Grenade Rogue Endgame Build Guide

• Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, there are two ways to gain shrouds: Enshrouding Aspect and Umbrous Aspect.
• The latter is used in this build to profit from the enormous Damage Reduction especially when you get hit infrequently.
• For it to work, you don't need to invest any points into Dark Shroud on the skill tree, but you can if you want to profit from a higher Damage Reduction value or its enhancement and upgrade options.

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.

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 Maxiumum Life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like Dexterity, Attack Speed, Critical Strike Chance. and additive increased damage rolls. Also Masterwork Maximum 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 you normally would and 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 Control effects.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones, such as Soothing Spices, Song of the Mountain, and Elixir of Fortitude II.

While Stun Grenades from Exposure are buffed by the 4 Grenade Aspects, the starting point for scaling is significantly lower than Opportunist's. By dividing the damage of your Aspect by your Max Weapon Damage, you can calculate the % Weapon Damage Scaling of all Aspects. Below is the calculation when Dual-Wielding Swords:

• Opportunist's: 2,340 ÷ 650 = 3.6 or 360%

The base damage of Exposure Stun Grenades is 40% of your Weapon Damage, which is 9 times lower than Opportunist's.

Written damage values on all Aspects are based on your Weapon Damage. As this changes, the tooltips dynamically update to the new value. Here are the values for the 4 Weapons available to Rogue assuming 800 Item Power:

• Daggers: 360% × 596 = 2,146
• Dagger + Sword: 360% × 623 = 2,243
• Swords: 360% × 650 = 2,340
• Bow: 360% × 650 = 2,340
• Crossbow: 360% × 794 = 2,858

Smoke Grenade always uses your last used Weapon so to maximize the raw damage of your Stun Grenades, cast Heartseeker or Caltrops prior to continuously casting Smoke Grenade as they both use your Ranged Weapon.

• 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. At maximum stacks, increasing your total Ranks of Dark Shroud affects your effective hit points (EHP) against one-shots as follows:
  • Increasing Dark Shroud from: Rank 1 to Rank 5: 15.3% more EHP
  • Rank 1 to Rank 11: 50% more EHP
  • Rank 1 to Rank 15: 87.5% more EHP
  • Rank 5 to Rank 11: 30.1% more EHP
  • Rank 5 to Rank 15: 62.5% more EHP
  • Rank 11 to Rank 15: 25% more EHP

• 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

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

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 temporarily takes 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.

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 regeneration is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again without significant investment in Crowd Control.

• 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 it 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