Diablo 4 Penetrating Shot Rogue Build Guide for Season 2: Luck of the Ranger

This Rogue build utilizes the Combo Point Bonus of Penetrating Shot to make good use of the effect of the Windforce Unique Bow!

This Rogue build guide assumes you’re at least level 50 and have completed enough of your Renown to have gained the 10 additional Skill Points available.

If you want a great leveling build to reach this point with, try our Shadow Flurry Rogue Leveling Build – A Flurry build that uses Shadow Imbument for huge AoE potential. If you want to level up as Rogue, at the end of this guide, we have a leveling section showing you how to develop a new character from level 1 with this build.

Build Overview

This build uses Penetrating Shot coupled with the Combo Point Specialization for huge damage with the effect of the Unique Windforce Bow that applies additional DoT effects on hit through high Lucky Hit Chance. We’ll also use X’Fal’s Corroded Signet to allow these DoT Effects to trigger additional damage bursts.

We’ll mainly be using mobility skills like Shadow Step and Dash to keep us alive and out of danger. Since we’re focused on Marksman Skills, we’ll also take Dark Shround and use the Umbrous Aspect to maintain our Dark Shrouds for some extra Damage Reduction.

To round off the build, we have Shadow Clone and Poison Imbuement giving us more damage potential. Both also offer some defensive utility to the build. Shadow Clone offers us Unstoppable for a good duration, while Poison Imbuement will trigger Debilitating Toxins meaning we take less damage from poisoned enemies.

Skill and Passive Breakdown

In this section, we’ll be talking about each skill we use. This is the whys and hows of how the build works, and then we’ll cover the skill point distribution.

Skills

These are the main skills for the build. We’ll explain what purpose each serves and how they fit the build

Puncture

Puncture is our Basic Skill, which applies Vulnerable and stack Combo Points for us in addition to keeping our Energy topped off.

Penetrating Shot

Penetrating Shot is our Core Skill and the focus of the build. It’s high base Lucky Hit Chance allows us to very easily boost it further and trigger those effects more often.

Shadow Step

Shadow Step is primarily a mobility tool, but also incredibly useful to break Crowd Control if we’re in a tight spot or against powerful enemies.

Dash

Dash is here purely as a mobility tool, and we even invest some leftover points into it to further reduce its cooldown to use it more often.

Poison Imbuement

Poison Imbuement works well with harder-hitting skills like Penetrating Shot, since the damage it deals scales with the damage dealt by the base skill.

Shadow Clone

Shadow Clone is our Ultimate of choice, as it offers a solid boost to our single-target damage as well as additional AoE potential with certain aspects.

Dark Shroud*

Dark Shroud is a great defensive skill, which we’ll end up using more passively through the Umbrous Aspect. We can still swap it to the Skill Hotbar occasionally for a full refresh if it’s needed, though this should be infrequent.

Passives

Here we’re only going to talk about the main passives we absolutely want as well as our Key passive. There are unfortunately a couple we will need to take to get access to these though.

Key Passive – Precision

Precision grants us a stacking multiplicative Critical Strike Damage bonus each time we Critically Strike with a Marksman Skill, which stacks up to 5 times. At max stacks they will be consumed to give us a Guaranteed Critical Strike and doubles the bonus.

Stutter Step

This gives us a bit of extra mobility each time we Critically Strike. Since this will happen often enough, this boost will help us trigger Impetus more often.

Concussive

Concussive works well for bonus Critical Strike Chance, as the effect of Windforce also applies a knockback meaning we can trigger this fairly often.

Weapon Mastery

Weapon Mastery grants different stats based on our equipped weapons. In our case, it’ll be granting increased damage to Healthy from our Daggers, and Increased damage to Vulnerable enemies from our Bow.

Exploit

This is a great damage bonus, though it’ll only apply to the very start and end of a monster’s Life.

Malice

With the Exploit Glyph, we’ll be able to Apply Vulnerable regularly enough to take advantage of this bonus damage against Vulnerable enemies.

Debilitating Toxins

Since we’ll be able to poison large groups of enemies with a single attack, this also means until that poison wears off they’ll deal reduces damage to us.

Innervation

This allows Penetrating Shot to recover a good bit of our Energy spent casting it, reducing the burden of needing to use Puncture for Energy.

Second Wind

Since we’re not trying to reduce our Energy costs, we’ll be able to activate this every 3rd cast of Penetrating Shot, giving us even more Lucky Hit Chance.

Impetus

Not only do we max impetus out ourselves, it’ll also gain up to 3 additional ranks from Windforce bringing it up to an x42% damage bonus, and if we wanted to another 3 ranks from our amulet for up to a maximum of x63% damage to our Penetrating Shot.

Skill Point Distribution: Where to Assign Your Skill Points

This is an easy-to-reference table for where we’ll be placing all of our Skill points. These are listed in the order they appear on the skill tree.

Icon	Skill Name	Skill Tree	Points
	Puncture	Basic	1
	Enhanced Puncture	Basic	1
	Fundamental Puncture	Basic	1
	Penetrating Shot	Core	5
	Enhanced Penetrating Shot	Core	1
	Advanced Penetrating Shot	Core	1
	Stutter Step	Core	3
	Shadow Step	Agility	1
	Enhanced Shadow Step	Agility	1
	Disciplined Shadow Step	Agility	1
	Dash	Agility	4
	Enhanced Dash	Agility	1
	Methodical Dash	Agility	1
	Concussive	Agility	3
	Weapon Mastery	Agility	3
	Dark Shroud	Subterfuge	1
	Enhanced Dark Shroud	Subterfuge	1
	Subverting Dark Shroud	Subterfuge	1
	Exploit	Subterfuge	3
	Malice	Subterfuge	3
	Poison Imbuement	Imbuement	1
	Enhanced Poison Imbuement	Imbuement	1
	Mixed Poison Imbuement	Imbuement	1
	Deadly Venom	Imbuement	1
	Debilitating Toxins	Imbuement	3
	Shadow Clone	Ultimate	1
	Prime Shadow Clone	Ultimate	1
	Supreme Shadow Clone	Ultimate	1
	Innervation	Ultimate	3
	Second Wind	Ultimate	3
	Adrenaline Rush	Ultimate	1
	Impetus	Ultimate	3
	Precision	Key Passive	1

Gearing and Stats

In this section, we’ll cover all the things you’d want to keep an eye out for to enhance the final build. This includes our Recommended Weapons, Specialization, Aspects, and of course, Uniques.

Recommended Weapons

For our weapons, we’ll be using the Unique Windforce Bow and pair of daggers. Optionally, one of these daggers can be Condemnation to enable more frequent use of Penetrating Shot with its full effect.

There’s also a buggy interaction with Tibault’s Will granting additional Combo Points which are also filled by Condemnation’s effect. This dramatically scales Penetrating Shot’s Lucky Hit Chance well above 100% making some less guaranteed effects more likely to occur, with many reaching 100% chance. Though, this is very likely to be fixed going to in Season 3, but for now makes the build insanely powerful.

Ideal Stats

The table below details the ideal stats for our gear, be on the lookout for gear that matches at least three of the four rolls below.

Due to the width of the table, we highly recommend mobile users rotate their devices to view it properly.

Slot	Stat 1	Stat 2	Stat 3	Stat 4
Weapons	Core Skill Damage	Critical Strike Damage	Vulnerable Damage	Dexterity
Helm	Cooldown Reduction	Maximum Life	Total Armor	Resistance
Chest	Maximum Life	Damage Reduction	Total Armor	Resistance
Gloves	Critical Strike Chance	Ranks to Penetrating Shot	Lucky Hit Chance	Attack Speed
Pants	Maximum Life	Damage Reduction	Total Armor	Resistance
Boots	Movement Speed	Ranks of Dash	Resistance	Resistance
Amulet	Cooldown Reduction	Ranks to Impetus	Imbuement Skill Cooldown Reduction	Marksman Skill Damage
Rings	Critical Strike Chance	Maximum Life	Lucky Hit Chance	Critical Strike Damage

Recommended Gems

This build uses X in our Weapons, X in our Armor, and Diamonds in Jewelry.

We opt for X in our Weapons as

We use X in our Armor, as

We go with Diamonds for Our Jewelry as Resistance are worth capping out on, giving us an effective 70%+ damage reduction to all elemental damage. We can swap these to specific resistance gems as we cap them with gear or paragon.

Vampiric Powers

During the Season of Blood, we’ll have access to Vampiric Powers, which allow us to slot up to five unique powers into our Sanguine Circle to increase the power of the build. We’ll include more than the maximum in the selection below to offer alternatives, but they will be listed in order of their relative strength.

Name	Effect	Reason
Metamorphosis	Evading turns you into a cloud of bats, making you Unstoppable for a short duration. Evading through enemies with this effect applies Vampiric Curse and deals Physical Damage.	Paired with Tibault’s Will, this solves all of the build’s Energy issues, not that it has many to begin with.
Ravenous	Chance to increase Attack Speed by our Total Movement Speed.	Since we have high Lucky Hit Chance and Movement Speed, this allows us to very quickly stack up our Combo Points.
Hectic	Every 5 Basics Skill casts reduces active cooldown by a small amount.	This provides more uptime for Poison Imbuement and Shadow Clone, our only long cooldowns.
Resilience	Increases Damage Reduction based on Missing Max Life.	This adds a lot of extra survivability to the build.
Anticipation	Reduces Ultimate Skill Cooldown. Ultimate Skills deal increased damage for each nearby enemy affect by DoT.	More uptime for Shadow Clone is great for our overall damage.
Prey on the Weak	Increases Vulnerable Damage. Enemies afflicted with Vampiric Curse are also Vulnerable.	This pairs well with Metamorphosis as well as Accursed Touch to give use high Vulnerable uptime.
Accursed Touch	Chance to apply Vampiric Curse on hit. Enemies afflicted with Vampiric Curse can spread it to nearby enemies. Accursed Souls deal increased damage,	Since we stack Lucky Hit Chance, this gives us a high chance to apply Vulnerable more often in extended fights.

Specialization

This build uses the Combo Points Specialization. This grants us a Combo Point each time we land a Basic Skill, adding additional effects to Core Skills.

This enables our Basic Skill to increase the Lucky Hit Chance of Penetrating Shot. This extra boost allows us to more regularly and reliably apply different effects from both skills and Aspects.

Aspects

We’ll cover the Aspects that are recommended for maximizing the potential of the build. We’ll also suggest which gear slot you should look to place them in.

The Aspects marked with asterisks (*) below are temporary inclusions until all recommended Uniques are acquired and equipped.

Trickshot Aspect

Trickshot gives Penetrating Shot more AoE potential by making all hits split additional arrows off to the sides. While these arrows will deal less damage compared to the main arrow, it will spread poison and provide more chances for Lucky Hit procs.

We’ll place this on one of our melee weapons. The effect is useful but not worth boosting, so it’s an easy fit for one of our melee weapons.

Aspect of Arrow Storms

Arrow Storms grants our main damage skills a chance to create arrow storms that deal Physical Damage over Time. This is pretty good supplemental damage on its own, but also provides another DoT to trigger X’Fal’s Corroded Signet with.

We’ll place this on our Gloves. While boosting this would make the arrow storms deal more damage, we use it more for the pairing with X’Fal’s Corroded Signet.

Aspect of Bursting Venoms

Bursting Venoms is mainly being used for the additional DoT effect it creates. While it can be used to occasionally reactivate Poison Imbuement, it’ll be harder to do as a ranged build. Much like Arrows Storms, it’ll be used as another way to trigger X’Fal’s Corroded Signet.

We’ll place this on one of our Rings. Much like Arrows Storms, this is used for the X’Fal’s Corroded Signet pairing and is not an ideal boost target.

Aspect of Elements

The Aspect of Elements grants a cycling damage increase, swapping between our Physical and Poison Damage every 7 seconds. This is a very consistent damage bonus for us, as we can time Poison imbuement to the window where Poison is boosted for huge damage.

We’ll place this on our Amulet, as it’s our best damage-boosting effect and our Bow is a Unique Bow so we cannot place it there. Until we get Windforce though, it’s best placed on our Bow instead.

Accelerating Aspect*

Accelerating makes it so that when we Critically Strike with Penetrating Shot, we have increased Attack Speed. This allows for quicker stacking on Combo Points and faster animations overall.

We’ll place this in our Ranged Weapon. This means we’ll want to move it after we acquire Windforce. We will eventually drop it entirely once we have all our Uniques, but it’ll be the last one we actually want to drop of the three temporary Aspects.

Aspect of Imitated Imbuement*

Aspect of Imitated Imbuement allows our Shadow Clone attacks to also apply Poison Imbuement while also increases its damage. Combined with Trickshot Aspect, we’ll get more value out of each Poison Imbuement cast.

We’ll place this in our other Ring. This means it’ll ultimately be dropped for X’Fal’s Corroded Signet when we get it, but it’s an okay boost until we do get it.

Aspect of the Expectant*

Expectant will increase the damage of each of our Penetrating Shot casts, thanks to using Puncture to stack up Combo Points between casts.

We’ll place this on our other melee weapon, as placing it elsewhere only increases the stack rate and not the damage bonus.

Ghostwalker Aspect

Between Shadow Step and Shadow Clone, we’ll have Unstoppable up fairly often to gain the movement speed from this effect. During Season 2 the Metamorphosis power will also let us gain this effect.

We’ll place this in our Boots. Boots are the only place we can reasonably fit a Mobility Aspect.

Umbrous Aspect

Umbrous Aspect gives us a chance to gain a Dark Shroud when dealing damage with a Marksman Skill. This helps us stack and maintain Dark Shrouds as a defensive layer.

We’ll place this on our helmet. This avoids any shuffling around when we get Tibault’s Will.

Aspect of Disobedience

Disobedience grants a stacking bonus to armor when we deal damage. Since we make use of Poison Imbuement and other DoT effects, it’ll be easy to quickly stack this up.

We’ll place this on our Chest. Similarly to Umbrous this prevents any eventual shuffling of aspects.

Aspect of Might*

Might grants us increased Damage Reduction when we deal damage with our Basic Skill. The overall amount is generally less than what we get from Dark Shroud and the Umbrous Aspect, which means it provides less value and is easier to drop.

We’ll place this on our Pants. This is a great defensive aspect for the build, but Tibault’s Will provides so much for the build that makes it worth dropping.

Unique Items

We’re only going to talk about the few that offer the strongest effects on the build. While there are others that help, these are the ones you really want to slot into your build if you get the chance. These will drop starting in Tier 3 content, but decent upgrades for the build once you get them.

Windforce

Windforce is a Unique Bow that grants a chance for our Ranged skills to deal double damage. With this bonus being a Lucky hit effect, it works well with this build that is very Lucky Hit focused and can trigger it more often.

X’Fal’s Corroded Signet

X’Fal’s Corroded Signet is a Unique Ring that grants our DoT effects a chance to trigger extra bursts of damage. This makes our stacking of Lucky Hit Chance even more valuable as it not only triggers the DoT effects that pair with this, but this effect as well.

Tibault’s Will

Tibault’s Will is a good pairing with Shadow Step to maintain our Energy easily while also making it a damage boost overall. This item also has a bugged interaction that grants us increased Combo Points, and by extension a massive boost to our Lucky Hit Chance.

Condemnation

This is used to not only let us reach our normal Combo Point count faster but also boost our damage. This can also take advantage of the increased Combo Points granted by Tibault’s Will and instantly stack them to the max.

Frostburn

Frostburn is a pair of Unique Gloves that can help the build greatly. This enables a high chance to freeze enemies we hit, thanks to the high Lucky Hit chance of this build. This Freeze also enables us to make use of the Frigid Finesse passive for even more damage potential in place of a passive like Stutter Step.

Paragon Boards and Glyphs

These two endgame options are part of the Paragon System which is available starting at level 50.

Paragon Boards

Paragon Boards are a feature that becomes available at level 50. These boards allow us to spend the Paragon points we earn for leveling and Renown to strengthen our character. Each of these has a single Glyph Slot to place a glyph of our Choice.

Starter Board

Like all starter boards, this one offers generic damage and defenses.

As usual, we’ll path up the right side through Prime to our Glyph Node, then continue up the left side through Skillful and head to the next board. We can additionally pick up Lawless and Resilience later for the extra defenses.

Cunning Stratagem

Cunning Stratagem is the only Legendary effect that’s consistently useful for the build, boosting the Lucky Hit Chance we gain from Combo Points. In addition to this, this board offers plenty of bonuses to Core Skill Damage and some great defensive boosts.

We’ll rotate this board so Cunning Stratagem is in the lower right. We’ll path through the Slayer cluster to Cunning Stratagem and then the Denial cluster to the right side gate.

We’ll wrap back around later after the Eldritch Bounty board to grab the Finisher cluster, our Glyph Node, and the Lawless cluster before pathing out the left gate.

Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade is primarily a Glyph Node. The board does offer some great generic bonuses like Elite Damage, Critical Strike Damage, and Armor.

We’ll rotate this board so that Havoc is in the upper left corner. We’ll path through Lawless to reach our Glyph Node before taking the Elite Damage offered by focuses and heading to the upper gate. We can come back at a later time to pick up the Havoc cluster for more Critical Strike Damage.

Leyrana’s Instinct

Leyrana’s Instinct is a board that is also just another Glyph Node for us, but has a nice defensive cluster we can grab in the process.

We’ll rotate this board so that the Glyph node is in the lower left corner. We’ll path to our Glpyh Node, taking the intelligence on the way there. We’ll grab Tolerance for the bonus Resistances, and most of the Feint cluster for the extra Intelligence it offers. Then we’ll head out of the left gate.

Eldritch Bounty

Eldritch Bounty is a Lengendary node we could take advantage of if we wanted, but since we only use Poison Imbuement we won’t get as much use out of it. It’s just very far out of the way from our Glyph Node.

We’ll rotate this board so that our Glyph Node is in the lower right. We’ll path straight to our Glyph Node, taking Potent in the process for the Dexterity for our glyph. We’ll also grab the Dexterity near our Glyph node as well as the Dexterity on the way toward the lower gate for our glyph.

Exploit Weakness

Exploit Weakness is another Glyph Node for us, but we can get some Vulnerable damage as well.

We’ll rotate this board so that the Glyph Node is in the upper right. We’ll head to the Glyph node, taking all the strength nodes along the way for our glyph. We’ll grab Artifice for the Vulnerable damage and access to the extra Strength here to activate our glyph. Finally we’ll head to the upper gate to out final board.

No Witnesses

This is purely used to get a final Glyph Node with our remaining points. We don’t have many options left for Glyphs, so we can choose to place these point into other desired clusters on other boards.

We’ll rotate the board to the Glyph Node is closest to the lower gate. We’ll head straight to the Glyph Node, heading up the left path so we can grab Strength for out glyph on the way there. Then we’ll grab the strength from the Training cluster to active out Glyph fully.

Glyphs

Each of our Paragon Boards has a Glyph Slot, where we can socket one of our Glyphs. These Glyphs provide powerful bonuses that can be leveled up by completing Nightmare Dungeons to increase their power. Below are the Glyphs we recommend and what board to place them on.

Ranger

Ranger increases out Marksman Skill Damage for every 5 Dexterity allocated in range. With 40 Dexterity in range we’ll gain Damage Reduction when our Bow is our active weapon.

We’ll place this in our Starter Board, as it has plenty of Dexterity to activate the bonus effect. We will even spend excess points here to increase this effect and get more dmaage.

Turf

Turf increases our Damage Against Close Enemies for every 5 Strength allocated in range. With 25 Strength Allocated in range, we’ll gain Damage Reduction against Close Enemies.

We’ll place this in Cunning Stratagem, as we get the Glyph Node much later on, despite this being our second board.

Exploit

Exploit increases our Vulnerable Damage for every 5 Strength allocated in range. With 25 Strength allocated in range, we’ll apply Vulnerable for a short time when we first damage enemies.

We’ll place this in Tricks of the Trade as most of the strength is located around the Lawless cluster we already path through.

Combat

Combat increases our Critical Strike Damage for every 5 Intelligence allocated in range. With 25 Intelligence allocated in range, Critical Strikes will refund a portion of their Energy cost.

We’ll place this in Leyrana’s Instinct as it’s one of our highest Intelligence boards that doesn’t require weird pathing to reach most of it.

Chip

Chip increases our physical Damage for every 5 Dexterity allocated in range. With 40 Dexterity allocated in range, dealing Physical Damage to an enemy will increase all damage they take for a short time.

We’ll place this in Eldritch Bounty as it is a board with plenty of Dexterity and doesn’t force us to take both rare nodes to activate the bonus effect.

Pride

Pride boosts the effect of all Rare nodes in range, in the case of where this is placed, this means more Vulnerable damage. With 25 Strength allocated in range, we deal increased damage to healthy or Injured enemies.

We’ll place this in Exploit Weakness as we can easily get the required Strength without going out of the way for it.

We can also opt to swap this with Exploit once both glyphs are maxed to get more bonuses from the base effect. This swap would grant more Dexterity, Elite Damage and Armor at the cost of some Vulnerable damage which can be more valuable overall.

Bane

Bane increases our Poison Damage for every 5 Strength allocated in range. With 25 Strength allocated in range, Poison Damage has a chance to deal double damage over its duration.

We’ll place this in No Witnesses, as we can easily activate the bonus with our limited paragon point left for this board.

Leveling Order

If you want to play this build from level 1, the next segment of this build guide is for you. Below you will see the exact leveling order in which you should acquire your skills and passives to maximize damage and overall performance.

Levels	Icon	Skill	Purpose
2-4		Puncture	Upgrade to Fundamental Puncture for Vulnerable application.
5-7		Penetrating Shot	Upgrade to Advanced Penetrating Shot for Slow and Knockdown.
8-10		Shadow Step	Upgrade to Disciplined Shadow Step for reduce Cooldown.
11-13		Dash	Upgrade to Methodical Dash for reduced cooldown.
14-17		Penetrating Shot	Max out our max damage skill.
18-20		Poison Imbuement	Upgrade to Mixed Poison Imbuement for the Lucky Hit effect.
21		Deadly Venom	Taken to reach Debilitating Toxins.
22-24		Debilitating Toxins	Reduces damage dealt by poisoned enemies.
25-27		Shadow Clone	Ultimate skill, that increases single target and AoE damage.
28-30		Weapon Mastery	Consistent damage boosting effects.
31-33		Dark Shroud	Upgraded to Subverting Dark Shroud for Movement Speed to use with Impetus. Used via Umbrous Aspect.
34-36		Innervation	Chance to recover Energy on hit.
37		Precision	Increases Critical Strike Damage and guarantees Critical Strikes regularly.
38-40		Second Wind	Increased Lucky Hit Chance for after every 3rd Penetrating Shot.
41		Adrenaline Rush	Taken to reach Impetus.
42-44		Impetus	Turns our high mobility into extra damage.
45-47		Exploit	More damage at the start and end of fights.
48-R1		Malice	More damage to Vulnerable enemies.
R2-R4		Concussive	Increased Critical Strike Chance when we knockback to knock down an enemy.
R5-R7		Stutter Step	Increased Movement Speed after Critically Striking.
R8-R10		Dash	Reduces Dash Cooldown.

To learn how to maximize your damage in Diablo 4, consult with our guide on that topic. Learning how to deal the highest possible damage with your build is crucial to succeeding in the Endgame and highest tiers.

This concludes our Diablo 4 Rogue Build focusing on the penetrating Shot skill. You can find more leveling and endgame Diablo 4 builds here on VULKK.com to try new things with your characters and spice up your gameplay.