The Rogue is a classic character from the original Diablo game in the series. The class has gone through many reworks through the games, branching out into an Assassin and an Amazon in Diablo 2, and then a Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 before settling down with its modern iteration. If you like stealthy classes that can output a lot of damage very quickly, the Rogue is for you.
While the Rogue isn’t the flashiest of the five classes in Diablo 4, they are very methodical. Rogues can swiftly dispatch enemies before they can react, striking from the shadows and setting up lethal traps. They are also one of the most powerful and balanced classes to play once they hit that level 100 cap, but before they can get there, you need to level them up to the level 50 milestone.
The early levels can be quite a grind to get through with the Rogue but worry not because this guide will show you the easiest path to take to get there. But first, you need to know how the Rogue fights.
Diablo 4 Rogue skills
The Rogue’s skill tree is divided into six main focuses.
- Basic skills: Starting skills that build up the Rogue’s energy.
- Puncture: Throws blades that deal damage. Every third cast slows enemies.
- Heartseeker: Shoots an arrow that seeks the closest enemy. Increases your critical hit rate.
- Forceful Arrow: Shoots a stronger arrow. Every third shot pierces enemies and makes them vulnerable.
- Invigorating Strike: Attacks an enemy and increases your energy regeneration.
- Blade Shift: Launches an attack that allows you to phase through enemies.
- Core skills: The main damage abilities that most skill builds focus around.
- Barrage: Fires five arrows in an arc that can ricochet and deal additional damage.
- Rapid Fire: Fires five arrows in quick succession, dealing base damage.
- Penetrating Shot: Fires a powerful arrow that pierces through all enemies it hits.
- Flurry: Launches a series of four attacks, hitting all enemies in front of you.
- Twisting Blades: Fires your blades toward an enemy, impaling them. Enemies hit take bonus damage while impaled. The blades return back after two seconds.
- Agility skills: Skills that provide high mobility and crowd control.
- Shadow Step: You turn unstoppable and attack enemies from behind with bonus damage.
- Dash: Lunge forward and slash all enemies in range.
- Caltrops: Backflip and drop caltrops that slow and deal damage to enemies caught in them.
- Subterfuge skills: Support skills that prevent damage and set up traps.
- Dark Shroud: Spawn five shadows that reduce the damage you take. With each hit, the damage you take is blocked by a shadow, causing it to fade away.
- Smoke Grenade: Throws a grenade that dazes enemies for four seconds.
- Poison Trap: Places a trap that, when triggered, poisons all enemies and deals damage over time. You have a limit of four traps.
- Concealment: Turn invisible and gain increased movement speed while being unstoppable for four seconds.
- Imbuement skills: Skills that imbue your next attacks with bonus damage types.
- Poison Imbuement: Imbues your weapons with poison. The next two skills deal bonus poison damage and damage over time.
- Shadow Imbuement: Imbues your weapon with shadows. The next two skills infect enemies that explode upon death, dealing heavy damage in an area.
- Cold Imbuement: Imbues your weapon with cold. The next two skills deal bonus cold damage and chill enemies.
- Ultimate skills: The most powerful skills in the Rogue’s repertoire.
- Shadow Clone: Creates a shadow clone that mimics your attacks with reduced damage.
- Rain of Arrows: Fires two volleys of arrows over a large area dealing double damage.
- Death Trap: Activates a proximity trap that triggers when an enemy enters its zone. The trap deals 250 percent damage to all enemies that get caught in its radius.
Just like every other class in Diablo 4, the Rogue has a class mechanic that is unique to them. In this case, their class mechanic Specialization, allows them to select certain key passives that impact your skills in a variety of ways. There are three different key passives to choose from and they can be swapped at any point in time.
Once the Rogue gets to level 15, they will activate their class-specific quest that will unlock the Specialization mechanic. Once you unlock it, you can choose one of these three passives.
- Combo Points: Every basic skill generates combo points. Core skills use combo points to add new effects to their attacks.
- Inner Sight: Allows you to mark targets. Attacking these targets fills up the Inner Sight gauge. Once it is full, you will gain unlimited energy for a few seconds.
- Preparation: Each time you use 100 energy points, your ultimate skills’ cooldowns are reduced by a few seconds. If you use any ultimate skill, the rest of your skills’ cooldowns are reset.
Now that you know the Rogue’s capabilities, the next thing to tackle is getting them to level 50.
Related: All Rogue Legendary Aspects in Diablo 4 and where to get them
Best early game Rogue leveling build
There are two skill builds that work best to level up your Rogue. One build focuses on your ranged capabilities with Barrage while the other build focuses on close combat using Flurry. For the purpose of transitioning to a powerful end-game build, the Twisted Blades build, we will focus on getting there using the Flurry leveling build since both of them are melee-oriented.
The first 15 levels are the biggest hurdle to overcome in this build with the Rogue’s low crowd control capabilities compared to other classes. Focusing on two skills, Puncture and Flurry, in the early levels should make this build function smoothly. To make it easier, the skill progression to level 16 should look something like this.
- Level two: Puncture
- Level three: Enhanced Puncture
- Level four: Fundamental Puncture
- Level five: Flurry
- Level six: Enhanced Flurry
- Level seven: Improved Flurry
- Level eight: Shadow Step
- Level nine: Flurry
- Level 10: Flurry
- Level 11: Flurry
- Level 12: Flurry
- Level 13: Poison Trap
- Level 14: Dark Shroud
- Level 15: Enhanced Poison Trap
As mentioned earlier, we will be focusing on Puncture and Flurry early game. Puncture and its improvements will not only generate energy but also mix in additional crowd-control abilities. Since Flurry is the main skill of this build, we want it maxed out as soon as possible. Flurry’s enhancements will make sure enemies take even more damage that you can heal yourself from.
To make Flurry even stronger, we get the Aspect of Encircling Blades from the Forsaken Quarry in Fractured Peaks. This Aspect will turn Flurry into a circular area-of-effect skill that will damage all enemies around you, making it even more potent in battle.
Now that your Flurry is as strong as it can get, we pick up more skills to complement the build. Shadow Step is essential for mobility to make sure you don’t get swarmed and die to an aggressive pack of enemies. Poison Trap will deal damage over time and its improvements will knock down enemies and reduce certain cooldowns you may have as well.
Dark Shroud rounds off your support/defensive skills by giving you damage reduction, something the Rogue desperately needs. The improvements from Dark Shroud will provide you with increased movement speed and a chance to not consume a shadow upon activation.
This should take care of your early game. From this point on, we focus on getting to the next big milestone: Level 30.
- Level 16: Countering Poison Trap
- Level 17: Enhanced Dark Shroud
- Level 18: Subverting Dark Shroud
- Level 19: Poison Imbuement
- Level 20: Deadly Venom
- Level 21: Alchemical Advantage
- Level 22: Enhanced Poison Imbuement
- Level 23: Blended Poison Imbuement
- Level 24: Debilitating Toxins
- Level 25: Malice
- Level 26: Exploit
- Level 27: Malice
- Level 28: Exploit
- Level 29: Malice
- Level 30: Exploit
From this point on, we try to improve our Flurry by adding an elemental imbuement to the mix. Our choice would be the Poison Imbuement with its complementary talents. Its enhancements increase the poison duration and damage while Deadly Venom increases poison damage even further. Finally, Alchemical Advantage gives you increased attack speed for every poisoned enemy.
The rest of the talents exploit enemies’ statuses. Poisoned enemies deal reduced damage with Debilitating Toxins active while Malice and Exploit provide bonus damage per attack on healthy, injured, and vulnerable enemies. Exploiting weaknesses is what the Rogue does best, after all.
The next milestone in this build is level 40. This is what the progression looks like.
- Level 31: Poison Imbuement
- Level 32: Poison Imbuement
- Level 33: Poison Imbuement
- Level 34: Poison Imbuement
- Level 35: Debilitating Toxins
- Level 36: Debilitating Toxins
- Level 37: Enhanced Shadow Step
- Level 38: Methodical Shadow Step
- Level 39: Adrenaline Rush
- Level 40: Momentum
Now that we’re getting to the second half of the build, it’s time to max out the other skills. Poison Imbuement and Debilitating Toxins are the first on our list, followed by the enhancements to Shadow Step which stuns enemies and grants you bonus critical damage. Adrenaline Rush grants you increased energy regeneration when you move, which is all the Rogue does.
We finally choose our key passive at this point as well. Momentum is the perfect one for this build since it gives the Rogue damage reduction, increased movement speed, and improved energy regeneration when they hit disabled enemies or attack from behind.
The final 10 levels of this build will work on rounding off everything we need to make this build tick.
- Level 41: Concussive
- Level 42: Trap Mastery
- Level 43: Trap Mastery
- Level 44: Trap Mastery
- Level 45: Haste
- Level 46: Haste
- Level 47: Haste
- Level 48: Siphoning Strikes
- Level 49: Siphoning Strikes
- Level 50: Siphoning Strikes
The last talents we need to polish this build are the ones mentioned above. Concussive grants you an increased critical strike chance against enemies that are knocked down. Trap Mastery grants you an increased critical strike chance against enemies that are vulnerable. Siphoning Strikes is the perfect complementary talent since it lets you heal when you land critical hits on close enemies.
And finally, Haste gives you increased movement speed when your energy is above half and increased attack speed when your energy is below half. This makes Haste a great value talent to have in any situation, granting increased movement speed to run at or away from enemies while the increased attack speed makes full use of the lifesteal mechanic of Siphoning Strikes.
The Specialization of choice to use in this build would be Combo Points. Since Flurry releases a barrage of attacks, you will always be able to make use of combos in any situation to give you a high damage output. Pair it with your Aspect of Encircling Blades and you will have quite a powerhouse.
And that’s all you need. Now that you are level 50, you might prefer switching to an end-game build. As mentioned earlier, there are a few good end-game builds, but going for the Twisting Blades build just seems like the natural progression of the Flurry build. Whatever you decide to choose, your Rogue should be able to sweep through end-game content with the right gear and skills.
