Diablo 4 Rogue Bow Build – Freezing Rain – In this Diablo 4 Rogue Build Guide, I’m going to be showing you my Freezing Rain Build, a continuation of the Cold Archer build based off the beta version rather than the live one, as we are using the Rapid Fire skill.

Diablo 4 Rogue Build – Freezing Rain

There are a couple of reasons I was finally able to make a Rapid Fire build that I was happy with. The first one is its repeating aspect, which means Rapid Fire has up to a 90% chance to ricochet to another target when put on a two-handed weapon. This would ideally be on your bow as you want every chance to ricochet as possible. The drawback of using Rapid Fire is that it tends to hit in a straight line, very rarely getting any AOE. However, this is compensated by these ricochets, making it much more viable.

The other reason is the fact that you can use it without having any energy problems through the use of the Exploit Glyph. This Glyph’s additional bonus causes enemies damaged by you to become Vulnerable for three seconds – although it cannot happen more than once every 20 seconds. And since we don’t have a way to naturally apply the Vulnerable status, this becomes a great way to get additional Vulnerable Damage, making them go down really fast.

The way this solves our energy problem is through the Improved Rapid Fire upgrade, which makes it so that you gain 15 energy per cast of Rapid Fire when it damages a Vulnerable enemy while costing 20 energy. So you only net lose 5 energy when using this, which is usually more than enough to get you through most Boss Fights.

Enhanced Concealment & Aftermath

However, if for some reason this is not enough energy, we also have the Enhanced Concealment upgrade of Concealment, and the Aftermath passive maxed out. Enhanced Concealment gives you 40 energy when you enter Concealment, while Aftermath gives you 75 energy when you use your ultimate skill, something you use regularly with this build.

And that’s because we have the Preparation Specialization, which makes it so that for every hundred energy you spend, you reduce your ultimate skill cooldown by 4 seconds. So basically, every five rapid fires it’s going to shave 4 seconds off your Rain of Arrows skill. And since we have no need for a basic attack, we can just keep using Rapid Fire to attack every enemy we see, making this happen very regularly.

Rain of Arrows – Ultimate Skill

Rain of Arrows is absolutely amazing in this build. I feel like it belongs in a marksman-type build or any range-type build. You can use this thing through walls to just wipe out rooms of enemies, it knocks them down and it takes your imbuement into account. And because we’re using the unique Word of Hakan Amulet, it also applies all imbuements every time you use this, meaning you’re going to freeze enemies, poison them and inflict them with a Shadow Imbuement, making them explode when you kill them. This makes it absolutely devastating.

Shadow Clone – Ultimate Skill

However, if you don’t have this Unique Amulet yet, I recommend using Shadow Clone. I like to swap this out anyway for World Bosses where Rain of Arrows isn’t really that effective.

Rain of Arrows is more suited against lots of enemies, whereas Shadow Clone is a more ‘‘focused’’ skill. There is an aspect that you can apply to your equipment as well that allows you to apply the imbuements you use to your Shadow Clone, so you can help freeze around the room, slowing things down a bit more until more damage.

Cold Imbuement – Imbuement Skill

Cold Imbuement makes it so that we can freeze and chill enemies, increasing the damage dealt to them via the Frigid Finesse passive and also through the Control Glyph that we have. This last one increases our damage against crowd-controlled enemies, as well as chilled and frozen enemies, so we get a lot of damage to Frozen enemies here.

I challenged myself when putting this build together not to use other Imbuements. I don’t have Shadow or Poison here. There are a lot of archery builds out there with it, including my own builds. But I wanted to just make it fully frozen with this build and see if it was viable. And it absolutely is.

Concealment – Subterfuge Skill

Besides this, as I mentioned earlier, I have concealment and what this allows you to do is become Unstoppable, as you go invisible, and I have it set to make my next attack critically strike.

And what I really love about this skill is, firstly, if you do get CC, this will bust you out of it and get you out of a bad situation. Second, it’ll boost your movement speed thus allowing you to run away from unexpected threats. If you open a door and you’re like ‘‘Oh crap, there’s a whole bunch of enemies!’’, you can run away really quickly, and also that instant critical when you come out of it is fantastic if you coupled with Rain of Arrows.

There is nothing like dropping an all-crit Rain of Arrows on a room of enemies only to watch them all explode.

Also, as mentioned earlier, you can use it in a pinch to get some energy as well. Just remember that you only have Vulnerability on enemies for the first three seconds, so you need to kill them quickly otherwise you’re going to run out of energy.

Smoke Grenade – Subterfuge Skill

And we also have Smoke Grenade here, which I absolutely love in this build. This dazes enemies in a small AOE, who are then unable to attack or use skills. And the reason this is so fantastic is that a lot of times you are facing a really nasty elite of sorts, and hitting them with this leaves them completely disabled, nullifying some of the most dangerous elites in the game.

Additionally, we have it upgraded so that it increases the damage we do to things that are affected by Smoke Grenade, so if you throw it into a crowd you’re going to deal more damage. We also have the Countering Smoke Grenade, so on Lucky Hit, dealing direct damage to enemies affected by Smoke Grenade has a 25% chance to reduce its cooldown by one second, or by three seconds instead if the enemy is Vulnerable.

Well, we have a lot of vulnerability in this build, making the cooldown of this get reset rather easily. We do have some ways of getting extra Lucky Hit, but this makes it able to use Smoke Grenade more often.

Also, a really good synergy happens between Smoke Grenade and Frost as Frostblitz Aspect makes chilled enemies hit by your grenade skills have a chance equal to double your critical strike chance to be instantly frozen for two seconds. So if you drop Caltrops that’s cold damage, enemies get chilled and you can then throw this to have a chance to instantly freeze some of them, drastically boosting your damage against them. It also natively increases your Critical Strike damage against frozen enemies, which is fantastic because we’re dealing with frozen enemies a lot.

Caltrops – Agility Skill

Caltrops is an AOE that shoots you backward and does a little bit of damage, sets Chilled on enemies that walk in it, and causes cold damage.

This skill is great for scenarios in which you are caught off-guard by a bunch of enemies when entering a room. Hitting Caltrops will automatically kick you backward and make them crowd-controlled. So you’ll get that boost and damage from crowd control. But also, they’re chilled, so you get that boost and damage to chilled as well. And then if you lob your Smoke Grenade in there, you might freeze some of them so they can’t really do anything, leaving you to just go to town with Cold Imbuement on them, or if you’re really desperate, pop Rain of Arrows and that’s over.

Skill Distribution

Each Diablo 4 Rogue Build comprises 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 Freezing Rain Rogue Diablo 4 Build. By the time you reach Level 50, you’ll approximately have 58 points, assuming that you’ve accumulated enough Renown from different regions to gain 10 extra points. So your Skill distribution should look something like this:

LEVEL 50+ ROGUE SKILLS
Skill	Points Spent
Puncture	1
Enhanced Puncture	1
Fundamental Puncture	1
Rapid Fire	8 (+3 from Gear)
Enhanced Rapid Fire	1
Improved Rapid Fire	1
Caltrops	1
Enhanced Caltrops	1
Methodical Caltrops	1
Weapon Mastery	3
Agile	3
Concealment	3 (+2 from Gear)
Enhanced Stealth	1
Countering Stealth	1
Smoke Grenade	1
Enhanced Smoke Grenade	1
Countering Smoke Grenade	1
Exploit	3
Precision Imbuement	3
Cold Imbuement	7 (+2 from Gear)
Enhanced Cold Imbuement	1
Mixed Cold Imbuement	1
Frigid Finesse	3
Chilling Weight	1
Innervation	3
Aftermath	3
Adrenaline Rush	3
Haste	3
Rain of Arrows	1
Prime Rain of Arrows	1
Supreme Rain of Arrows	1
Victimize	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 Freezing Rain Rogue Build – Equipment, Gems & Aspects

So that’s really the core concept of the build. There isn’t really any gear that you must have for this build to work beside some things that will obviously make it better, like the Word of Hakan, but nothing mandatory really.

The most important part here is getting the Exploit Glyph and slotting that to get the bonus, as it’s going to drastically boost your damage, putting Vulnerable on everything you attack. Having plus vulnerable damage on your equipment could mean you’re getting up to 70%~100% more damage on enemies, and obviously, getting those resources back every time you attack them allows you to just keep attacking, facilitating this strategy.

The way I accomplished this was by picking from Cunning Stratagem Node, which doesn’t help us at all as we don’t use combo points for this build, and using them to get the Exploit passive bonus.

Also, there are a lot of nodes that increase your core skill damage and since most of our damage comes from Rapid Fire, that worked out nicely.

Passive: Victimize

So for my Key Passive here, I’m using Victimize. On Lucky Hit, dealing direct damage to a vulnerable enemy has up to a 30% chance to cause an explosion, dealing 23% of the original damage to them and surrounding enemies.

Given you are spreading Vulnerable around, this is easy to do and allows you to get more AOE damage – which is great since Barrage is lacking in AOE damage.

It also synergizes well with Aspect of Cruel Sustenance, which makes explosions triggered by this passive heal you – a good way to give you some extra healing while you just sit there and gun enemies down. However, if you find you’re not taking too much damage, I would recommend taking the Precision Key Passive to further boost your damage.

Frankly, you don’t really get hit too much with this build – things just die. I tend to stay off the edge of the screen, particularly when I’m doing way higher-level Nightmare Dungeons than myself so that I don’t get hit. A lot of people have been joking that this is the ‘‘door build’’ because I stand in the doorway shooting, very rarely going into a room.

But if you like playing a long-range build then you don’t necessarily need this, as you’re not going to take a lot of damage – I just frankly like it for the extra healing and the explosions for AOE damage.

Armor

Cowl of the Nameless – Helm

On my helm, I have Cowl of the Nameless. This gives me cooldown reduction which is great for our ultimate crowd control duration. It gives us more energy and it gives you a Lucky Hit chance increase against crowd-controlled enemies.

Again, this isn’t mandatory for this build but it’s very nice, as it helps with Lucky Hit against things that we’re doing, basically. Everything should be crowd-controlled a lot of the time, particularly when you’re using Frost, Caltrops, and your Smoke Grenade. All those things are considered crowd control – so it’s very nice to have.

Grasp of Shadow – Gloves

Also, I have Grasp of Shadow unique here. It has attack speed as well as vulnerable damage. Both of those are good for this build. It also has Shadow Clone Damage, so if you’re using the Shadow Clone ultimate, this is good as well as Ranks to Core Skills.

It also makes it so on Lucky Hit, damaging a vulnerable enemy with a marksman or cutthroat skill has up to a 30% chance to summon the shadow clone that mimics your attack. This is fantastic for this build because you are hitting vulnerable enemies all the time, and you having that means you have a decent lucky hit chance, getting you extra damage from the shadow clone.

Accelerating & Vengeful Aspects

I also have Accelerating Aspect, which makes it so critical strikes with core skills increase your attack speed by up to 25%. This makes you attack faster, getting out damage faster.

In addition, I have the Vengeful Aspect, which on Lucky Hit making an enemy vulnerable has up to a 50% chance to grant +3% increased critical strike chance for three seconds, up to 9%. This triggers all the time because we’re continuously spreading Vulnerable around, so you’re going to get your critical strike chance up with no problem.

Smiting Band

This increases your critical strike chance against enemies that are below 35% health and increases your crowd control duration if you’re healthy by up to 40%. Both of these are great because when you are running low on energy, if a fight runs long, you want to have an increased critical strike chance against those enemies to finish them off. Also, if you fire Rain of Arrows into a room or Caltrops when you’re at full health, enemies will be chilled or frozen longer, allowing you to fire into them more.

Inner Calm

And then lastly, I have Aspect of Inner Calm, which makes it so the longer you stand still, the more damage you do. You tend to stand still a lot with this build as you don’t really need to move much.

And another aspect you should absolutely look out for, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to get, is the Mangler’s Aspect, which on Lucky Hit, dealing direct damage to a vulnerable enemy has up to a 45% chance to daze them for two seconds. Remember that dazed enemies cannot attack you or use skills, so you could theoretically daze things all over the screen that can attack you – and this is also considered crowd control. So any extra damage you have to crowd-controlled enemies or dazed enemies will kick into effect, dealing more damage to them. So this is just really, really good to have.

Overview

So that wraps up our Freezing Rain build. This is a fantastic build, probably the favorite one I put together so far. The Cold Archer in the beta was what I wanted to make into my build and with these things I was able to finally see this thing come into fruition, and it works phenomenally. So if you’ve been looking for a good Range Archer that just uses Cold, freezing and absolutely wrecking things, this is the build for you.

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