Build Mechanics
The main concept behind this build is to create Shadows with Synchronized Strike and Shift, allowing them to imitate all your buffs and stats for Shadow Cascade. The overlap of those Cascades are able to shotgun to reach high single target damage.
There are two major damage multipliers in the Shadow Cascade tree Leveraged Momentum 3/3 and Careful Assault 4/4 we want to focus on to reach those high numbers:
- Attacking with Shadow Cascade while 4 Shadows are up will grant you the huge 100% more damage multiplier. Shift starts to snapshot this multiplier with Dancing Shadows after your first Shadow Cascade self cast, even though it leaves behind the 5th Shadow (Lasting Presence) with Shadow Master 5/5. The 5th Shadow though appears after Shadow Cascade is getting triggered. That's why we can benefit from the 100% increased Shadow Damage.
- If you look into the Shadow Cascade skilltree it seems like a waste to stack melee attack speed since Crushing Darkness will not longer allow attack speed scaling. This is true for the actual self cast animation of Shadow Cascade. Leveraged Momentum 3/3 still allows you to scale the damage output with your melee attack speed stat though. We will benefit from Swift Assassin 8/8 (24%), Veil of Night 5/5 (15%), Flash of Steel 5/8(12%), Art of the Blade 5/5 (25%) and up to 15% on gloves (T5) getting a total of 91% melee attack speed = around 55% more damage.
Shadow Cascade has (for whatever reason) a base crit chance of 10% making it extremely easy to reach high crit chance numbers with a small investement from passives and gear. Therefore we can simply focus on Katanas for the strong critical strike multiplier and most importantly defensive layers like SuffixDodge Rating and a 100% capped Glancing Blow via certain passives like Weapons of Choice 8/8 during combat (around 4-6 extra Dusk Shroud stacks).
Skill Rotation
There are multiple ways how you can play this build depending on the situation and content you currently farm.
The main rotation on bosses or high hp monsters i would recommend looks like this:
It's basically a 1-2-1-3-1-2-1-3 pattern. We can always keep the damage output high since we can manually cast Shadow Cascade while Shift is on cooldown in between.
The main rotation in monolith looks like this:
Shift - Synchronized Strike - Shadow Cascade (first time to snapshot Shift with dmg multipliers) - Shift - Synchronized Strike - Shift ... repeat
On trash mobs you simply continue to press Shift after Sync Strike for fast clearing. Whenever a boss or high hp enemy appears you add Shadow Cascade after Sync Strike to bypass the Shift cooldown for higher damage output as mentioned above. Check out the Video Build Guide and Gameplay to get a better overview of this rotation.
Mana Sustain
The build starts to feel smooth and you will have no more mana issues once you achieve this setup:
- Shift - Swift Recovery 4/4.
- Synchronized Strike - Dynamics 3/3.
- Shadow Cascade - Onslaught + Fight In The Shadows 2/2.
- Umbral Blades - Nightmare Dash.
- Around 17/18 mana regeneration in character sheet.
- At least one flat mana source on gear (recommended on gloves as a prefix).
Important note: You can also simply leave out Dark Allies in the beginning which results in a lower damage output while also reducing the mana cost of Synchronized Strike making it more comfortable to play.
Defense
Mechanically we trust our HP pool (3k+), capped Resistances, 100% Crit Avoidance, high Life Leech and over 1k Life recovery with Synchronized Strike and Skiasynthesis, 60% Endurance, High Movement Speed, decent Armour/Dodge and 100% Glancing Blow during combat.
A good player can mostly survive using Silver Shroud at the right time. Rogue is pretty much vulnerable to one-shots. The guaranteed dodge can help you out.
We can easily get Frailty and Chill on our Katanas, Slow will be provided by the recall mechanic from Umbral Blades.
Knowing boss or monster abilities while also being able to kite a lot will greatly improve your survivability.
Your playstyle and game knowledge is responsible for you survivability at the end. Try to learn the game, be patient and have fun!
