Welcome to the Arrow Storms Rogue Specialized Guide! This build focuses solely on the two legendary aspects, Arrow Storms and Vengeful, to deal damage. As such, we don't invest into scaling any of our skills and instead only include raw damage multipliers, lots of Attack Speed and Lucky Hit Chance in order to get the most out of these effects. This is a formidable season starter build as both aspects can be found from dungeons for the Codex of Power and they start scaling their damage as you improve your weapons. Not only that, but the entire setup has lots of similarities with the very potent Andariel Rogue Build that you can transition into as soon as you acquire Andariel's Visage with only a few adjustments. Let's jump in and see what it's all about!
Our Specialized Builds are Endgame builds with specific requirements and purposes. In order to play them, you are expected to already have specific items and effects available. Luckily, this build in particular works pretty much the same way from start to finish as you can unlock its required powers from dungeons.
Requirements for this build to function:
- Arrow Storms
- Vengeful
- Stacking Attack Speed & Lucky Hit Chance bonuses
Paragon
Look below for the selected Paragon Boards, Paragon point allocation, and the correct Glyphs you should use for the Arrow Storms Rogue. Note: The Paragon Boards below are the final setup with no steps.
Level 15+ Glyphs required: Control, Fluidity, Turf, Chip, Pride, Ambush
Season 5 - Infernal Hordes
In Season 5, the Season Theme brings your hero back into the bowels of Hell, in the Infernal Hordes endgame activity. You're first introduced to Hellbreach Dungeons, miniature Horde-like micro-dungeons that teach you the new mechanics and rewards systems. As you slay more powerful Demons and Bosses, you're rewarded with the new Reputation progression that comes with amazing rewards. These include Crafting Materials, unlocking Season's Journey tiers and even the coveted Resplendent Spark, needed to craft a mythic unique.
Follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the Reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 5 guide for more information.
Gameplay
The Arrow Storms Rogue has a very simple rotation with a few situational tools:
- Make enemies vulnerable with Puncture for extra damage and to trigger Vengeful.
- Spam Puncture to create Arrow Storms on enemies.
- Throw Smoke Grenade on elites & bosses to disable them, increase damage taken and trigger our Poison effects like Alchemical Advantage and Debilitating Toxins.
- Activate Caltrops against the toughest enemies, especially on bosses, to trigger extra damage taken and Deadly Ambush. You can follow up with Evade (press it mid-air for a longer jump), Flurry, Dash or Shadow Step to close the gap immediately.
- Use Dash freely to move around and get a crit buff.
- Dark Shroud is an optional skill you can put on the bar once you acquire Shroud of Khanduras, which is very helpful for higher tier Pit runs as it allows you to get a 3 second invulnerability on demand. Alternatively, you can simply include Shadow Step to go even faster (with and without the item). To do so, remove points from Smoke Grenade, Dash or Debilitating Toxins.
- Flurry is a secondary mobility tool that you can use to dash from pack to pack. In addition, we are constantly building Combo Points so you can get a 45% Attack Speed buff from pressing this skill ca. every 3 seconds. Especially against elites and bosses this is a valuable buff to speed up your procs.
- With Unstable Elixirs , our potion becomes an active damage cooldown. Try to build the muscle memory and press it once roughly every 10 seconds unless you risk running out of charges in a boss fight.
- Note that bosses (and unstoppable elites) take significantly less damage until they are staggered as we are forced to include many conditional damage multipliers such as Concussive Strikes, Retribution, Frigid Finesse and more in order to scale our damage.
The Arrow Storms cap & scaling explained
Gear and Stat Requirements
The Arrow Storms Rogue requires specific Aspects, Affixes, Masterworks and Tempers on your gear to perform well. See below:
- Legendary Aspects:
- Arrow Storms
- Vengeful
- Umbrous
- Elements
- Retribution
- Rapid (until you get Fists of Fate)
- Concussive Strikes
- Might (until you get Cowl of the Nameless)
- Inner Calm
- Uniques:
- Cowl of the Nameless (mostly for Trick Attacks ranks)
- Fists of Fate (for lots of Lucky Hit Chance and random crowd control procs to stagger bosses)
- Shroud of Khanduras (use Assimilation until then)
- The Umbracrux (can replace Elements, totem spawned by Smoke Grenade)
- Mythic Uniques:
- Tyrael's Might (optional for tons of damage reduction but you lose the ability to group up enemies with Shroud of Khanduras)
Recommended Stat Thresholds
- 25%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 12+ total Ranks of Dark Shroud
- 500%+ Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies
- 400%+ Damage per Dark Shroud Shadow
- 80%+ Chance to Cast Puncture Twice
- 80%+ Lucky Hit Chance
- 120%+ Caltrops Duration
- Armor Capped 9,230
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 40,000+ Life
- 20%+ Chance to Freeze
- 20%+ Chance to Stun/Immobilize
- 25%+ Dodge Chance
- 160%+ Movement Speed
Crossbow setup with Heartseeker:
Once you have really good gear, you can also play this setup with Heartseeker instead of Puncture. In order to play this, you need to free up two points for Enhanced Cold Imbuement to apply vulnerable via Coldclip (e.g. from Dash or Smoke Grenade). The advantage of this setup is that the base damage of Crossbows is ~22% higher than that of Swords. Since we are capped at max. 7 Arrow Storms anyway and procs use the currently held weapon for its damage calculation, we can squeeze out more total damage per tick as long as we still reach that number reliably.
The total Lucky Hit of Heartseeker together with the ricochet arrow is relatively comparable so it mostly comes out as a loss in Attack Speed you need to make up for. With a good amulet that has multiple ranks in Alchemical Advantage this is easily overcome though. An added benefit is that you also gain +15% crit chance for free so your total damage improvement over using Swords is roughly 30% once you have this setup online.
FAQ & Mechanics
When I can transition to this build?
Which Elixirs are the best?
How are Dark Shroud stacks generated in this build?
Mechanics
Learn about the mechanical details that make the build tick.
Dark Shroud Scaling
Attack Speed Caps
Dodge Mechanics
Stagger
Gameplay Video
Credits
Written by wudijo