Rapid Fire 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:

Skill Rotation

The general idea is to use whatever is at your disposal to keep some distance while keeping up all of your buffs from various skills and passives. Heartseeker does a great job at stacking combo points easily while providing much needed utility benefits.

• Heartseeker isn't used for DPS, but for its utility to build Combo Points.
• Build 3 Combo Points, activate Shadow Imbuement or Cold Imbuement, then fire Rapid Fire.
• Use Dash to get around the battlefield for better positioning with Rapid Fire and to generally travel around the world and through dungeons quickly. Beware that Dash can be Imbued, so avoid wasting charges on it.
• Use Smoke Grenade for more damage and to keep enemies, especially elites from attacking you.

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 in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. Rapid Fire Rogue focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Wat - Activates Decrepify by simply moving (evading). Helps with stagger, defense and allows an execute at 10% HP. This also synergizes well with the rune combination below.
• Xol + Ohm - War Cry buffs us with 15% extra damage. Xol Rune is activated often from the first rune combination.

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 often, so this is a good activator.
• Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage, damage reduction (Dark Shroud) and overall quality of life.
• Xal - For extra defense.
• Yax - Good amount of offering for just drinking a potion.
• Lith - If you don't mind not evading after every Rapid Fire cast, this is a good choice.
• Moni - A mini Bac. Decent for those who like to stutter step.
• Yul - Build uses a lot of cooldown skills, so this is a decent activator.

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: Raheir

He has a lot to offer us from a defensive standpoint. Skills like Valiance and Bastion help protect us from heavy hits and grant Unstoppable. Bastion also works in tandem with Ground Slam to provide some very strong offensive buffs.

• Reinforcement: Varyana

We take Earth Breaker for the continuous knockdown for Malice procs.

To enable the Rapid Fire 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 Rapid Fire 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 Rapid Fire 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.

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's the difference between Heartseeker and Puncture?

Heartseeker feels great especially in season 6 with being able to use Fundamental passive and allows you to play a bit further out, like a ranger. Puncture feels great to play up close and will have a little quicker rotations due to quicker frame break points, thus more output over time. Choosing which to use and what style is up to you, but it is easier to manage the lob effect of Rapid Fire when playing up close, which can feel better when using a controller.

I feel squishy, how can I increase survivability?

The build naturally includes some strong defensive choices on skill tree, paragon and through legendary aspects. Outside of that, good item rolls are a primary factor in increasing your survivability, in particular your chest and pants armor pieces. Make sure to focus on these and stack stats like damage reduction, maximum life and armor as much as possible. To go even further, you can also roll defensive stats on your amulet. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.

My damage is too low, how can I improve it?

Your main source of damage is your ranged weapon, in particular its item power that directly scales its damage per second. This is the base for all further damage calculations, so make sure to focus on finding a high level weapon. In addition, you want to stack offensive stats like Critical Strike Chance, Vulnerable Damage, Core Skill Ranks and others and level up your Glyphs to unlock even more power through the Paragon system. For more details, take a look at the stat priority table above.

How to deal with Champions and Suppressor elites?

Since you can't fire at a specific target when they are hidden behind others, the only real counterplay you have is to dive in with Dash or Shadow Step and single them out in melee range before dealing with remaining enemies. Check out the gameplay section above for more details.

How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?

Even without Dark Shroud on your skill bar, there are three ways to gain shrouds: Enshrouding Aspect, Mot rune, and Umbrous Aspect. You don't even have 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.

Mechanics

Dark Shroud Scaling

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

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

The Rapid Fire Rogue is a superb allrounder with a toolkit that prepares you for all situations. It's a fun and mobile farming build that with a few tweaks can transform into a DPS powerhouse to take on the biggest challenges the game has to offer. I hope you enjoy a great build.

• Build 3 Combo Points with Heartseeker, then finish with Rapid Fire.
• Keep ranged while applying all buffs and debuffs for maximum burst damage and safety.
• Use Shadow Imbuement and Cold Imbuement for extra damage and utility.
• Use Agility Skills cleverly to gain advantages in combat, rather it's positioning for keeping distant.

Written by DiEoxidE
Reviewed by wudijo