Twisting Blades Rogue Endgame Build Guide

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.

Rogues don't have many sources of Unstoppable but a good way to break out of crowd controls is with Shadow Step.

In the early game you may occasionally starve on resources before you get the full combo online. The Starter and Ancestral versions feature Starlight aspect to help. Alternatively, investing more into Resource Cost Reduction (esp. on Crossbow) helps with this. Additionally, you can put more points into Innervation or temper Resource Generation, Resource Cost Reduction or Lucky Hit: Chance to restore Resource on your rings.

You cast Dark Shroud manually. Due to Rain of Arrows insanely low Cooldown through Word of Hakan, Preparation will reset all of your other cooldowns frequently enough.

The +16 Ranks to all Imbuements are insanely potent for Poison Imbuement. It also works well to reduce the cooldown from Rain of Arrows and gives us access to Mixed Shadow Imbuement and activates all three bonuses for Cold, Shadow and Poison from Eldritch Bounty. This then feeds into our Alchemical Admixture Key Passive.

• 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

Damage Formula
Admixture Multiplier: ((Shadow DMG% x [Shadow Legendary Glyph^Total] x Eldritch Bounty [If Shadow Imbuement]) + (Poison DMG% x [Poison Legendary Glyph^Total] x Eldritch Bounty [If Poison Imbuement]) + (Cold DMG% x [Cold Legendary Glyph^Total] x Eldritch Bounty [if Cold Imbuement])) x (Non-Physical Legendary Glyph^Total) x (1+Elements) x 0.2 + 0.4

Double Dipping
We have certain multipliers double-dipping the final damage and Alchemical Admixture. Effects such as Elements, the new Legendary Glyphs, Eldritch Bounty all multiply the Additive Shadow, Poison and Cold damage you have and also affect the damage you deal with the Imbuements themselves.

Find out more about Rogue Interactions and Mechanics in our Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

• 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
• Breath of the Coven* (Untested)

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Attack Speed

The following Attack Speed % sources function for Twisting Blades. For a more in-depth explanation of how attack speed works, please read our Attack Speed Mechanics article.

Lucky Hit Chance

The Lucky Hit Chance of Twisting Blades continues to differ from expectations. In a brief interaction test of 300 points of data for the base version of Twisting Blades and 500 points of data for Twisting Blades using Bladedancer's, overall Lucky Hit Chance was significantly lower than expected.

Each hit of Twisting Blades was expected to have the Tooltip Lucky Hit Chance% (in this case, 114%). The test was set up in a way where we tracked Doombringer triggers per hit and tracked all damage instances individually using recorded footage. Based on other spell functions, Twisting Blades was expected to have either a 114% Chance to Lucky Hit per hit, or 1-(1-1.14)^(1/2) = 100% chance to Lucky Hit due to the limitations of the formula when a skill has two damage instances on it. However, it turns out that the data was distributed in the following way:

Without Bladedancer's

With Bladedancer's

As we can see, the Doombringer Triggers to Total Hits ratio is off by a significant margin compared to the expected ratio. We are getting roughly half the expected triggers, which makes Twisting Blades very poor in Lucky Hit Chance contexts. More on Lucky Hit functionality in our Lucky Hit Mechanics article.

Interactions that work with Twisting Blades

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that partially works with Twisting Blades

• Aspects
  • Dark Dance, which gives 40% damage instead of 80%

• Uniques and Mythic Uniques
  • Crown of Lucion

Interactions that do not work with Twisting Blades

N/A

Poison Imbuement is an imbuement that empowers abilities that can be imbued, such as core skills like Twisting Blades, and converts it to the poison element damage type. Although the imbuement has charges, if your imbued ability hits multiple times per cast, the skill applies the imbuement with every damage instance. This implies that tempering that allows your skills to hit multiple times is excellent for frequently applying Poison Imbuement to the target. To understand how its damage is calculated and how DoT duration influences the damage dealt, refer to the Damage Calculations accordion below.

Lucky Hit Chance

The Lucky Hit Chance per damage instance for Poison Imbuement is calculated according to the following formula:

Because this formula has (100% - Tooltip LHC%) as a part of its calculation, it was theorized that you gain no more benefit from Lucky Hit once you reach 100% Tooltip Lucky Hit. If the theory was correct, as (100% - Tooltip LHC%) approaches 0, the chance to trigger Lucky Hit effects skyrockets until finally getting to 100% Lucky Hit per tick. At 203.03% Lucky Hit, we would have had 99.99% Tooltip Lucky Hit and an expected proc total of (1-(1-[0.33 x (1+2.03)])^(1/12)) x 0.75 x 792 = 318 X'fals triggers. This was not nearly the case, and similar tests were conducted at other Lucky Hit values to verify this functionality. Further testing has to be conducted, but based on this test, the following was true for Poison Imbuement

DoT Damage Instance LHC = (100% - (100% - 33%)^(1/12)) x  (100% + Sum of [+]Lucky Hit Chance)

More on Lucky Hit functionality in our Lucky Hit Mechanics article.

Imbuement Potency

The game has a stat called imbuement potency, which can be found on things such as Efficacy and Corruption. Potency increases the effectiveness of the imbuement you use.

• Poison Imbuement: Increases the damage over time it deals.
• Cold Imbuement: Increases the amount of chill you apply to the target
• Shadow Imbuement: Increases the damage it deals.

A misconception within the community was that imbuement potency increased the passive benefits from the enhancement nodes such as Blended Poison Imbuement or Mixed Shadow Imbuement. This has been verified not to be the case, it only increases the functionality of the base skill.

Imbuement Improvements

• Mixed Poison Imbuement can trigger per damage instance. This means that Barrage with High Velocity and Branching Volleys can trigger Mixed Poison Imbuement on each individual damage instance.
• Blended Poison Imbuement increases the poisoning damage by 75% with the condition that you caused a critical strike with the imbued skill applying Poison Imbuement. This does not mean that Poison Imbuement now scales with Critical Strike Damage.

Interactions that work with Poison Imbuement

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that do not work with Poison Imbuement

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) 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 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. In this build we have:

• Slow, Stun, and Freeze from tempered affixes on our gear.
• Immobilize from Crippling Flames.
• Chill from Frozen Orb Enchantment.
• Daze from Concussive Strikes.

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.