Intro:
The general concept is not new, Dred from Epoch Builds have a very similar approach from a shadow cascade build long time ago. You can consider this an updated version of a shadow cascade centric build.
As maybe novelties: we are not focusing on our shadows damage, not building around Mourningfrost, and we are giving special consideration to our attack speed scaling.
I’ve been playing around shadow cascade with skills, skills nodes and defenses, after docens of hours of experimenting and playtesting, I found this setup is extremely damage efficient, resilient and satysfying to play with. There’s very very little I would alter after this point.
Having said that, any suggestion or correction is greatly appreciated.
Build Planner:
This would be a perfectly assembled version in T20 no sealed affixes. This blasts through most game content and 350 corruption easy.
Endgame Filter:
For leveling, I recommend the rogue leveling filter from Maxroll.
Brief Showcase
T4 Fire Lich Cremorus Showcase
Pros:
- Extremely fast build to blast through echoes. Blow up enemies and elites extremely fast despite high corruption, usually under one second.
- Satisfyting and rewarding, still easy gameplay all about positioning and skill pacing, based on three buttons: Shift, Synch Strike and Dancing strikes.
- With well assembled T20 gear no sealed affixes you can confortably farm 350 corruption with lots of modifiers. Dodge and Crit avoidance are annoying but not game-breaking for this build.
- No uniques needed at all.
Cons:
- We are dual wielding so increased global damage taken, and more importantly, not abusing bastion. Forget about climbing 500+ corruption or face-tanking T4 bosses with little care.
- We are melee, LE kind of hates melee a bit, so we get the short end of the stick. Some bosses and enemies are very melee-unfriendly.
- We need to get our critical rate in shape, is the most challenging part of the gearing progression puzzle and very expensive in passives + gear.
General evaluation:
Map clearing: 5/5. Really good movement movement thanks to shift, 8% movement and 1.5 seconds haste on hit from passives, the build goes really fast though maps. Absolutely top tier in this regard.
Boss Killing: 4/5. While you can certainly kill bosses fairly fast, this build doesn’t really excel at it, still you should be able to kill most bosses under one minute range.
Defenses: 4/5. With access to fairly consistent glancing glow, evasion, rogue is tankier that it may seem at first glance. The lack of uniques to get the build to the next level, and dual wielding is what stops this build to get to the top tier.
Late endgame Potential: 3/5. Being melee and relying on shift to get armor and trigger damage, means is one of the worst builds against T4 Julra, still doable. You certainly won’t faceroll or skip boss mechanics. You should be able to get 200 corruption and clear in that difficulty quite well, and with some tuning in gear and blessings, be able to push it up to 300-350 corruption and still blasting echoes at superior pace without problems. Other builds right now can work well past 400 corruption and face-tank Julra, keep that in mind.
Damage scaling
The build is pure melee physical, with lots of critical investment. The optimal setup runs two katanas.
We want to get melee physical damage, critical multiplier, increased melee attack speed, and we want to reach guaranteed crits with shadow cascade, just for convenience.
As our signature scaling, we scale from increased melee attack speed. Our passives give us 85% increased at all times (any speed value gets a 20% extra value thanks to katanas 1.2 base speed). We get some speed burst thanks to Sync strike, that translates into 30% increased attack speed for 3 seconds (should be near always on), Rythm passive from Bladedancer usually means from 18 to 30% additional increased attack speed most of the time (the buff rises from any skill we will be using, gives 6% increased attacks speed, and lasts 5 seconds and stacks). Both buffs will make Shadow Cascade (60% more per 100% increased, from Leveraged Momentum Node) and Dancing strikes (33% more per 100% increased, built in) stronger.
Our main damage skill, Shadow Cascade has lots of “more” working for it: If scales 12% more per shadow, 0.6% per 1% increased melee attack speed, and two 30% more at the cost of not having a fast attack animation based on attack speed, this is not an issue, our cascade is always triggered by other skills.
The Damage from skills:
Our main damage comes from Shadow Cascade, we cast it using Shift, or Synch Strike into Shift, and sometimes procs out of Dancing Strikes. Some secondary damage with some Shadow daggers procs, from Dancing strikes and Synch Strike. Lastly, our dancing strikes will do some damage while we wait for shift to get off cooldown.
Sync strike is there to burst down elites, bosses and helps out clearing out. Usually, we cast Sync strike into Shift and 3 cascades will hit the target(s). The damage from Synch Strike itself is not high but will proc Shadow Dagger if all hits land on the same target(s), this alone can clear some trash mobs without cascade. We can also cast Sync strike before shift, if we have already engaged with shift from medium range. Sync strike also has Armour shred and physical resistance shred built into it.
Dancing strikes compliments our build a bit, we have shadow daggers on hit, has 30% more damage to bosses, 32% phys penetration, and lands a fighting arena that gives us 100% increased damage. The hits themselves apply our on on melee hit effects, and has lots of Armor shred built in. You can clear trash mobs just dancing around. We will also create a shadow with the second strike, and we will have 10% chance to proc shadow cascade while dancing.
Shurikens also provide Physical resistance shred, and any on hit effects, per shuriken cast and enemy we can get up to 5 hits and 10 stacks of Phys shred. We only cast Shurikens when we shift. They last 4.8 seconds and we can shift every 3 or 2.7 seconds, so they will be on 100% uptime without any effort.
Shift is central to our combo and our movement skill. Shift will leave a shadow behind and cast cascade on arriving, any shadow from shadow cascade kills, dancing strikes, synchronized strike and the shift itself will cast shadow cascade. Shift will give us 50% movement buff for 1.5 seconds, that not only helps to run through maps, gives us 50% increased damage thanks to Agility passive, and we can re-engage with the enemy and dance quite fast.
We get lots of “on hit” (up to 5) from shurikens, these can proc phys shred from blessing, frailty/armour shred from amulet/gloves/relic, and critical vulnerability from critical eye passive. All our other attacks will all proc both “on hit” and “on melee hit” effects, specially the synch strike burst, 5 hits max with one single skill use, like armour shred/frailty/slow/chill from weapon, and frailty from spell breaker passive.
The defenses:
We use health in the standard way, not ward at all. Expect from 1.5k entering monos, to about 2.5k in late endgame with fairly tuned gear.
Going endurance with this build is not worth the 3 T5 endurance suffixes you will need just to cap it, as this build has no endurance support in his passives / skill nodes. By default, is better to just focus on health/armour/dodge after resists.
100% crit avoidance with empowered blessing from Reign of Dragons + crit avoidance suffix by default.
We get 15% increased damage taken from dual wield 
We love dodge, should get a bit of increased/dex/flat from gear, as well as from our passives, but we get lots of conditional dodge from our passives and skills: 160 when hit recently from Once passive, 50 from each dusk shroud we get, 100 flat when we are dancing, and a huge burst of 600-900+ flat dodge (depends on dexterity) for one second after shift from elusive. In practive we have from 25% to 40-70% dodge depending on what we are getting from conditionals. Dodge is huge to this build.
We love armor: To get the most out of the 150% increased armour from shurinkens, we want a few flat armour affixes on gear, plus the flat armor from spirits of fire blessing. We can get easily 2k armor, and with extra effort (good armor bases, any exalted flat armor, great roll in blessing) we can progress to 2.5k and 3k armor.
Glancing blows: We have 71% at all times, we need 6 dusk shrouds to get to the 100% chance, and rarely we will get that quantity with our skills and setup (we are usually on a 2-6 range).
25% less damage while moving: This will be up when using dancing strikes and obviously when moving, but beware it doesn’t work in part of the sync strike animation, so don’t sync strike with a barrage of projectiles coming directly at you.
20% less damage from fighting arena: The arena lands with Dancing strikes after a few seconds, comes really handy on bosses and arena maps.
12% less DoT Damage from Synch Strike’s Crimson Storm. We should be able to maintain the 3 Crimson Shroud stacks with 100% uptime in battles. DoT damage is really scary in high corruption and T4 bosses, this really helps.
We apply the 3 frailty stacks almost instantly with synch strike and shuriken hits, so we can count with 18% less damage to every enemy we have stepped in.
Weapons:
Our optimal setup is two katanas with melee crit and added melee physical damage. Melee crit is mandatory. From all gear and idols, we can only get flat melee physical damage from our weapons, so that’s out BiS second weapon prefix, less optimal options for the second prefix are critical strike multiplier and increased melee attack speed.
I we can choose to seal any affix, melee leech and increased melee attack speed would be the best options.
For suffixes, our high priority is percent dodge on both weapons. Chance to Chill/Slow/Shred Armour on Hit and Increased Stun Chance are all nice to have.
Helmet:
Umbral Visage is BiS by far, with crit multi built in, Scalebane Grimace and Gorgonscale Coif are secondary options, plain 1-2% hit leech, barely saving us one point of “Blood Dance” passive, and the CRD from Gorgonscale doesn’t add much if we have it covered.
Vitality and Increased Health are our priority affixes. Always try to get those two in any gear progression.
For the second prefix, ideally you want +2 to synch strike, but as is really hard to get it on the right base, other options while progressing your gear are, Vitality, Dexterity, Increased Shadow Daggers Effect, Increased Damage of Skills use by Shadows, Increased damage while wielding a sword. Stay away from “Increased damage per active Shadow with Shadow Cascade” as it’s currently bugged.
The other suffix is flexible, armour is preferred as you cannot get it under rings/relic, but could also be crit avoidance, flat health, or any resistance you may need to fix.
Chest:
Brigandine Armour, Gorgonscale Coat and Crimson Garb are all great. Scalebane Coat is a subpar option with less base armour, but could fit in if we get a really good one affix-wise. The poison res implicit is not useless after all. Brigandine Armour is BiS, Gorgonscale Coat comes as a close second. The thing is the lightning res on Gorgonscale Coat is overkill, as we get all of it from the blessing, but the crit avoidance if gets a high roll pretty much saves an entire suffix slot.
We could use Woven flesh to fix our crit avoidance, and a 2-3 LP one could be BiS, but we have other plans to get our crit avoidance.
Our priority prefix is +2 Shadow Cascade. Or priority suffix is increased health.
Secondary prefix would be Vitality, “Chance to gain Dusk Shroud when you use a Melee Attack that hits”, or “Dodge Rating if Hit Recently” for a more defensive boost, or “Increased Critical Strike Chance per Equipped Sword” to trivialize increased critical needs.
If we can choose something to seal, +1 to shift (T1 is enough) would be great. T1-T2 “Increased Critical Strike Chance per Equipped Sword” and “Mana efficiency with Synchronized Strike” if we want to make room for +2 Shadow Cascade, would also be great options.
For secondary suffix, added armour is our best bet, followed by added health, other than that, we can fix resistances or get some dodge, but better get those in other places, chest get better magnitudes and are a bit wasted specially with resistances.
Gloves:
Engraved Gauntlets or Crusader Gauntlets. Solarum bracers as a third, less optimal option. Crusader Gauntlets allows us to get critical multi in The Black Sun blessing, we solve void res with just one T5 blessing, with the other two we can go Void resistance in the blessing instead, and cover that resistance almost entirely with the empowered version (recommended). Engraved gauntlets allows us to get into endurance for advanced setups.
Our priority prefix would be increased melee attack speed. Our priority suffix would be hybrid health.
For secondary prefix, I would go with Dexterity, Melee Leech is also interesting, as we could save 3 points on Blood Dance passive doing so. Increased Critical Strike is also an option while you progress with gear, but you prefer it on other places.
For secondary suffix, our first option would be added armour, but also is one of the few places we get frailty on hit. Progression options are resistances, crit avoidance and flat health.
Belt:
Plated Belt and Bronze Belt are best just for the flat armour, but any belt is fine as you progress.
With belts, we want increased health or hybrid health, with cooldown recovery speed as priority.
For prefixes, “Ward and Ailment Cleansing on Potion Use” is great, followed by Increased Physical Damage and Mana Regeneration.
In the ideal world, we would seal “Ward and Ailment Cleansing on Potion Use” (T1 is enough) and get both Increased Physical Damage and Mana Regeneration. Good luck with that.
Boots:
Solarum Greaves are the best option. Heoborean Boots is an alternate option, but we lose on base armour and the resistance roll could be quite low. Shrine Boots is a distant third option, but the stun duration effect is not great, and has minimal base armor. All three options can get up to 18% movement speed, that’s important.
Our priority prefix is increased movement speed, and our priority suffix is cooldown recovery speed.
As secondary prefix, vitality takes priority, but dexterity is a distant second option If you didn’t manage to get 2 dexterity affixes in other places.
As secondary suffix, you want hybrid health. Until you make it happen, are flat health, crit avoidance and resists, as you progress your gear.
Rings:
So many useful options:
Ivory ring for necrotic, ideally one if we run bone amulet, if not, we could also fit in two of them.
We can use one Ruby ring with Solarum greaves to leave fire out of the resistances puzzle. If we are not using Solarum, we can run two of them.
Gold ring, Copper ring and Opal ring are great as we progress, but not ideal bases, usually you will get lightning res from blessing, and copper while fixes our crit, is recommended to get defensive value with implicits if possible as we fine-tune our gearing.
Finally, Coral ring is a great wildcard ring, with 5-6 vitality is worth a slot if we don’t have anything better. Even a silver ring with a 7-8% roll is great, because more movement speed is always great, but ultimately doesn’t help with defensive optimization.
Our priority is to get dexterity on both rings and solve as much resistances as we can in the ring suffix slots. Also is one of the best places to get crit avoidance, shared with relic. So, ideally, we should try to solve 3 or 4 resistances on ring suffixes, and get crit avoidance here if we didn’t get it on relic.
We also should try to get mana regeneration in one of our rings if we don’t have it from belt, other top options are Increased Physical Damage and Increased Critical Strike.
Relics:
Ancient coins is by far the best option, but only with a good critical roll, anything past 60% is worth a T6 or even T7 increased critical strike prefix. Antidote vial is also great, not only covers our poison res needs, the extra leech rate could replace “Blood Dance” secondary effect if we got leech from gloves or sealed prefix on weapon. Ruby Dice is an option only if we didn’t get all our fire res from Solarum greaves / Ruby Ring.
Ivory Dice, Weathered Coins, Jade Dice and Stolen Tithe all add something useful into the table, but they are more of progression placeholder. As you tune your gear, you will want one of the mentioned above.
Our priority prefix would be +2 Dancing strikes. Our priority suffix would be Frailty on Hit.
For the second prefix, the ideal one is critical multiplier, but is not a big deal as we get so much only from 2 katanas + Umbral Visage + “All In” passive, we are sitting on 393% critical multiplier on average, without affixes or skill bonuses. Dexterity, Critical Strike Chance, Increased Physical Damage or Mana Regeneration if we still miss it, are all good alternatives.
For the second suffix, resistances could also be solved here.
Amulet:
Our best one is Bone Amulet, because we cover two resistances with it, one good roll or is enough to justify its place. Jade Amulet is also great, but only if we get a good roll (13%+) on increased melee attack speed, and lastly, Oracle Amulet give us DoT DR, with a 15%+ roll can be surprisingly valuable in late endgame.
Gold Amulet is not worth, because the abundance of fire res on other bases, and we can cover lightning res entirely from a blessing. Ruby Amulet and Silver Amulet add some value, but, even with good rolls, are only worthy as we progress into the good ones.
Our priority prefix is either Critical Multiplier or Physical Penetration, Increased Physical Damage is a great secondary option.
Penetration + Multi is obscenely hard to get in a good base, but as Increased Physical Damage is “common” (there are so many prefix options), we can get it in a good base and craft multi or penetration there.
Our priority suffix is flat health. As secondary is a great place to get Increased dodge if we didn’t get it on both katanas, or flat dodge if we did. As progression placeholder, we can get big resistance values in these suffixes.
Is recommended to cap poison res with idols + passives and not use item suffixes. Poison has the lowest priority of all resistances, is better to no over-cap it.
Idols:
We only need two, maybe three Grand Majasan Idol (3x1) with a high rolls on “Increased Critical Strike Chance per Equipped Sword”, for the suffix anything useful goes, Increased Armour Shred Effect, Increased damage while wielding a sword, Poison Resistance, Dodge Rating if Hit Recently, Physical Damage.
Ornate Majasan Idol (4x1) with decent rolls in vitality and poison is a great fit.
Fill in as many Large Shadow Idol (1x3) you can get with high rolls of Increased Health. You can fit also some elemental resists, Increased Damage of Attacks use by Shadows, Health Gained on Dodge.
Fix resistances and add as many Stout Lagonian Idol with increased and flat heath as you can. Fill the 1x1 holes with Armor + Health small idols.
Blessings:
Reign of Dragons: 70% Critical Strike Avoidance, less optimal: 100% increased Physical Damage, 20% all resists, 75% Necrotic Resistance.
The Age of Winter: 75% Cold Resistance or 150 Endurance Threshold.
The Black Sun: 75% Void Resistance or 40% Critical Strike Multiplier.
Spirits of Fire: 320 Armor, much less optimal: 27% Endurance, 70% increased Dodge Rating.
The Ending Storm: 75% Lightning Resistance, less optimal: 160% Increased Stun Chance.
Managing our critical rate:
Is not shown ingame, but shadow cascade has 10% base critical rate we also get 4% more from skill nodes. We need “only” need 316% increased critical strike total, to get 100% crit strike in cascade with two T5 melee critical on both katanas, it will take a while to optimize.
You can check if you got to the 100% crit with cascade adding and removing a point in Critical Precision passive, and checking Cascade’s tooltip DPS, if we are capped, DPS will not go any higher.
We can level our character with Sword + Dagger until we can get our critical strike sorted with the two katanas, as we have Sai is the best dagger option with 4% critical in implicit, and is faster, obsidian dagger comes as a close second because of raw power with increased phys implicit in and 5 more flat physical, but we lose some global attack speed. Initially we have “critical precision” (16% per point, up to 8) and “weapons of choice” (20% per point, up to 8) in our passives to cover most of the initial increased critical needs.
We can get increased crit per sword from Grand Idols the moment we switch to 2 Katanas to cover “weapons of choice” giving glancing blows instead of increased critical, and we can trim points from “critical precision” as we get more critical from gear implicits and maybe a few prefixes in rings/gloves/relic. A good rolled ancient coins base can give us a huge increased critical, a well rolled copper ring equals a T5 increased prefix, and we can round it up with a increased critical strike a stout lagonian idol prefix.
Exile coat and Solarum bracers can help us get some extra increased critical by implicit while we assemble our gear, but are not recommended for our endgame setup.
Other considerations:
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Health, as always, is high priority, we should aim for 2.5k at the very least with good gear, blessings and half-decent idols. Remember you can get Vit from Helm/Chest if you are areally lacking health. Some people consider VIT also a must in gearing, I consider it high priority but not the highest.
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Dexterity s fairly important, because it boosts Elusive Skill node in shift, Nimble in Dancing Strikes and is a way to get some flat dodge without using suffixes. Also increases the damage of all our skills.
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For dodge, 20 to 25% dodge without conditionals is fine. Dodge is of very low priority on suffixes and usually a placeholder.
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We want a bit (25% or more) of mana regeneration and we would be nearly mana neutral repeating our usual combo non-stop (synch into shift and dancing in between). We only need one T4-5 prefix and we are done, If we didn’t manage to fix it, some points on Spell Breaker would do the trick.
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With 30% frailty on hit in relic or gloves we are fully covered. Frailty on weapon/amulet is a waste, but is an option when we don’t get to choose. T1 sealed on amulet and T1 sealed in gloves/relic would also fit the bill but is quite hard to pull off. Spell Breaker could fill the role barely if we don’t have frailty anywhere else.
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For 100% crit avoidance I heavily recommend trying to cap it with Reign of Dragons empowered blessing plus one T5 suffix. Increased Physical Damage is fine, but we want as many defensive value from our blessings, we will not lack damage. All Resistances has great value but ultimately suboptimal for our build, as we can cap many resistances with other blessings entirely, or only two sources, usually implicits.
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You could get capped (or close to) endurance if you happen to use a good rolled engraved gauntlets (12%+), this can be done with two T5 endurance, one T7, or a T6 + T1-2 sealed. A very advanced setup for late endgame is to get capped endurance, and try to push your endurance threshold near your low life threshold (35%) with added endurance. Then add Death’s Door passive. This will make you quite hard to finish off by enemies in high corruption, if you get into low life you will benefit from both Death’s door 24% less damage taken, and the 60% less of endurance, with all the other defensive layers on top.
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Shred armour is not needed, and is a bit of a luxury in one of our weapons. We have tons of armour shred in our skills, and with many stacks quickly goes into diminishing returns. Low priority.
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Your biggest DPS improvement, is adding T6 Melee Physical Damage, next is sealing T1+ Melee Attack Speed in weapons, then T6 Melee Attack Speed in Gloves. Any T6 Physical/Melee from +Skills is 5% increased DPS at best. DPS is secondary as our damage and burst potential is very high.
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Few uniques can fit in the build, only provided you get 2+ LP, and not without some luck with the legendary craft, and heavy re-adjustments afterwards: Suloron’s Step can be up to 20% increase of DPS, but you need to cover -75% physical res. Penumbra & Siphon of Anguish rings add some offensive power, Quicksilver Coil is okay with high 3-4LP. Ravenous Void is very hard to fit in, and messes up Endurance/Death’s Door. Thorn Slinger for +1 all our skills and some movement, and Vipertail for dodge and slow.
0.9 Version changes:
Shift goes from 3 seconds to 3.5 seconds, also doesn’t start the cooldown until the shift ends (is maybe 0.2 extra seconds) but we can gain cooldown for both shift (Velocity shift node) and cooldown recovery in suffixes now. You need 2.5s shift to have the same pacing as before.
Thanks to velocity we save 10 mana in each rotation, so we only need a bit of extra mana regeneration now.
Dancing strikes goes from 0.6 a 0.5 seconds (thanks to more CDR), so the skill rotate slashes faster. Also they fixed the hitbox on first and second attack that didn’t get increased area. As a result we apply shadow daggers with dancing strikes a bit more consistently.
Shred got butchered, the max stacks of the debuff goes down from 20 to 10, so we get as much as 50% physical shred out from it. We don’t need to change anything on our build setup, we just get to the new 10 cap easier.
On the bright side, dual wielding got buffed, from 15 extra damage taken to 9. By comparison we take 5% less damage than before. Somehow makes up for the suffix loss.
Two new rogue gear items Gorgonscale Coif with some CDR and increased stun as implicits, and Gorgonscale Coat with Crit avoidance and Lightning Res. Both are decent options, still Umbral Visage and Brigandine Armour are a bit better all things considered.
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Gear: We now need cooldown recovery speed on boots and belt. This allows for vitality in helmet prefix, but we lose a suffix regardless. You want both if you want to shift feel just as good as before.
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Passives and nodes: We remove Unseen Strike and Consumed by shadow nodes on Shift, and put the three points into Velocity. To compensate a bit on Shadow Cascade, we can move one point in shadow torrent and Put in on Execution. Thanks to Velocity, we spend 10 less mana on shift, so if we have frailty on hit on relic/amulet we can remove Spell Breaker completely. I put those 4 points in Asuvon’s pact. We lost one point in Shuriken’s Floating Blades, we can put it on toxic tips, doesn’t matter.
Multiplayer:
Shift has a weird halt in place of half a second when you cast it. Sometimes chaining abilities doesn’t go smooth.
Also weapon attack speed doesn’t work, this means we lose 20% melee attack speed. With two katanas you get 20% more attack speed, but is not happening.
This translates in about 15% less damage overall.
