Shadow Step Rogue Build 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

• Vengeful Spirit Servant - We use this before we get Piranhado, as it increases our survivability.
• Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed. Unfortunately, it's ineffective against Bosses.

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

• Voice of the Stars - This Gem enables us to use multiple powerful synergies from our Witchcraft Powers by granting Shadow Clone all applicable tags.
• Toadling's Wish - Has synergy with Grow and Voice of the Stars, significantly improving our Shadow Clone.
• Elder Sigil - This significantly increases our Shadow Step damage.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Hungering Void - Yet another way to allow you to pull mobs together, but you pay a high opportunity cost to equip it.

Skill Rotation

• Always try to keep your Shadow Step imbued with Cold Imbuement.
• Use Caltrops on tough elites and bosses.
• Use Shadow Step to Cleave down mobs.
  • This hit will reset your Shadow Step CD through the Disciplined Shadow Step upgrade with enough CDR.
  • With Assassin's Stride all of your Shadow Steps will be imbued with Shadow Imbuement. This also procs Uncanny Treachery granting you Stealth after every cast.
• Dark Shroud provides more damage reduction and movement speed.
• Dash should be used to traverse the map faster when there are no enemies around to Shadow Step to.
• You always want to use Shadow Clone as soon as it is ready to reset all of your other cooldowns and to activate many of it's damage bonuses like No Witnesses. The Clone itself also significantly contributes to your damage output.

Rogue Specialization

In the Paragon we pick up important damage multipliers and use Glyphs that benefit our Vulnerable Damage for Victimize. A lot of Rogue's power relies on enemies being Crowd-Controlled so key items like Fists of Fate are important to apply them.

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Shadow Step Rogue focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Neo + Vex - Grants you additional Ranks on all of your skills. This lets them deal more damage and is also useful to reduce the base cooldown of Shadow Clone.
• Yul+ Qax - Gives us more damage and allows us to spend energy to reset our Cooldowns through Preparation.

Alternative Choices

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

• Lac - Invokes Challenging Shout for more defense.
• Kry - To group up enemies.
• 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.

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: Subo

He reveals all enemies and materials on the minimap, allowing you to farm Iron Chunks and Bundled Herbs easily. The highlighting is very useful to spot out Elites in Dungeons, as you will recognize the pattern for elites quickly after getting used to it.

You gain a multiplicative increase to your Lucky Hit Chance whenever Subo attacks an enemy through his Ambusher passive.

With how frequently we want to drink Potions for Unstable Elixirs, Share a Drink helps us to generate more.

Reinforcement: Varyana

We choose Bloodthirst for more attack speed.

To enable the Shadow Step 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 Shadow Step 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.

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 can I do to improve survivability?

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.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

As a Rogue you do not have many sources of Unstoppable but a good way to break out of crowd controls is with Shadow Step. Shadow Clone also makes you Unstoppable for 5 seconds.

When I can transition to this build?

Shadow Step Rogue is a Specialized Build that requires a lot of gear to properly shine and will feel a bit clunky without it. You need plenty of Cooldown Reduction and Shadow Step Cooldown Reduction. If you do not have Harlequin Crest, reaching the required Cooldown Reduction breakpoints. The breakpoint is Shadow Step having less than 3.6s cooldown at around 60% combined CDR.

What is the Cooldown Reduction Breakpoint and how do I reach it?

Harlequin Crest with 3 Masterworks (MW) on Cooldown Reduction (CDR) provides you with 44% CDR. Additionally, having Mobility CDR on Boots with 11.6% and Shadow Step CDR on a Ring with 19.5% (2 MWs) will put you at a combined 60% CDR consisting of:

9 * (1-0.44) * (1-0.116) * (1-0.195) = 3.58 = 3.58s Shadow Step Cooldown

Combined with Disciplined Shadow Step, you gain a Shadow Step Charge every 0.58s. While it may sound like a decent window, this combined 60% is the absolute minimum amount of CDR you should have. The more CDR you have, the smoother the build will feel. You can use CDR on the Amulet to make reaching the breakpoint easier if you do not have a triple passive one.

For more information on how to exactly calculate your CDR, check out the Cooldown Reduction Mechanics sections further below.

Mechanics

For more even more in-depth information about specific Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, check out the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

Dark Shroud 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

Cooldown Reduction Scaling

• You need exactly 66.66% Cooldown Reduction to reduce Shadow Step's Cooldown to 3 seconds.
• You can combine Cooldown Reduction affixes and Shadow Step & Mobility Cooldown Reduction tempers.
• Cooldown Reduction is inversely multiplicative with each other.
  • Example: You have two Cooldown Reduction rolls, each being 20.2%.
  • Your actual Cooldown Reduction is not 40.4% now, but 36.3% instead.
  • The formula for this is as follows:
    • 0.363 = 1 - (1 - 0.202) * (1 - 0.202)

Shadow Step Mechanics

• With Ravager's you gain an additional charge for Shadow Step.
• Ravager's also resets your Shadow Step Cooldown when you kill an enemy with Shadow Step.
• Disciplined Shadow Step reduces your Shadow Step Cooldown by 3 seconds. This is massively useful to instantly reset your Shadow Step Cooldown given enough Cooldown Reduction (66%+).

Smoke Grenade Mechanics

• Countering Smoke Grenade is required to reset the cooldown quickly. With sufficient Cooldown Reduction and Smoke Grenade Cooldown Reduction, you can reset the cooldown with 1 hit on a vulnerable enemy affected by it.
• Daze has different effects, depending on the target:
  • Against monsters, it's functionally similar to Stun. Monsters won't attack, move or use their spells.
  • Against players, it disables their abilities but they can still move around freely.
  • Against bosses, it raises the stagger bar.
• The damage bonus is tied to the Daze effect. If the crowd control is removed through Unstoppable, so is the damage buff.

Dodge Mechanics

• You can dodge most things in the game excluding Damage over time effects and certain boss-mechanics.
• Utilizing the high natural dodge chance of this build allows to keep high stacks of Dark Shroud.
• Dodge Chance affixes are not additive, but inversely multiplicative instead.
• Dodge Chance aspects, such as Assimilation are additive.
• Agile is treated like an affix, so inversely multiplicative.
• Dodge Chance Calculation:
  • [Dodge % from Dexterity] + [100 * (1 - (1 - Dodge% A) * (1 - Dodge% B) * ... * (1 - Dodge% N))] + [Additive Dodge% A] + [Additive Dodge% B] + ... + [Additive Dodge% N]
  • Example: 16.6% Dodge Chance from Dexterity, 15% Dodge Chance Affix, 15% Dodge Chance Affix
  • 16.6 + (100 * (1 - (1 - 0.15) * (1 - 0.15)) = 44.35%
  • This would grant you 44.35% Dodge Chance, instead of 16.6+15+15 = 46.6 if it was additive.

Stagger Mechanics

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

Coming soon.

Written by M1PY