Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Build Guide - D4 Maxroll.gg (2024)

Infinite Spin to Win

If you use Force Interact (Default: F) to interact with things while spinning, you won't break the Snapshot. You need to be directly on top of what you want to interact with. This is extremely useful in the Undercity.

Welcome to the Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Guide! This build combines fun, speed and raw power into one package to cruise through all challenges the game has to offer! Constant spinning, potent explosions and incredible pace are the on the menu for Dance of Knives!

Dance of Knives feels very fluid and satisfying to play. You spin through Dungeons, Helltides and the Undercity indefinitely, once you have reached sufficient Movement Speed.

Our main skill Dance of Knives with Star Shards. Through stacking a lot of Attack Speed, we can scale the damage very high. As Dance of Knives spends Charges instead of Energy, resource management is a lot easier than on other builds.

If you have used the Dance of Knives Rogue Leveling Build before, ensure to follow the changes in the Ancestral and Mythic Variants thoroughly.

Let's Spin2Win!
Requirements for this Build:
  • 190%+ Movement Speed

Note

This build guide assumesyou have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Rogue Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.

Season Theme

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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:

  • Seething Opal of Equipment
  • Seething Opal of Gold
  • Seething Opal of Materials
  • Seething Opal of Torment
  • Seething Opal of Socketables

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

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

Essentials

  • You pick up points in Blade Shift to advance the Skill Tree. Blade Shift is useful to pre-stack Asheara's Khanjar, which has to be snapshotted (= fully stacked before spinning) and to gain Momentum quickly.
  • Dance of Knives is a channeling ability that throws knives at a constant rate at your enemies. Attack Speed does not influence the speed at which you throw the knives, but instead increases your base damage with them. Through various buffs and tempers, we want to maximize it as much as possible. Do not stop spinning to drop Stun Grenades, we do not care for their damage, we only use their multiplicative bonuses to boost our actual Dance of Knives damage.
  • Dark Shroud is your main defensive tool and also provides you with necessary Movement Speed.
  • With Concealment you can permanently have your Dance of Knives Critically Strike and apply Vulnerable to enemies. Use it right before starting your Dance of Knives channel.

Imbuements

  • Shadow Imbuement is mostly used to clear densely packed areas and while powering to lower tier content.
  • A Poison Surge Temper on a Dagger allows you to utilize synergies to further amplify your Attack Speed Alchemical Advantage.
  • Cold Imbuement is used against Bosses. You should drop it for Dash in the Speedfarming Variant. You should only use Dash when needing to traverse great distances and never while spinning.

Ultimate and Key Passive

  • Yom invokes Druid Petrify which counts as Ultimate. If you do not have that Rune, you need to cut Cold Imbuement for Shadow Clone.
  • Momentum is our Key Passive and we stack it up quickly through Dance of Knives. It also provides us with defense and movement speed.
  • You pick up damaging passives such as Weapon Mastery. Frigid Finesse increases your damage against Frozen enemies and is activated by your Lucky Hit: Chance to Freeze Tempers and Fists of Fate.
  • You sustain your Health through Siphoning Strikes.

Skill Rotation

How to not run out of Charges with Dance of Knives

  • Start the channel with at least 4 Charges
  • Preparation restores all charges. Yom is required to invoke Druid's Petrify which activates it.
  • 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.

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 and Alchemical Advantage with either a small channel of Dance of Knives or through hitting something with Blade Shift (recommended).
    • 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. Activate Shadow Imbuement for clearing or Cold Imbuement for Bosses.
  5. Cast Concealment.
  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 you keep moving, your Bac + Yom Runeword will reset your Cooldowns and all Dance of Knives Charges throughPreparation.
Hints:
  • The order of Steps 1 to 4 does not matter. The only important order is to Conceal before Spinning.
  • If Shroud of False Death has stealthed you before Conceal, break it by using Blade Shift.
  • Do not stop spinning to drop Stun Grenades, we do not care for their damage, we only use their bonuses to boost our actual Dance of Knives damage.

Rogue Specialization

Preparation

Preparation reduces your Ultimate Cooldown by 5 seconds for every 75 Energy that you spend.

The Runeword Yax + Qax allows you to spend Energy.

If you keep moving, your Bac + Yom Runeword will reset your Cooldowns and all Dance of Knives Charges and gives you damage reduction.

Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Rogue Specialization Guide.

Paragon & Glyphs

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

!

Important

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.

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.

Tip

Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

To Level 15

  1. Versatility
  2. Explosive
  3. Canny
  4. Devious
  5. Control
  6. Headhunter (Paragon 300 Version)

To Level 46

  1. Explosive
  2. Versatility
  3. Control
  4. Devious
  5. Canny
  6. Headhunter (Paragon 300 Version)

There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 fromRenown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.

Runes

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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:

  • Ohm - 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.
  • Neo - Solid choice before you have Bac.

Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.

Mercenaries

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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: Subo

Allows you to see enemies and materials on the Minimap. Share a Drink is tremendously useful to get Healing Potions back for Yax. Ambusher helps you to stagger faster and to have an easier time applying Crowd Control effects.

Reinforcement: Varyana

Bloodthirst is excellent to increase your Attack Speed and therefor your Base Damage of Dance of Knives.

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

Stat Priorities & Item Progression

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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:

  • 2000+ Dexterity
  • 50%+ Lucky Hit Chance
  • 300%+ Critical Strike Damage
  • 100% Cap1 Attack Speed
  • 100% Cap2 Attack Speed
  • 10+ Total Ranks of Weapon Mastery
  • 100%+ Damage per Dark Shroud Shadow
  • Armor Capped 1,000
  • Resistance Capped 70%+
  • 6,000+ Life
  • 200% Movement Speed Capped
  • 90%+ Chance for Dance of Knives to Deal Double Damage Capped
  • 10+ Total Ranks of Dance of Knives

Starter

Ancestral

Mythic

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.

Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.

Build Variants

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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

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 Dash when having to traverse empty spaces. Be careful, as Dash can consume Qax.

Gear & Skills

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.

These are the key changes:
  • We take Cowl of the Nameless which is a massive damage boost through the compounding Trick Attacks.
  • The biggest changes is swapping Yax to Feo. This allows our Qax to overflow for 250%[x] increased damage.
    • Activating Feo can be very tricky, but using explosive barrels, traps, or elite affixes to become CC'd is easier than timing to become injured.
    • Using this method makes it even more important to maintain the giga spin as long as possible.
  • Drop Asheara's Khanjar for a Sword for higher base damage and more consistent damage output.
  • Swap your Crossbow to compensate for the missing Cutthroat Attack Speed.
  • Use Shadow Clone for the guaranteed 5 seconds Unstoppable.
  • You can drop one resistance roll for Dexterity on the Boots. When pushing, you want to consume Soothing Spices anyway.

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 to reach Cap 1 Attack Speed.
    • Elixir of Fortitude II if you have trouble surviving.
    • Queen's Supreme
    • Soothing Spices
    • Chorus of War

FAQ & Mechanics

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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?

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

My damage is low, what is happening?

How are we freezing enemies for Frigid Finesse?

Why are we stacking Attack Speed?

Why are we stacking Stun Grenade damage bonuses?

Why are we using Alchemical Advantage without Poison Imbuement?

Why are we using Diamonds in our Weapons?

Daggers vs Swords? How do they affect Weapon Mastery?

Crossbow vs Bow?

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

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

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

Which Elixir and Incense should I use?

Mechanics

For more even more in-depth information about specific Rogue Mechanics and Interactions, check out the Rogue Compendium by Avarilyn.

Dark Shroud Mechanics

Dance of Knives Attack Speed Scaling

Snapshots

Attack Speed Caps

Stagger Mechanics

Video Guide

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

Summary

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

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: Blade Shift x10 => Yax + Qax => Dark Shroud => Imbuement => Concealment => 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.
  • Your Bac + Yom Runeword will reset your Cooldowns and all Dance of Knives Charges!
  • Spin2win!

Credits

Season 6 - Season of Hatred

Dance of Knives Rogue

Written by M1PY

Dance of Knives Rogue Endgame Build Guide - D4 Maxroll.gg (2024)

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