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Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame Build Guide

Season 6 - Season of HatredEndgame

Last Updated:December 7, 2024|Changelog|FAQ

Welcome to the Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame guide! This is a great speedfarming build clearing content faster than most others in the game but also coming with a high skill ceiling. If you are looking for a fun & agile Rogue build that flies around the battlefield, you've come to the right place!

Twisting Blades is a two-step melee attack: First, you attack a single enemy for a moderate amount of damage, then the blades return to you from that enemy's position after a short delay. These returning blades are the core of the build and what you need to play around to succeed. On their path, they hit all enemies for high damage and combined with various mobility skills like Evade, Dash and Shadow Step you can annihilate entire packs at once during their flight. Finally, these returning blades rotate around you with Bladedancer's Aspect, transforming you a walking dervish as you fly across the map.

There are different variations the Twisting Blades Rogue, combining this Core Skill with varying Imbuements and other effects (see more in the Progression/Variants sections below). The strongest version plays around permanent Poison Imbuement applications to produce large DoT ticks. All in all, Twisting Blades is a very versatile skill that can do everything reasonably well, making this build a great allrounder choice. Even though it may be difficult for you to play the build well at the beginning, do not despair! With some practice and our guide, you too are able to succeed with the Twisting Blades Rogue in Diablo 4. Let's get started!

Requirements for this Build:

The Alchemical Admixture Key Passive requires three different non-physical damage types. We get Poison from Poison Imbuement, Shadow from Death Trap and another type from the Coldclip Aspect. If you do not have enough CDR to sustain Death Trap or are missing Coldclip, you need an Elemental Surge Temper. This can be Cold, Fire or Lightning as a temper on your Dagger.

Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame Setup

View all variants

This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Twisting Blades Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Rogue playstyle, check out all of our Rogue Guides

Season Theme

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Twisting Blades Rogue

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

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Dance of Knives Rogue

Essentials

  • You pick up points in Puncture as your Basic Skill. It attacks quickly, replenishing your Energy and applying Vulnerable. Later on, it will be used to generate Combo Points for Twisting Blades.
  • Twisting Blades is our main damage skill.

Imbuements

  • Poison Imbuement is our main Imbuement. Activating it adds an extra DoT to your next Twisting Blades casts. Therefore, we invest heavily into it and eventually deal almost all of our damage through its Poison applications.
    • While at first we cannot guarantee permanent uptime, later we get extra Imbuement charges from Tempering mods on Rings and include Bursting Venoms to reset its cooldown.
  • Dash and Shadow Step are used to move faster, engage packs or get out of crowd controls.

Ultimate and Key Passive

  • Death Trap is used to activate No Witnesses and group up enemies.
  • It also acts as one of the activators for the Alchemical Admixture Key Passive. This requires three different non-physical damage types. We get Poison from Poison Imbuement, Shadow from Death Trap and another type from the Coldclip Aspect. If you do not have enough CDR to sustain Death Trap or are missing Coldclip, you need an Elemental Surge Temper. This can be Cold, Fire or Lightning as a temper on your Dagger.
Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame Skill Tree

Skill Rotation

Fundamentals
  • Use Death Trap on Cooldown to pull enemies together.
    • This is your Shadow activator for Alchemical Admixture.
  • Build Combo Points with Puncture for Twisting Blades.
    • You will likely score a few Lucky Hits while attacking, activating another part for Alchemical Admixture through your Coldclip Aspect.
  • Imbue your Twisting Blades with Poison Imbuement
    • This is your Poison activator for Alchemical Admixture.
  • Use Dash for Mobility and repositioning.
  • Use Shadow Stepto get out of crowd control and become Unstoppable.

Rogue Specializations

The Rogue's Class Specialization allows you to choose one out of three powerful passive effects to boost your build. Our Specialization of choice for this build is Combo Points.

Combo Points - Use Basic Skills to boost your subsequent Core Skills.

Use your Basic Skills to boost the subsequent Core Skill for more damage and other effects. Combo Points are displayed above your XP bar near the bottom of the screen.

Combo Points

Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Specialization Guide.

Paragon & Glyphs

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Dance of Knives Rogue
!
Important

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.

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.

← Use the slider for progression steps →
Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame Paragon
Tip

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

  1. Bane
  2. Efficacy
  3. Control
  4. Tracker
  5. Versatility

To Level 46

  1. Bane
  2. Efficacy
  3. Control
  4. Tracker
  5. Versatility

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

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Twisting Blades Rogue

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 Twisting Blades Rogue focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot
  • Tam + Ohm - Invokes War Cry. With our frequent use of Twisting Blades, we keep this up a lot.
  • Poc+ Lac - Invokes Challenging Shout. We spend a lot of resource, so this is active often and boosts our defenses.
Alternative Choices

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

  • Cem - We evade frequently so that is a good alternative to Noc.
  • Yax - We drink a potion frequently to keep Unstable Elixirs up, so this rune can also be beneficial.
  • Kry - To group up enemies before having access to Shroud of Khanduras.
  • 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.
  • Mot - You can use this before you have access to Umbrous in addition to taking Dark Shroud on your skill bar.

Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.

Mercenaries

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Twisting Blades Rogue

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. This greatly benefits your Arrow Storms procs.

Scorched Earth improves your Damage over Time massively.

Reinforcement: Raheir

We choose Bastion for extra defense when fighting.

Twisting Blades Rogue Mercenaries

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

Stat Priorities & Item Progression

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Twisting Blades Rogue

To enable the Twisting Blades 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.

  • 20%+ Lucky Hit Chance
  • 30%+ Critical Strike Chance
  • 2500+ Dexterity
  • 400%+ Damage per Dark Shroud Shadow
  • 4+ Extra Poison Imbue Charges
  • 30%+ Attack Speed
  • 30%+ Cutthroat Attack Speed
  • Armor Capped 1,000
  • Resistance Capped 70%+
  • 6,000+ Life
  • 160%+ Movement Speed
  • 80%+ Chance for Twisting Blades to Hit Twice
  • 40%+ Cooldown Reduction
  • 300%+ Ultimate Damage
Starter
Ancestral
Mythic

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Twisting Blades 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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic

Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.

Build Variants

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Twisting Blades Rogue

This section is designed to guide your Twisting Blades 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.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic

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

Starter Dance of Knives Rogue Gear
Starter Dance of Knives Rogue Skills
  • Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% to all Resistances and it is recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70%+ Resistances) at all times. As you unlock higher item 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.
  • Umbrous is an important survivability tool for many Rogue builds. As long as you have not found it, use Mot and/or Dark Shroud on your skill bar for extra defense.

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

Ancestral Dance of Knives Rogue Gear
Ancestral Dance of Knives Rogue 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.

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

Mythic Twisting Blades Rogue Gear
Mythic Twisting Blades Rogue Skills

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 about the Twisting Blades Rogue Build.

What can I do to improve survivability?

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

What can I do for better Energy recovery?

Why are we using Royal Diamonds?

How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?

Mechanics

For more Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, visit the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

Dark Shroud Scaling

Alchemical Admixture Mechanics

Attack Speed Caps

Twisting Blades

Poison Imbuement

Smoke Grenade

Stagger

Video Guide

Updated S6 Video Guide Coming soon by M1PY on YouTube

Summary

The Twisting Blades Rogue is a super fun and mobile assassin that speedfarms content better than almost anything else and can pull its weight in higher end content thanks to Poison Imbuement. While quite difficult to learn, it's a build that feels very rewarding once you have mastered its gameplay and is an excellent choice to start a fresh season with.

  • Use Punctureto build Combo Points for Twisting Blades.
  • Throw down Death Trap to group up enemies and activate No Witnesses.
  • Focus on +Poison Imbuement Count and Damage per Dark Shroud Temper mods.
  • Activate Poison Imbuement whenever ready to apply heavy DoTs and melt enemies.
  • Alchemical Admixture requires you to use three different non-physical damage types. We get Poison from Poison Imbuement, Shadow from Death Trap and another type from the Coldclip Aspect. If you do not have enough CDR to sustain Death Trap or are missing Coldclip, you need an Elemental Surge Temper. This can be Cold, Fire or Lightning as a temper on your Dagger.
  • Use your crowd controls to deal more damage and stay alive with Dark Shroud triggered from Umbrous.

Credits

Written by M1PY
Formerly written by wudijo
Thanks to Avarilyn for in-depth testing on Rogue mechanics

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