Diablo 4 Shadow Rogue Build Guide: In this Diablo 4 Rogue Class Build, I’ll show you how to play a Shadow Imbuement – Twisting Blades Rogue, which is a melee Diablo 4 Build for the Rogue that impales enemies with the Twisting Blades Skill to inflict massive AoE damage. If you’ve been looking for a good Diablo 4 Twisting Blades Rogue Build that allows you to quickly explode all your enemies, then this guide is for you!

• The Level 50 version of this build evolves into the Shadowblade Build.

Also, be sure to check out our Diablo 4 Wiki and Interactive Map if you need help finding specific Altars of Lilith, Dungeons, or Side Quests!

Diablo 4 Shadow Rogue Build Guide – Twisting Blades

The way this Diablo 4 Shadow Rogue Build works is by using Shadow Imbuement in combination with Twisting Blades to generate a chain reaction of explosions that decimates big groups of enemies. To achieve this, you’ll start the fight by casting the Shadow Imbuement buff, then you’ll head straight into a pack of enemies and perform two attacks with Twisting Blades (you can hit the same enemy or two different enemies).

Now, you’ll use Dash to pass through the group and get on the exact opposite side and start attacking using your Invigorating Strike (this will build up combo points and increase your Energy regeneration). At this point, the first two attacks you made with Twisting Blades will return to you passing through the pack of enemies. This will deal damage to all of them and apply the Shadow Imbuement debuff, which will generate a chain-reaction of explosions. Also, because of the Advanced Twisting Blades Upgrade, both your Shadow Imbuement and Dash cooldown’s will be reduced, and thanks to Consuming Shadows you’ll get back the energy you spent, allowing you to restart the sequence.

Once you are on the opposite side, you can use Invigorating Strike to increase Energy Regeneration and to build up 3 combo points, which will greatly increase the damage of your Twisting Blades, so even if you are not able to cast Shadow Imbuement right away, the daggers will deal even more damage on the second pass, allowing you to finish off any remaining enemies.

The aspect that will help the most here is the Bladedancer’s Aspect, making it so that the returning blades orbit around you in the end to deal extra damage, which is very useful to finish off the enemies or to deal with Elites. This new Orbit Damage is further amplified based on the enemies pierced by the boomerang effect. You can acquire the Codex of Power of this aspect by completing the Jalal’s Vigil Dungeon, located at Scosglen.

I recommend using Combo Points Specialization to fight regular enemies, as it’ll increase the damage of your Twisting Blades, and also give you a Speed Buff, but you should swap to Inner Sight Specialization when fighting Bosses. Doing so will allow you to spam the Twisting Blades skill when Inner Sight is active, dealing a ton amount of damage and generating a massive amount of orbiting blades that quickly ticks the boss health’s down. Remember that you’ll also invest points into the Shadow Clone Ultimate to be able to summon your shadow who will mimic this action, further increasing the burst damage.

Diablo 4 Twisting Blades Rogue Build Guide – Skill Distribution

Each Diablo 4 Shadow Rogue Build is made up of the 6 Active Skills they have equipped and changing these Skills can drastically alter the way the Rogue Class in Diablo IV plays. In this section, we’ll take a look at what Skills you should slot for the Twisting Blades Rogue Diablo 4 Build. Your Skill distribution should look something like this:

LEVEL 25 SHADOW ROGUE SKILLS
Skill	Points Spent
Invigorating Strike	1
Enhanced Invigorating Strike	1
Twisting Blades	5
Enhanced Twisting Blades	1
Advanced Twisting Blades	1
Shadow Step	1
Dash	1
Exploit	3
Malice	2
Shadow Crash	1
Consuming Shadows	2
Shadow Imbuement	3
Enhanced Shadow Imbuement	1
Blended Shadow Imbuement	1
Shadow Clone	1
Prime Shadow Clone	1

The above list gives you the general order to invest in Skills, but keep in mind that you should prioritize picking up new Active Skills over investing in passives, so pick up passives later if you can get new Active Skills when you level up.

Diablo 4 Shadow Rogue Build – How to Handle Packs of Enemies

So there are several different strategies to employ with this Diablo IV Build for the Twisting Blades Rogue, and these change depending on whether you’re facing a large group of enemies or a Boss. Let’s start with a group of enemies first, and we’ll cover how to handle Bosses in the next section.

Shadow Imbuement

As with the rest of the Diablo IV Builds for the Rogue Class, you’ll be able to choose the type of damage you deal. For this Twisting Blades Rogue, we’re going to pick Shadow Imbuement to convert your damage into Shadow Damage and infect multiple targets. To infect a target you must strike it with a Shadow Imbued skill, we’ll achieve this by first sticking a shadow imbued Twisting Blade into an enemy, and then making it pass through the other enemies when it returns to us.

When an infected target is killed, it will explode, dealing massive damage to all surrounding enemies, generating a chain reaction that decimate big groups. In addition to this, our Blended Shadow Imbuement upgrade will make them Vulnerable, so after the first explosion everything else will die even faster.

Twisting Blades

Twisting Blades is key to this build, because of its boomerang effect. Enemies often attack you in a line pattern, so you’ll want to strike the first one or two enemies and then reposition behind them. After 1.5 second, the blades will return to you, passing through the pack and applying the Shadow Debuff and dealing massive individual damage thanks to the Enhanced Twisting Blades, which will allow you to kill some enemies and trigger the chain explosion. You’ll want to prioritize positioning to maximize the amount of enemies you hit when the blade returns, as each enemy hit will reduce all of your active cooldowns by 0.25 second for each enemy hit thanks to the Advanced Twisting Blades Upgrade.

Since this is the main skill of your Twisting Blades Rogue Diablo 4 Build, you’ll want to max it out and then get Enhanced Twisting Blades together with Advanced Twisting Blades as soon as possible.

Invigorating Strike

Invigorating Strike is a Basic Skill for this D4 Build that allows you to deal a small amount of damage, but also increases your Energy Regeneration and has a 50% Lucky Hit Chance, which is very nice to have. Since you’ll be using the Combo Points Specialization against regular enemies, so each attack you perform will give you 1 combo point. Ideally, you’ll want to use your starter combination of Shadow Imbue and Twisting Blades to then dash behind the enemy group and start attack perform three attacks with Invigorating Strike. This will give you 20% Energy Regeneration, or 50% if the enemy is either Injured or Crowed Controlled.

Also, if you happen to have a very good Lucky Hit Chance skill on your equipment, you can also go for Primary Invigorating Strike to further increase the proc chance, but it’s not mandatory for this build.

Dash

We’ll be using dash to quickly navigate through the open map, and also to quickly reposition behind the pack of enemies at the beginning of the fight. Note that Dash has 2 charges, so make sure you always have at least 1 charge available when engaging a group of enemies, or you won’t be able to reposition to activate your combo. You won’t need enhancements for this Skill since it’ll be primarily used for movement

Shadow Step

Shadow Step is an essential survivability tool of this Twisting Blades Rogue D4 Build, since your Health and defenses aren’t all that great. When activated, you’ll automatically gain Unstoppable, which removes and prevents all control impairing effects. This allows you to break out of critical situations, such as getting froze or stunned.

In addition, the skill will perform a lucky hit with a 100% chance on the target enemy, and provide you 50% movement speed for 2 seconds, giving you the chance to drink a potion and reposition to a safe place.

You can also use Shadow Step to quickly reposition behind an enemy to take full advantage of the Twisting Blades Boomerang effect, but you should only do this if you are certain you are not going to get affected by a control impairing effect.

You won’t need the enhancement or upgrade, since we’ll be mainly using it as an emergency survival tool.

Passives

For passives of this Diablo 4 Twisting Blades Rogue Build, you’ll be taking Shadow Crash to gain access to Consuming Shadows. Shadow Crash raises the chances of Stunning enemies when they receive Shadow Damage which works great for elites, but the Skill you’ll want more is Consuming Shadows, hence the 2-point investment. This lets you generate all the Energy you spent in the combo, provided that you kill them with the Shadow Imbuement.

The other passive that you’ll want to take are Exploit and Malice.

Exploit increases the damage you deal to both Healthy and Injured enemies. Since you’ll first deal damage to enemies with full health, and then deal with the remaining ones, this passive is active practically all the time.

Malice increases the damage you deal to Vulnerable enemies, which synergizes perfectly with the Blended Shadow Imbuement that makes enemies vulnerable after the explosions.

Rogue Build for Boss Fights

Boss fights are handled a bit differently with this Diablo 4 Twisting Blades Rogue Build. First, you’ll want to swap your specialization from Combo Points for Inner Sight. Inner Sight allows you’ll fill up a gauge when attacking the marked enemy, Bosses are often alone, so you’ll be filling the gauge by attacking it. Once the gauge is full, you’ll gain unlimited energy for 4 seconds. At that moment, you’ll want to spawn your Shadow Clone, cast Shadow Imbuement and then start spamming Twisting Blade as much as you can. As the blades return, they’ll start circling around you, stacking tons of damage into the boss.

Shadow Clone

Shadow Clone is an ultimate ability that will provide you with aid by conjuring your own shadow to copy the actions you’re pulling off. Although the damage won’t be as potent, it’s still a great way of increasing our single target damage. You can also invest in Prime Shadow Clone to have another option to make you Unstoppable every time Shadow Clone is activated.

Make sure to use your dash to avoid boss attacks or to quickly disengage from combat to drink a potion and recover your health. Same as with regular enemies, you’ll want to save Shadow Step for when you are affected by a movement impairing effect. Finally, remember that you can also use your Shadow Clone Ultimate to the same end, thanks to Prime Shadow Clone which provides you Unstoppable for 5 seconds.

Final Tips

For this Diablo 4 Twisting Blades Rogue Build, you should be on the lookout for gear that gives bonuses to Dexterity, Intelligence, Maximum Energy, +Rank to relevant skills, Critical Strike Chance, Critical Strike Damage Bonus, Damage to Close Enemies, Imbuement Skill Damage, Core Skill Damage, Energy Cost Reduction, and Cooldown Reduction. Damage Reduction is also good to pick up where you’re often susceptible to taking in lots of damage in the melee range. It’s a pretty OP D4 Rogue Build due to the massive burst damage you deal.

You can run around the map and stack a couple of enemy groups and engage all of them at the same time for maximum efficiency. Make sure to prioritize positioning over attacking individual targets.

When it comes to Legendary Aspects, you’ll also want to get the Aspect of Lethal Dusk and Ravenous Aspect for this Diablo 4 Build. Lethal Dusk grants Stealth when evading through a Shadow Imbuement infect enemy, which is great if you need to recover or reposition, and on top of that, it will give you a buff that grants you 1~5% of maximum life recovered on kill for 4 seconds. Meanwhile, Ravenous Aspect rewards you with increased Energy regeneration when a Vulnerable enemy is slain, which works hand-in-hand with Blended Shadow Imbuement.

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Be sure to check out our Diablo 4 Wiki for any other questions you have about the game and the Builds page if you are looking for more Diablo IV Builds, as well as our Ultimate Beginner Guide and Best Class to Play if you are looking for more Diablo 4 content!