Diablo 4 Rogue Leveling Build Guide

This leveling build for the Rogue in Diablo 4 focuses on the early game progression of the class, all the way through the campaign's completion. We’ll guide you through the leveling process, including Skill Order and notable Aspect from dungeons.

This Diablo 4 Guide is up-to-date for Patch 1.0.2d

The Rogue in Diablo 4 is one of those classes that like to be quick and flashy with their skills. We’re going to cover a melee-focused build that comes online early and remains effective from level 1 well into the end game.

This Rogue leveling build will assume you’re starting out fresh from Level 1. This means we’re not going to account for the Skill Points from Altars of Lilith or anything else that could possibly come from another character.

To learn more about the available Classes in Diablo 4, read our beginner guide. It will give you more than enough information on each one and show you the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

This Rogue leveling build focuses on the Flurry Skill, using a skill that is better for leveling as it's not as reliant on quick reactions or your positioning. We’ll still be popping packs of enemies with ease and dealing substantial damage thanks to Shadow Imbuement.

This build will still be incredibly mobile thanks to Shadow Step, which helps us get around quickly as well. It’ll also help us break free from Crowd Control, should we get ever get caught by any.

With Dark Shroud there to cover defenses, we won't be as fragile, but we’ll still have to rely a fair bit on our mobility and positioning to stay safe. Eventually, we’ll be able to improve this skill to make it even more reliable and consistent, for when our enemies don't just pop from our damage.

We’ll be looking to use the Combo Point Rogue Specialization for this build, as it’ll greatly boost our damage. We also don't benefit from Inner Sight quite as much as Twisting Blades build would, which really solidifies this choice. Preparation is still an okay choice but offers much less damage for the build.

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 general leveling order.

Invigorating Strike is a great starter skill, thanks to it passively increasing your Energy Generation by 30%. This makes it ideal for many melee builds which often want to generate energy very quickly to use their skills over and over.

When it's upgraded to Fundamental Invigorating Step, it will also become an easy source of applying Vulnerable. Even though it's a single target skill, Flurry can spread the vulnerable effect, which makes this a strong pairing.

Flurry might be a little off-putting to use at first, since it's very directional. However after we get an early aspect for it, it becomes a much better skill overall. With Improved Flurry it’ll spread Vulnerable to everything it hits, while Enhanced Flurry heals you in the process.

If you want to hold off on using Flurry until you get its Aspect, feel free to use Twisting Blades, which is just as strong of a melee offering, provided you get used to the mechanics of it.

Shadow Step is a very low cooldown and reliable way to not only move from enemy to enemy, but also break free from crowd control. It does fairly good damage in addition to also boosting our movement speed for a short duration.

Once we upgrade it to Disciplined Shadow Step, it’ll be even better as doing what it already does. Having it on a lower cooldown in general makes it just that much better.

Dark Shroud is the Rogue premiere defensive skill, offering a fairly consistent way of mitigating damage. While you will lose these defensive shadows each time you get hit, we’re able to fix this later with an aspect to make it even more reliable.

You could upgrade Dark Shroud either way, but we recommend Countering Dark Shroud. This extra Critical Strike Chance bonus works really well with the build, especially early on where it’ll be tough to get it otherwise.

Shadow Inmbuement allows us to deal Shadow Damage for a couple of skills. If these skill defeat enemies though, they’ll explode and deal damage to other nearby enemies. Once we get Flurry's Aspect, this will cascade and just make entire packs of enemies disappear.

We’ll take this to Blended Shadow Imbuement for the extra Vulnerable application, but Mixed Shadow Imbuement can also work just as well to make that cascade of explosions even better.

Shadow Clone is a great ultimate Skill all around. Not only does it give us extra damage, it can also be used as a panic button to get out of Crowd Control if we can't use Shadow Step. Since it echoes all of our skills, it’ll be our main way of improving our Single Target damage.

Alternatively, if you don't find yourself enjoying Shadow Clone, you can opt to also take Poison Imbuement for better single-target damage, as Poisoning is quite good at that, if you don't mind the damage over time aspect.

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.

As a melee build, we have a choice between Momentum and Victimize for Key Passives. Since Flurry has a very low Lucky Hit Chance, Momentum wins out here. We definitely have more than enough AoE already anyways.

This grants us a stack system that at full stacks, we get Damage reduction, Energy Regeneration, and Movement Speed. We can even get an Aspect to add some healing to this as well, which gives us just about everything we need short of damage.

As a melee Build, the damage reduction from Sturdy will help us out quite a bit, as we’ll be close to enemies very often. While it won't protect us much from ranged enemies, it's still great to pick up, but not a priority to max.

Siphoning Strikes can be a "one-point wonder" honestly, but if we get enough crit, it can very easily provide a ton of extra sustain. With Flurry hitting multiple times and giving multiple chances to land a Critical Strike, it's a good investment.

Exploit is a huge damage increase, granting multiplicative damage bonuses against Healthy and Injured enemies. With a lot of our goal being you make enemies simply pop and disappear, this is a great pick up.

Thanks to being able to readily apply Vulnerable, Malice will do plenty to help boost our damage. It's another multiplicative bonus we can take advantage of very easily, which makes it valuable.

Precision Imbuement is a little bit of a tricky one to consistently benefit from, but we’ll have not trouble making use of it thanks to Shadow Imbuement. It’ll be far from a permanent bonus, the early critical strike chance is very valuable for the build.

With Shadow Imbuement being a core part of this Rogue leveling build, Consuming Shadows can be quite effective at what it does. With a Shadow-imbued Flurry popping enemies very quickly, we’ll get back a ton of energy letting us use Flurry even more.

We’ll start our leveling by taking Invigorating Strike and Enhanced Invigorating Strike. This will allow us to get our Core Skills, where we’ll take Flurry and upgrade it to Improved Flurry. Then we can go back and pick up Fundamental Invigorating Strike.

After this, we’re able to get to our Agility Skills. Here we’ll grab Shadow Step and upgrade it to Disciplined Shadow Step. Then we’ll go grab a point in Sturdy and Siphoning Strikes so we can access our Subterfuge Skills.

In our Subterfuge Skills, we’ll be grabbing Dark Shroud and upgrading it to Countering Dark Shroud. Then we’ll grab two points in Exploit, so we can access our Imbuement skills.

For Imbuement Skills, we’ll be grabbing Shadow Imbuement and upgrading it to Blended Shadow Imbuement. Then we can go back and grab the last point in Exploit as well as max out Malice to get to our Ultimate Skills.

Here we’ll pick up Shadow Clone and upgrade it to Supreme Shadow Clone. After this, we’ll head back to Flurry and finally max out its level. In the Core Skills section, we’ll max out Sturdy, and can also do the same for Siphoning Strikes if desired.

Then we can pick up our Key passive, Momentum. Shadow Step sets us up to be able to stack it quickly with Flurry, then we only need to maintain it. After this, we get to go back and pick up the passives we want for the build.

In the Imbuement section, we can pick up and max Precision Imbuement as well as grab Shadow Crash to be able to pick up Consuming Shadows which we can opt to max for a fairly consistent boost of Energy.

Finally, we recommend going back to max out the level for Dark Shroud, which makes it grants a much higher damage reduction per shadow.

All said and done, we’ll end up at Level 41-45 after this, which is around the time we’d also be finishing up the campaign.

This section sums up the Leveling Process in an easier-to-reference format.

In this section, we’ll cover the Aspects you’ll want to grab from dungeons as you can, as well as ones to keep an out for to help the build along. We’ll also talk about the uniques that can help the build out in a few ways, though these will be fairly rare compared to the aspects.

These are Aspects awarded for completing specific dungeons, which you can use to boost your power without relying on luck.

Aspect of Encircling Blades not only makes Flurry a fully circular AoE around us, but gives it an additional multiplicative damage bonus, talk about a huge win. This makes Flurry way less tricky to use and massive increases the number of enemies you can pop with a Shadow-imbued Flurry.

This Aspect becomes available in your Codex of Power after clearing the Forsaken Quarry dungeon in Fractured Peaks.

The Enshrouding Aspect allows you to passively recover Dark Shoud Shadows while also further boosting the damage reduction they offer. The only downside is that yo have to stand still to recover shadows, but it's a good way to stack the em back up out of combat, letting you keep the cooldown for when they run low in combat.

The Enshrouding Aspect is available in your Codex of Power after completion of the Ghoa Ruins dungeon in Hawezar.

While this doesn't add a ton of damage, this will however allow Dark Shroud to be a passive source of damage. Since this is Shadow Damage as well, if it happens to finish off an enemy it can also trigger Consuming Shadows, which will grant energy.

The Aspect of Volatile Shadows is available in your Codex of Power after completion of the Ancient's Lament dungeon in Dry Steppes.

The Aspect of Unstable Imbuements adds a damaging explosion around use when we use an Imbuement skill, which in this case will deal Shadow Damage. Much like the Aspect of Volatile Shadows, this can trigger Consuming Shadows for us, in addition to the damage, helping with Energy management.

The Aspect of Unstable Imbuements is available in your Codex of Power after completion of the Whispering Vault dungeon in Dry Steppes.

Easily a top-tier defensive Aspect, Aspect of the Protector will grain us an additional Barrier when we damage an Elite. This means extra defenses for the encounters when we really need them. Being available really early on adds to this value.

The Aspect of the Protector is available in your Codex of Power after completion of the Lost Archives dungeon in Fractured Peaks.

Edgemaster's Aspect is a great Offensive Aspect that increases our damage based on how much of our resource we have remaining. This is also a Multipicative Damage bonus, which is exceptionally valuable for an Aspect.

The Edgemaster's Aspect is available in your Codex of Power after completion of the Oldstones dungeon in Scosglen.

Unlike Dungeon Aspects, these are not as reliably accessible, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for them as you play.

The aspect of Stolen Vigor is a great way to add extra value to the momentum Key passive, granting us a good bit of life per second for each stack of Momentum. It's mostly passive sustain that will definitely help for longer encounters or as we sprint through dungeons.

Ravager's Aspect is great just for the extra charge of Shadow Step, which help to quickly stack Momentum. The fact that it can refund its cooldown and boost its damage when it defeats an enemy is a nice bonus as well making it a fairly potent attack.

The Aspect of Imitated Imbuement allows our Clone to also use Imbued Skills. This one is more of an optional choice to help boost the damage from our Shadow Clone, but is a fantastic pick-up if we take Poison Imbuement as a swap for bossing.

We’re only going to talk about the few that offer the strongest effects to 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. Keep in mind these won't drop until you enter World Tier 3, which is possible by the end of the leveling process

While Mother's Embrace is a unique ring available to all classes, it's exceptionally powerful for builds that use an AoE Core Skill like this one. In addition to the Energy Refund it gives us for hitting multiple targets, we get a ton of stats we want, like Crit Chance and Crit Damage.

Condemnation is a Dagger that works with the Combo Points Specialization, which is the preferred option for this build. It offers a great multiplicative bonus while granting a chance for our basic Skill to instantly create 3 Combo Points to use. This can allow Flurry to rack up a ton of damage very quickly.

Ashera's Khanjar is another Dagger that can find use in this build. It gives us a stacking Attack Speed boost, which isn't super impactful, but can still boost our overall dps by making Flurry a faster skill.

Now, Skyhunter is a bow which means it's a stat stick at best. But it has an exceptionally strong effect on it isn't worded in a way that implies it only applies to itself. This makes your first instance of damage against an enemy a Critical Strike. While we don't get any use out of the secondary effect, if this effect triggers for any skill, can be worth slotting for that alone until we have a high Critical Strike Rate.

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