Hey everyone, just wanted to post my first real build that I’m actually proud of having made! It’s a lowlife lightning chakram build that revolves around using Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living to activate the Death’s Door passive at the end of the bladedancer tree. This, combined with some more crit chance spread throughout the passive and active skill tree, we easily reach 100% crit chance. So far, the build hasn’t had any issues with either survivability or damage, however, it hasn’t been pushed into empowered monos yet. The only real drawbacks to the build are the steep item requirements; Exsanguinous, Last Steps of the Living, 2x Fulgurite Shards, and well rolled rares/exalts, with the optional Strand of Souls being a very, very good addition, but an optional one nonetheless. If anyone has any ideas for moving the build forward, or any questions, please ask away! I’d love to talk about both this build and this game
Seems like a good start to a build and a great first post to say hello.
Like the Deaths Door focus - always good to see people push an obscure node in either the passives or skills to see if they can make a viable build…
Without looking too much into the nitty gritty of your build, here are a few suggestions…
Its only generating about 1200 ward… this is not going to be good enough when you hit empowered monoliths… Even with the boosts from skills, you simply dont have enough defence in place to withstand being one-shot (even non-crit one shots)… I would aim for at least another 1k ward by stacking Health to get the health to ward from the chest/boots etc…
I would also suggest that you invest in some sort of active defence… Dodge is RNG based so I would go for some sort of guarateed defence - either Endurance, Armour or Glancing blow… just sometime to take the edge off the big hits that are coming in empowered…
Lethal mirage is a great OH SH1T skill that would benefit from your Daggers… Alternatively, see this post for a shuriken syncronised strike interaction example… It has some serious fire power that might spark some adjustments to your build.
Health Potions are your kryptonite… If you mistakenly walk over one it will mess up your health to ward interaction and you will get killed by a love tap… You might need to consider the health to ward potion affixes or a unique that addresses this… It absolutely drives me bonkers to have an otherwise tanky low life build be killed by picking up a potion at the wrong time.
You have the Keen node in Chakram but you only have one point in the Shift Sleight of hand - these work well together if you like the Shift playstyle… you might want to see if that works better… Personally I have never found the Elusive node is shift for the 1s dodge boost is worth it… but it all depends on playstyle…
Hey thanks for taking the time to look through my build! To respond to your points:
Is it worth dropping resist suffixes on gear for the extra ward? I’m not entirely sure here and testing it would be a bit of a headache so I’m not sure. Rogue also doesn’t have many options for health boosting passives sadly
I do have a normal 31% glancing blow chance currently, 71% if I just sit it a smoke bomb and get dusk shroud stacks through that. Also, armour is another suffix, along with resists and health, so I’m not too sure what to go for there. Lastly, Endurance wouldn’t work on this build as it’s ward based, so I didn’t go for that
I’ve actually just started messing around with lethal mirage not only as an “oh shit” button but also for helping my single target dps, as that’s been lacking just a bit for my liking
Health potions are a bit of an annoyance, but I find that the combo of Exsanguinous + Last Steps of the Living drains my health fast enough that it’s not too terribly bad, but I might throw the health to ward conversion affix on my gloves if I can make a better pair
I only put the one point into Shift Sleight so I could throw a chakram out for fun, I liked how it looks, I’m not trying to use shift as a damaging skill, just there for movement and mana gain. That being said, I don’t really care for any of the shift nodes besides Swift Recovery, Momentum, Lasting Presence, and Shadowslip, so I just dumped points into elusive so I could get something out of it.
Overall, having cleared my first empowered mono with this build, it wasn’t too bad. I only died once due to what was really just bad positioning on my part, but yea I would still like to work on the build’s survivability as, truthfully, it’s not the best. May have only died once, but there were definitely some close calls.
Resists are always good… Stacking Health is really hard and requires a lot of commitment but the benefits to the Ward generation are very good… Never tried this with Rogue tho so it could be REALLY hard to do.
Endurance… yah, brain fart here… Depending on your playstyle the smoke bomb can be a little tricky to use - i.e. if you like moving around like I do then you find that smoke bomb is never where you need it to be… except for bosses etc where you can kite around in a predictable way… The key is to find at least one defensive measure to help with your EHP in some sort of predictable manner… see Tunks website to help figure what works the best…
Lethal Mirage… yes, it requires a lot of commitment to work as a high damage skill… I tend to use it in Rogue builds purely for the temporary invulnerability/boosts - if timed right this can save you from lots of boss telegraphed hits…
Sync Strike with multiple shadows would be the way to go imho if you wanted a nuke skill.
Health potions - it gets worse in empowered where every last bit of ward counts…
Shift… ok… just a thought based on your video / shift spec… Shifting from pack to pack dumping shurikens is quite a fun build, but again its a particular playstyle…
Survivability is going to be your biggest issue - you will probably have to sacrifice something (like crit multi) to make it work… On this same note, you might want to consider something to get more ward generation - maybe a blessing or even some of the idols…
Spitballing here - An intersting thing to test would be to see at what point the Deaths Door node activates - i.e. maybe you dont need both the boots & chest to get to a permanently active Deaths Door? i.e. ward and health? That could potentially offer other options for gearing… like Transient Rest - Unique Brigandine Boots - Boots - Last Epoch Item Database …
So I’ve made some changes, namely the belt. Dropped Strand of Souls for a rare belt with health + potion health → ward, and changed up the idols to get some more health as well, since the old ones were mostly giving crit multiplier which at this point doesn’t do a ton as I’ve already stacked so much of it. Survivability is definitely better, and in case anyone wants to see what the bossing is like currently, I’ll link a video of an abomination kill and the new build planner here
Though another change I’m looking to make is still to upgrade the gloves, and hopefully get some vitality on there as well, and maybe on the belt too.
I think if you keep it low-health you can move from spamming chakram to spamming Sync Strike + chakram. Low health rogue has great mana sustain thanks to quadriple mana recovery on shifting. For that you’ll need 2 huge idols with Mana Efficiency with Synchronised Strike , 1-2 mana regen suffixes on your gear and spamming shift on cooldown
Further, you can try to replace body piece with crafted one. There are juicy affixes for you: Ward Gained When You Create a Shadow (will sufficiently replace passive ward generation for you if you spam sync strike), Added lightning damage with Shurikens and 2 defesive suffixes. Together with base armor on body piece this will outperform Exsanguinous defensive-wise.
Also, defense check will come much earlier than dps check, so i recommend getting Bastion of Honour which doubles your EHP in melee range
I’ll play around for a bit without Exsanguinous, as I do have a decent body armour lying around with some good stats on it, but I don’t entirely think I need bastion of honour. It’s a throwing build, so there’s really no advantage to being in melee range to begin with, and we’d lose a ton of damage, not only through just losing a second fulgurite shard, but all of the passives that rely on dual-wielding/having multiple weapons equipped (like the X% increased crit chance per dagger passive). I understand that defense is more important than offense, but the build still needs to feel good to play you know? But I do currently feel like the sync strike spam method might be better than Exsanguinous, since I have to sync strike + chakram most large packs of monster in empowered monos anyway.
So I did run another empowered mono without Exsanguinous and I can definitely say that it’s a viable alternative. Overall I FEEL like Exsanguinous is better as it has much better one-shot protection, but a rare chest with ward when you make a shadow is probably better sustain? It’s just that it’s really hard to get over 1k consistent ward with just Last Steps of the Living, so I think I’ll be sticking to Exsanguinous. However, I did record me killing Rahyeh with a rare chest piece on in case anyone wants to see that.
As i see gameplay didn’t change much. Did you try to spam sync strike to max ward generation? It also requires to spam Shift to keep up with mana costs.
UPD: tried it myself and didn’t manage to go over 1.5k ward. Looks like ward retention from double ivory was just not enough.
-harder to stack flat life
-harder to stack retention
Retention you can get from the
Stack as many small idols with ward retention+cold res as you can get. All elemental res is currently bugged and will not work.
There is also a quiver that adds a ton of damage for low life builds, but that’s more of an archer thing.
Another thing you can do is use Balista with the Potions notable. Its actually pretty cool because you already want to use potions for the armor buff. Get many effects that give ward on potion, convert all potion life to ward and you’ll have a lot of sustain.
Actually… I really like this idea. The only problem is that I don’t think Rogue can get idols to drop with ward retention can they? Maybe I’m looking at the item database wrong but I’d rather not have to play a sorcerer to farm gear for my rogue, that just feels weird to me. Regardless I’ll see what I can do with my gear and give it a shot.
So currently I’m running through an empowered Ending the Storm to try and get either lightning res shred or ward per second for blessings, but when I looked at those unique gloves I remembered that Xithara’s Conundrum exists, and I’m currently messing around with that. While it’s a decent dps loss for our Chakram, the clear is already pretty good even in empowered monos. However, because Xithara’s disables life leechs, this means we can run the shadow setup on lethal mirage for a TON of extra single target damage, and it solves the potion health → ward problem. So once I get to Lagon, i’ll record my go at him and see how the build does with this setup.
Ok, so I think the build is actually just about done now, though I’ve yet to push high corruption or arena waves with it so who knows, maybe it’ll need some more tweaking but for now I think all of the items are going to be locked in, just need some improvements across blessings and the rolls on my rares. So here’s a few links to boss kills and the build planner:
I’ll also be making a new video and updating the initial post with it as, again, besides refining some rolls on blessings, idols, and my rares, I think this will be the go-to setup for this build, however a non-exsanguinous version would probably also work at least decently well for those that want to squeeze out a bit more damage, or don’t have Exsanguinous.
Alright, here’s my video going over what I’ll consider the final version of the build!
Thanks to everyone here on the forums for helping spitball some ideas to make this better, it’s able to breeze through empowered monos right now, we’ll just have to wait and see how well it does at high corruption.
