Shadow Step Rogue Build Guide
Welcome to the Shadow Step Rogue Endgame Guide! This build features an unorthodox Rogue archetype and a unique playstyle. The purpose of this build is to zoom through all content in the game! Therefore, we use Shadow Step as our main damage ability, turbocharged Momentum and Stolen Vigor! This relies stacking Cooldown Reduction to instantly jump from enemy to enemy, boosted by conditional multipliers on each hit. The Gear, Skills, Paragon and Gameplay setup are unique to this build and require a strong understanding of the class to pilot properly!
Requirements for this Build:
- This build requires very specific gear and affix rolls. Missing the recommendation even a bit can lead to a very unpleasant experience with the build.
- You need at least 60%+ Total Cooldown Reduction for Shadow Step for the build to feel fluid and around 70%+ to unleash its full potential.
- You also need at least 10+ Ranks in Shadow Step.
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.
Witchcraft Powers
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
- Purging Touch - Shadow Clone receives the Eldritch Tag from Voice of the Stars and therefore this Power is a direct damage boost for it.
- Hex of Shattering - This Power reduces the damage we take from enemies and activates Piranhado.
- Grow - Shadow Clone heavily benefits from this and Toadling's Wish multiplies it's potency even more.
- Aura of Siphoning - You must equip one of the three available Witchcraft Auras to enable Voice of the Stars. This Aura is preferred for its Healing effect and Poison damage.
- Aura Specialization - As of Patch 2.1.3, this aura is a multiplicative damage increase to your Critical Strike Damage, despite stating that it is additive.
- Piranhado - To pull mobs together efficiently.
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.
Occult Gems
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.
- Soul Harvest - Before you have access to Aura Specialization, this is a decent substitute.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
Essentials
Zoom through the map with Shadow Step. Shadow Step is your main damage skill.
Prioritize Elite enemies with your Shadow Steps to take them down before they can act.
Simply spamming Shadow Step can already deal with most open world situations easily, but in order to be the most effective, there are many details to master.
Your general Gameplay rotation relies on strategically hitting targets through the Cleave Temper and managing your Cooldowns properly.
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
Preparation
Preparation reduces your Ultimate Cooldown by 5 seconds for every 75 Energy spent.
We spend Energy through the Qax rune.
This allows us to reduce the Cooldown of our Ultimate for better uptime and damage reduction.
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.
Shadow Step Rogue Endgame Paragon
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
To Level 15
- Versatility
- Fluidity
- Headhunter
- Devious
- Control
To Level 46
- Versatility
- Fluidity
- Headhunter
- Devious
- Control
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 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.
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: 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.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
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:
- Less than 3.5 seconds Shadow Step Cooldown
- 25%+ Shadow Step Cooldown Reduction
- 50%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 40%+ Attack Speed
- 10+ total Ranks of Shadow Step
- 400%+ Damage per Dark Shroud Shadow
- 400%+ Ultimate Skill Damage
- Armor Capped 1000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 5,000+ Life
- 30%+ Dodge Chance
- 20%+ Chance to Freeze/Stun/Immobilize
- 150%+ Movement Speed
- 40%+ Shadow Clone Cooldown Reduction
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.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
- 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)
- 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%+).
- 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.
- 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 = 46.6if it was additive.
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.
Video Guide
Coming soon.
Credits
Written by M1PY