but it is easier to manage the lob effect of Rapid Fire when playing up close, which can feel better when using a controller.
The build naturally includes some strong defensive choices on skill tree, paragon and through legendary aspects. Outside of that, good item rolls are a primary factor in increasing your survivability, in particular your chest and pants armor pieces. Make sure to focus on these and stack stats like damage reduction, maximum life and armor as much as possible. To go even further, you can also roll defensive stats on your amulet. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.
Your main source of damage is your ranged weapon, in particular its item power that directly scales its damage per second. This is the base for all further damage calculations, so make sure to focus on finding a high level weapon. In addition, you want to stack offensive stats like Critical Strike Chance, Vulnerable Damage, Core Skill Ranks and others and level up your Glyphs to unlock even more power through the Paragon system. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.
Since you can't fire at a specific target when they are hidden behind others, the only real counterplay you have is to dive in with Dash or Shadow Step and single them out in melee range before dealing with remaining enemies. Check out the gameplay section above for more details.
Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, there are three ways to gain shrouds: Enshrouding Aspect, Mot rune, and Umbrous Aspect. You don't even have to invest any points into Dark Shroud on the skill tree, but you can if you want to profit from a higher damage reduction value or its enhancement and upgrade options.
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.
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
- 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.
Video Guide
Coming soon...
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 Heartseeker, then finish with Rapid Fire.
- Keep ranged while applying all buffs and debuffs for maximum burst damage and safety.
- Use Agility Skills cleverly to gain advantages in combat, rather it's positioning for keeping distant.
Credits
Written by DiEoxidE
Reviewed by wudijo