Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Build Guide

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:

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

Skill Rotation

How to not run out of Charges with Dance of Knives

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

Still trouble sustaining the channel?

• Combo Points + Star Shards allows you to gain more total Charges. If you attack up to three times with Blade Shift, you gain 1 additional Charge per Combo Point.
• Once you have sufficient Movement Speed (190%+) to infinitely spin, swap it out for Preparation.

Optimal Rotation

The order and situation in which you use your Skills is very important to allow you to perform well with any given build. As a Dance of Knives Rogue this is even more important, because Dance of Knives snapshots certain buffs for the entire duration of your channel, irrespective of their regular duration. Therefore, the optimal order of execution is as follows:

1. Get 5 Stacks of Asheara's Khanjar with either a small channel of Dance of Knives or through hitting something with Blade Shift.
   • You only need to do this at the beginning, when you do not have any Stacks of Ashearas.
2. Drink 2 Healing Potions to activate your Yax + Qax runeword.
   • You can only drink a Healing Potion at full Health if you have at least 1 Point in Unstable Elixirs.
3. Enshroud yourself with Dark Shroud.
4. Cast Concealment.
5. Activate Shadow Imbuement for clearing or Poison Imbuement for Bosses.
   • You can pick up Poison Imbuement as soon as you have dropped Combo Points for Preparation.
6. Start spinning with Dance of Knives.
7. If you get interrupted or run out of Charges, you need to begin at Step 1 again.
   • If any of your Skills are on Cooldown or you have no Imbuements left, use Shadow Clone to reset all your Cooldowns through Preparation.

Rogue Specialization

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 Dance of Knives Rogue focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Yom - Invokes Petrify after traversing. With our high mobility, we keep this all the time and use it to proc No Witnesses and Preparation.
• Yax+Qax - Qax Rune keeps its buff for the entire duration of Dance of Knives. Use the Yax+Qax Combo before using Concealment and starting the Dance of Knives Channel.

Alternative Choices

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

• Bac - Slight damage boost for when you do not have Yom yet.
• 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.
• Mot - You can use this before you have access to enough cooldown reduction to drop Umbrous in addition to taking Dark Shroud on your skill bar.

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: Varyana

Hysteria, Bloodthirst and Bloodlust are all excellent early tools to increase our Attack Speed and therefor our Base Damage of Dance of Knives.

Reinforcement: Raheir

We choose Bastion for extra defense when having our main damaging window active through Shadow Clone.

To enable the Dance of Knives 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 Dance of Knives 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.

This section is designed to guide your Dance of Knives 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.

Starter

Ancestral

Mythic

Speedfarming

Victimize

Pit Pushing

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% 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.

How to not run out of Charges with Dance of Knives

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

Still trouble sustaining the channel?

• Combo Points + Star Shards allows you to gain more total Charges. If you attack up to three times with Blade Shift, you gain 1 additional Charge per Combo Point.
• Once you have sufficient Movement Speed (190%+) to infinitely spin, swap it out for Preparation.

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.

How to not run out of Charges with Dance of Knives

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

Still trouble sustaining the channel?

• Combo Points + Star Shards allows you to gain more total Charges. If you attack up to three times with Blade Shift, you gain 1 additional Charge per Combo Point.
• Once you have sufficient Movement Speed (190%+) to infinitely spin, swap it out for Preparation.

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

How to not run out of Charges with Dance of Knives

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

Still trouble sustaining the channel?

• Combo Points + Star Shards allows you to gain more total Charges. If you attack up to three times with Blade Shift, you gain 1 additional Charge per Combo Point.
• Once you have sufficient Movement Speed (190%+) to infinitely spin, swap it out for Preparation.

This setup optimizes the build to Speedfarm Infernal Hordes and Helltides. Use Shadow Imbuementto clear trash mobs easier and only use Poison Imbuement for tough Bosses.

Gear & Skills

This variant focuses around the Key Passive Victimize and is mainly for very-late endgame. It requires entirely different gear and playstyle.

Gear & Skills

Fundamentals

• Activate Poison Imbuement whenever it is ready to have your Dance of Knives imbued at all times. This also activates Eldritch Bounty.
• Use Shadow Clone when it is ready to activate No Witnesses.
• Engage enemies with Shadow Step when your Shadow Clone is not on Cooldown or with Dash if you are farming easier content.

Engage with Crowd Control

• Follow up with an Evade to pull mobs together with Shroud of Khanduras. Evading through enemies with Flickerstep also reduces your Ultimate Cooldown. The totem from The Umbracrux counts as an additional enemy.
  • Keep the mobs grouped up at all times for big Victimize explosions.
  • The Shadow explosion from Shroud of Khanduras has Lucky Hit Chance and can trigger Victimize. This is why you will sometimes immediately blow up a pack after pulling it together.
• Toss Smoke Grenade into Elite Packs to amplify your damage against them and score additional Lucky Hits with it.
• Use Poison Trap for the Knockdown and increased damage on Elites & Bosses.
• The Umbracrux spawns a totem whenever you use Smoke Grenade or Poison Trap. This totem acts as an additional target to score Lucky Hits on and trigger Victimize explosions.

Spin2win

• Start spinning by holding down Dance of Knives while fighting enemies.
• Drink a Potion every 10 seconds for Unstable Elixirs.

Victimize Damage Formula and Scaling

• Damage Formula for Season 6:
  • Victimize% = (1 + 1.2 x ((1 + Vulnerable Additive) x [1.2 x Malice x (Vulnerable Legendary Glyph^Total)] - 1)) x 0.6
• Double Dipping
• Malice (triple dips during stagger), Legendary effects of Exploit, and Diminish
  • Even though Diminish double dips, we still use Headhunter instead as it is only slightly less damage but offers significantly more attributes. The reduced Physical Damage from Vulnerable enemies from Diminish is a very conditional defensive tool and not worth it.

Victimize Damage Scalers in Dance of Knives Rogue:

• Aspects
  • Retribution
  • Noxious Ice

• Passives
  • Exploit
  • Malice
  • Trick Attacks
  • Enhanced Caltrops (Push Variant)
  • Enhanced Smoke Grenade
  • Frigid Finesse
  • Unstable Elixirs

• Legendary Nodes
  • Cheap Shot
  • Eldritch Bounty
  • Exploit Weakness
  • No Witnesses

• Glyphs
  • Control
  • Fluidity
  • Exploit
  • Headhunter
  • Devious

• Uniques and Mythic Uniques
  • Fists of Fate

• Stats
  • Vulnerable Damage (individual target tracking)
  • All flat Damage%
  • Damage% against Crowd Controlled if applicable
  • Elemental Damage% if applicable

Interactions that do not work with Victimize

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

• Aspects
  • Edgemaster's

• Passives
  • Weapon Mastery
  • Impetus

• Glyphs
  • Versatility

For more information about Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, check out the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

Victimize Damage Backloading and Internal Cooldown

• The Key Passive has an internal cooldown now, but is backloading the damage that would have been dealt between the explosions.
• As an example, hitting 10 mobs and triggering 10 Lucky Hits on them will still only yield 1 explosion but deals the damage of 10 explosions.
• This means Victimize scales insanely well with density and Lucky Hit Chance now.
• The internal cooldown is estimated to be around 0.6 seconds which favors high Attacks per Second with high Lucky Hit Chance.

The Umbracrux

• We use it to gain additional target for Victimize procs and for evading through it with Flickerstep.
• The damage it deals itself is not super relevant, but can still ramp up quite well with big original explosions.
• Position your totem behind the boss to have your Knives from Star Shards caught by it.

Lucky Hit Chance Breakpoints

Shroud of Khanduras

Shroud of Khanduras has a 100% Base Lucky Hit Chance on the explosion. This means that you want to reach at least +100% Lucky Hit Chance to guarantee a Victimize proc upon pulling the mobs together. This is easily done by equipping Fists of Fate.

+100% Bonus Lucky Hit Chance, is a 2x Multiplier to the Base Lucky Hit Chance.

Victimize base proc chance is 50% (0.5). With 100% (1) Base Lucky Hit Chance and +100% (2) Lucky Hit Chance Bonus, the following Formula derives:

100% Proc Chance = 0.5 * 1 * 2

Dance of Knives

Further Lucky Hit Chance still significantly benefits the build by increasing the chance for Dance of Knives to proc Victimize. A Blade from Dance of Knives would guarantee a Victimize proc at around +471% Lucky Hit Chance, which is practically unreachable, so get as much Lucky Hit Chance as you can without sacrificing other stats.

Victimize base proc chance is 50%. With 35% Innate Lucky Hit Chance on Dance of Knives and +X% Lucky Hit Chance Bonus, the following Formula derives:

1 = 0.5 * 0.35 * x

x = 1 / (0.5* 0.35)

x = 5.714

So around +471% Lucky Hit Chance Bonus.

With ideal gear and Ambusher from Subo, the Mercenary you can reach a total of around +310% without majorly sacrificing other stats for it.

• +139.9% from Fists of Fate
• +54% from Heir of Perdition (12/12 MW +3 Crits)
• +11.7% Ring 1 (12/12 MW no Crits)
• +11.7% Ring 2 (12/12 MW no Crits)
• +15% from Elixir of Advantage II
• +15% from Alchemical Advantage
• +15% from Alchemist's Fortune
• +10% from Paragon on Exploit Weaknesses
• x20% from Ambusher
• = +308.76%

You can use further methods to boost your Lucky Hit Chance, but this will usually result in a net loss of damage as you trade of other things. In fact, using +Ranks to Alchemical Advantage on the Amulet or Masterworking the Rings for Lucky Hit Chance instead results in a loss of damage output.

For more information about Lucky Hit Chance, check out the Lucky Hit Chance Mechanics Article by Avarilyn.

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.
• Remember to use Consumables when Pushing:
  • Elixir of Advantage II for more Lucky Hit Chance.
  • Elixir of Fortitude II if you have trouble surviving.
  • Queen's Supreme
  • Soothing Spices
  • Chorus of War

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.

My damage is low, what is happening?

You are probably not using your Skills in the correct order. The order and situation in which you use your Skills is very important to allow you to perform well with any given build. As a Dance of Knives Rogue this is even more important, because Dance of Knives snapshots certain buffs for the entire duration of your channel, irrespective of their regular duration. Refer to the Optimal Rotation section further above.

Why are we stacking Attack Speed?

Dance of Knives scales its base damage with additional Attack Speed instead of throwing Knives faster. Through the Cutthroat Attack Speed temper and various other rolls on gear and buffs, we can scale its damage extremely high.

Why are we using Diamonds in our Weapons?

Because of No Witnesses. We proc this constantly through the Bac + Yom that invokes Petrify after traversing.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Include a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

I run out of Dance of Knives Charges a lot, what can I do?

• Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
• Move in fluid circles or a straight line, do not take sharp turns
• Do not linger on mobs and never stop moving
• You need around 190%+ Movement Speed to infinitely keep spinning.

Still trouble sustaining the channel?

• Combo Points + Star Shards allows you to gain more total Charges. If you attack up to three times with Blade Shift, you gain 1 additional Charge per Combo Point.
• Once you have sufficient Movement Speed (190%+) to infinitely spin, swap it out for Preparation.

I can not find an Amulet with the listed stats, what can I do?

The Kurast Undercity allows you to target farm for Amulets with +Passive Ranks through the Tribute System. The Stat Priorities List also shows alternatives to the Best in Slot affixes.

Which Elixir and Incense should I use?

• Elixir of Advantage II for more Lucky Hit Chance.
• Elixir of Fortitude II if you have trouble surviving.
• For Pit Pushing use:
  • Queen's Supreme
  • Soothing Spices
  • Chorus of War

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

Dance of Knives Attack Speed Scaling

• Attack Speed scales Dance of Knives Base Damage linearly.
• If Dance of Knives has a Base Damage of 100% Weapon Damage, adding 50% Attack Speed puts it at 150%. This is a relative increase of 50%.
• If Dance of Knives has a Base Damage of 200% Weapon Damage, adding 50% Attack Speed puts it at 300%. This is a relative increase of 50% again.
• This means Attack Speed does not have diminishing returns and will always scale 1:1.

Snapshots

Confirmed Snapshots for Dance of Knives:

• Qax Rune
• Attackspeed from Cap 2 (Ashearas, Accelerating, etc.)
• Aspect of Synergy
• Concealment Crit + Vuln

Other Snapshots

As of October 12th where I verified the behavior of over 50 different interactions, all damage bonuses that were tested applied to Dance of Knives dynamically. Attack Speed increases that were in Cap 2 as listed above, did not apply dynamically and have to be snapshotted to work. Worthy to note that Momentum and No Witnesses apply their damage dynamically, so you do not need to restart the channel to gain their benefits.

Attack Speed Caps

Attack Speed% is capped at 200% and further divided into two individual caps of 100%. For the sake of this article, we will call them “Cap 1” and “Cap 2”. That means that if you have 200% attack speed from Cap 1, you will only benefit from 100% of that attack speed. At the end of this section, you can see what Attack Speed sources belong to what cap. Make sure that you check what attack speed sources you have so you do not go over the cap!

Cap 1

• Moonrise
• Close Quarters Combat (Cutthroat)
• Flurry
• Elixir of Advantage II
• Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
• Andariel's Visage
• Ring of Starless Skies
• Culler
• Nimble
• Artillery Shrine (100% AS)

Cap 2

• Close Quarters Combat (Marksman)
• Alchemical Advantage
• Accelerating
• Asheara's Khanjar
• Rapid
• Haste
• Basic Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
• High Velocity
• Enhanced Heartseeker
• Cutthroat Attack Speed (Tempering)

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.

The Dance of Knives Rogue is a fun to play, fast-paced and explosive build that performs outstandingly well in almost any scenario. With high mobility and tankyness you will best any challenge thrown at you.

• Snapshot Rotation: Yax + Qax => Dark Shroud => Concealment => Shadow Clone => Imbuement => Dance of Knives.
• Spin through Helltides, Dungeons and the open world indefinitely!
• Stack as much Attack Speed and Ranks to Dance of Knives as you can!
• Keep moving while channeling Dance of Knives to not run out of Charges. Spin2win!

Written by M1PY