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.
A new unique ring for S4, the Scoundrel's Kiss, 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.
Season Theme
Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
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 Step gives unstoppable and additional mobility.
- Caltrops for chill and eventually freeze. Also great for an overall damage buff the longer enemies are in the trap.
- Smoke Grenade gives us quite a bit of utility from more damage to disabling enemies so that they cannot attack.
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.
- Use Dash and Shadow Step to get around the battlefield for better positioning with Rapid Fire 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.
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 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
- Chip
- Pride
- Control
- Headhunter
Level 46
- Combat
- Chip
- Pride
- 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 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
- Bac + Qax Gives you big burst damage when triggered. The primary cause of most of your big numbers.
- Cem + 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:
- Ohm - Free damage and movement speed
- 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.
- Moni - A mini Bac. Decent for those who like to stutter step.
- 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. 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
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- 150%+ Movement Speed
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 jewelry 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.
- Rakanoth's Wake is critical in helping you cap your resistances in T2 and T3 content.
- 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 a big damage boost over a regular ring. It can be challenging to keep all 5 stacks in a 3 second window, but with the builds amazing attack speed, the ramp up is quick.
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.
- Use the Mythic variant for pit pushing. A more advanced breakdown for pushing over 100+ coming soon.
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's the difference between Heartseeker and Puncture?
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
Attack Speed Caps
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 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