TRUE OFFSCREENING With the Slippery Throwing-ONLY Rogue | Tanky "Autobomber" | All Content

Rogue
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Do you crave a TRUE full-screen AOE experience- offscreening packs like in PoE?

Do you want something fun to play that isn’t overly brainless, nor too mechanically intensive?

Wanna never have to worry about dying in a Monolith?

Then welcome to (what I think) is the most fun you can have with a Rogue build. This is my attempt at a THROWING ONLY rogue that doesn’t rely on uniques, +level gear, or Shadow Daggers to get by. (I mean we still use them for free damage but it’s optional, and we don’t gear around it)

Links: *Will upload better videos soon

Dummy damage: Throwing Rogue Dummy Hits - YouTube

Quick (choppy) Level 90 monolith gameplay: Last Epoch Throwing Rogue - Level 90 Gameplay - YouTube

*Note: the above video is with the Smoke Bomb variant rather than Umbral Blades

Build Planner

Loot filter

Google Doc with a more detailed rundown of Glancing Blows / Shurikens.

NOTE: the build planner is my actual gear, and is 100% not optimized

The short version:

This build showcases a few unique mechanics that I think are pretty under-utilized:

100% Glancing Blows + heal on glancing blow, single-target Shurikens for boss damage, and proliferated shadows using triggered abilities for off-screen clear.

In short it’s a straight physical damage + bleed build that focuses on shredding resists and dealing hits, but if you spec more heavily into bleed you can get some massive single target bleed stacks with line shurikens.

First, the part you’re probably here for: offscreening. How we do that:

  1. We use Synchronized Strike to make 4 shadows - these shadows can bypass the total shadow limit, allowing you to have ~6 shadows at once in ideal conditions.

  2. We use Shadow Cascade specced for throwing damage, mana restore, and 40% chance to create a shadow on-kill

  3. We use Dash to trigger Shadow Cascade, throw shurikens, and pop all existing shadows

  4. ON TOP OF THIS all popped shadows leave behind a Bladestorm courtesy of our new friend Umbral Blades

*OPTIONAL CHANGE: swapping Umbral Blades with Smoke Bomb is strictly “better” for comfort/survivability. The original build used Smoke Bomb specced to create shadows and debuff enemies- the +1 shadows per second not only heal you, they also help flood the screen with projectiles. Umbral Blades is fun, it’s just more clear that we don’t particularly need.

  1. Repeat ad nauseum. Synchronized strike > dash > shadow cascade > dash.

NOTE: It is INCREDIBLY important that you trigger Shadow Cascade (ideally with Shift) after using Synchronized Strike, otherwise you will be constantly out of mana. Shift and Shadow Cascade are both specced for mana restoration, specifically to offset the cost of sync strike.

Basically 40% of the Shadow Cascade kills that happen near the edges of the screen will spawn a shadow, which will pop the next time you use an ability, throwing more shadow cascade daggers, and leaving behind a Bladestorm.

The second most exciting part: shurikens. Single target shurikens are RIDICULOUSLY strong for single target damage. When converted to throw in a line, they can shotgun, applying phys pen, phys res shred, armor shred, and bleed with every shuriken you throw. On top of that, your shadows also use your Shurikens tree, so you can synchronized strike > shurikens for a 5-way shotgun if you want.

The third part: glancing blows - The 35% damage reduction stacks with endurance, among other things, and we can heal up to 50 life with every hit we take. Basically once you go below your endurance threshold you just stop taking damage.

How we get 100% without gear:

If you dual-wield SWORDS the Rogue passive tree alone can give you about 90% glancing blow chance and +32 health gained on receiving a glancing blow. All it takes to reach 100% chance is gearing for flat dodge or getting a stack of Dusk Shroud. Grab health on glancing blow on your body armor for additional healing.

We pair this with the Shift tree which gives us “cleanse all negative ailments when you shift” and “use a potion when you shift if you’re under 50% health”, as well as some skill nodes that give us life for creating shadows (we get 200 life gained per shadow and can make 5 at a time, repeatedly).

Long story short: it’s hard to die. DoTs are the scariest thing you encounter, and those can be worked around.

Let me know if you have any questions, and have fun with it :slight_smile:

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Thanks! Clear and concise write-up! Really want to try it out but I’m curious about the video to see the build in action :wink:

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Its 35% damage reduction for GB…

Am wondering about the Bladestorm & Shadow limit issue… Seems like this one might get some hotfix treatment… :wink:

Overall does sound like fun tho…

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Yeah, bladestorm is supposed to be capped to 3 I think?

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Derp- yeah I had it right in the google doc, just typed it wrong here. I was aiming for 50% stamina + 35% from glancing blows, and we get an additional 24% reduction at low life from the passive tree, and another 25% less damage taken while moving. All-in-all I think with a few hundred armor it adds up to 80-something percent reduced hit damage if you’re on low life.

And yes the bladestorm thing is supposed to be capped to 3- the “bypassing the shadow limit” thing with synchronized strike seems to bust it a little bit. I was able to get 10 storms on screen at once. If they do fix it I would just swap over to the “blades stick in the ground and explode” node for a similar effect aoe-wise.

Realistically smoke bomb is “better” but for now umbral blades is more fun.

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Love it ! Thanks for the build brother. Although it kinda destroys my framerate when density gets too high, do you have the same issue ?

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Unfortunately I have the same issue, really love the build, but my FPS got to such a horrible state that I dropped the build for now. Even on smaller packs it drops very noticeably despite my CPU and GPU only sitting at around 50% usage.

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Feels bad man :confused: fortunately for me i have a pretty decent setup so it’s far from being unplayable, but definitely more noticeable than with any other build i’ve played, for some reason… Maybe it’s the new umbral blades/bladestorm eating all the fps, who knows

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It’s the bladestorms for sure. Try KEEPING the bladestorm node and pathing over to the “stuck blades arm and explode” notable. The bladestorms will still seek out enemies but they just hit once and then pop. Helps keep your framerate more stable. The bladestorms are strictly “better” - if you can make 7-10 of them they absolutely SHRED single targets but the lag is a bit much sometimes.

You can also try the Smoke Bomb spec instead- it’s honestly “better” just less cool than the bladestorms.

The smoke bomb is specced to make a shadow every second so you get tons of healing and extra clear. You can literally just slap down the smoke bomb and stand in it spamming Shadow Cascade.

The extra knife explosions do make a stutter every once in a while, but the bladestorms are 100% what’s causing the major lag.

I’ve also considered trying to spec Umbral Blades as a single-target skill and dropping Shurikens for it, but I highly highly doubt I can make it better damage than shurikens since the blades can’t shotgun.

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well it may be a nice build for clearing, but that’s not an autobomber, might change that in the title.

i really wonder what your gameplay looks like, because mana seems to be a big issue for me

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“autobomber” is a little click-baity, I know, but it does play a bit like autobombing under the right conditions. You basically want to synchronized strike → dash → dash → shadow cascade → dash, as long as you have any shadows up every time you dash they pop and throw blades everywhere, so you’re looking to kill enough trash mobs to spawn more shadows to keep the cycle up. You should NEVER synchronized strike without triggering Shadow Cascade afterwards, ideally by dashing. Dash and Shadow Cascade are both specced for mana restore, that’s how you keep the cycle going.

Here’s a quick (very choppy) video of some level 90 monolith gameplay, I’ll record some better stuff soon.

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Thanks for the advice, but unspeccing bladestorm didn’t fix it for me, so I decided to tinker with things some more. When I dropped dagger dance the FPS issues were only very minor. Even when I put bladestorm back in after removing dagger dance, but that makes the clear feel very underwhelming, so I’ll have to find something else to cover it.

I’m hoping I can find an alternative as I do like the playstyle of this.

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Hey there thanks for this! I respec’ed my poison shuriken to this and scrape up whatever gear i have as close to this. Im just on level 75 mono and its nice, easy and flashy! Just had a few question.

1.)what gear stat priority are we looking for in gearing?
2.)do you just use shuriken on tough boss? im just doing the shuffle of shift-synchronize-shadow cascade-shift.
3.)we have umbral level but using smoke bomb on skill bar? (i just lazyly have smoke bomb on autocast)
4.) Do you mind sharing a loot filter you use? most of the filer i have is giving me some problem after patch

Thanks again! enjoyed playing the build

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Just trying the build now, and I am confused about the rotation you are saying to use. Sync strike > dash > dash > cascade is waaaaay too long to proc daggers. What I normally do is Sync strike > cascade > dash rinse and repeat. Am I doing something wrong because my dash is NOT procing daggers?

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1.) what gear stat priority are we looking for in gearing?

You can’t get all these affixes on every gear type but the most important damage stats in order are probably:

+# Throwing Physical Damage & minus throwing mana cost (rings & helm) > % Increased (Throwing) Physical Damage > Physical Penetration > Damage with skills used by shadows > Crit chance > Crit multi

+Throwing phys -mana cost is MANDATORY on rings, add it to your filter and shatter anything that has it that you don’t want to craft.

Throwing damage is a bit frustrating to scale- you need to be REALLY aware of the verbiage on passives and affixes because anything that specifies the word MELEE does nothing for us (literally every attack but the base swing of Synchronized Strike is throwing)

There are some really “nice to have” Rogue prefixes available on body armor/relics/helms that would include:

Health on glancing blow, Ward gain when you make a shadow, damage per active shadow with shadow cascade, increased damage bleed chance or crit chance per sword you’re wielding, chance to shred armor on throwing hit,

2.)do you just use shuriken on tough boss? im just doing the shuffle of shift-synchronize-shadow cascade-shift.

Yes, the shurikens are specced into the “thrown in a line” node, physical pen, and armor shred specifically for single target damage (they can shotgun when converted to a line). Shadow cascade still does okay damage on larger targets (especially with shadow daggers) but shurikens are spammable and cost no mana if you have 2 rings with -mana cost so it’s a reliably solid option.

3.)we have umbral level but using smoke bomb on skill bar? (i just lazyly have smoke bomb on autocast)

Umbral Blades is being triggered by popping shadows, you should never need to manually cast it, therefore it doesn’t need to be on the hotbar, so it frees up a spot for… whatever you want really. Use Decoy over Smoke Bomb if you’d prefer.

In empowered monoliths it’s much safer to be specced into Smoke Bomb than Umbral Blades- the original build was smoke bomb, it’s used to generate shadows because we get healed for 200 every time we make a shadow within 4 seconds of using synchronized strike. So as long as you use Synchronized strike every 4 seconds you should be getting constant healing since sync, cascade, shift, and smoke bomb all make shadows.

4.) Do you mind sharing a loot filter you use? most of the filer i have is giving me some problem after patch

This is the loot filter I’m currently using: https://pastebin.com/LPyCpzLs

It’s the .8.4 “template” filter that I think was made by… Mordarim? I wanna say? With a couple small edits

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If shift isn’t proccing daggers then you skipped the most important nodes in the bottom-right corner. All the most critical nodes for Shift are circled here:

“If you’re using a melee weapon, attack with shadow cascade after you shift” is what pops your shadows when you shift.

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Any chance you can share a lootfilter for this?

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Okay,
so I’ve done some testing. And tbh, I have no clue why you are playing this build without Umbral Blades? I’m using umbral and I just zoom through monoliths with sync strike → dash. That’s it. For bosses the same + some shurriken throws, but not mandatory at all. I took the Umbral passive which allows the blades to move. For bosses i equip a dagger + sword instead of 2 swords, which gives a lot more crit and enables the shadow daggers which boosts the umbral damage quiet a bit.

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I made a Rogue to test Umbral as my old BM has been deleted

I killed Rahyeh in about 14 seconds at level 65 with shit gear.

All I do is spam Sync>Umbral over and over, no mana left to do anything. I get a ring with - mana cost of Umbral to make it free to spam and I put the recall Blades on Shift which I never use unless im moving to another pack

My controller has a nice new bug/feature. When I press X it now also uses Y. I Put Sync on Y and Umbral on X, I just walk around pressing X and thats it. Less buttons than a PoE build

I would say I can easily inflict 100+ poisons.

Also did first phase Lagon in 7 seconds

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I mean mostly because Umbral Blades literally just came out like 2 days ago, and I made this build before that, so I knew it worked fine without them. The second reason being that Umbral is definitely going to get hotfixed- right now I’ve managed to make up to 10 bladestorms at once, and the skill tooltip says “3 max” so I’m sure the shadow/sync strike interaction is fully unintended. Like the build is COMPLETELY busted if you use Shadow Daggers. Even with no other skills involved 10 bladestorms will yeet a boss to death with shadow daggers.

I intended for this to be viable without bladestorms and without shadow daggers, and it is- it’s just objectively better DPS if you use them (for now).

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