Shadow Daggers Marksman Build Guide

Good Single Target Damage

Great Clear Speed

Fast And Fun Monolith Farmer

Shadow Daggers

No Bugs

High Mana Cost

Requires Good Gear For Endgame Dmg Scaling

Single Target Dmg Relies On Enemies With Big Hitbox For Puncture

Unique Heavy In Endgame

Defensive Stats Management

Shadow Daggers

Shadow Daggers is an ailment that you can apply on a target. Once it reaches 4 stacks the daggers plunge into the target dealing physical melee and throwing damage. The damage ALWAYS crits. Shadow Daggers has 68 base Physical damage and scales with Dexterity. Each added flat melee or throwing damage source applies at 340% effectiveness.

Gameplay

The gameplay and skill rotation is relatively easy. You pretty much cast Shift and Smoke Bomb whenever they are off cooldown. In the meantime we attack with Puncture to apply Shadow Daggers stacks to kill trash mobs and bosses while Shifting around to reposition and by dealing additional damage with the Shadow Daggers procs from Shadow Cascade. Shadow Cascade always procs after we use Shift so with this setup alone we have good AoE coverage and clear speed. Be careful with your mana pool while attacking with Puncture. The skill has a high mana cost because of the shotgun ability from Penumbral Ambush.

On Bosses or stronger enemies we use Smoke Bomb and try to stand within the generated smoke to deal additional damage. We have a perma uptime of Smoke Bomb with Shadow String. Shadows that we expire when using Shift inside of Smoke Bomb will generate more mana via Onslaught and proc Umbral Blades that also scales with flat throwing/cold damage.

Mana Sustain

Puncture costs 11 mana (15 base - 4 from Mind Piercer 4/4) with each cast and we are stacking high attack speed. I would highly recommend to reach a minimum of 16 mana regeneration in the character sheet. 18-19 is our goal in endgame. Shift and Smoke Bomb will help out with mana sustain.

Defense

We are a Marksman, so be prepared to play a squishy class that needs to be mobile to survive. You won't be able to fully facetank every monster in the game. Knowing boss or monster abilities while also being able to kite a lot will greatly improve your survivability.

Mechanically we trust our HP pool (2k+), capped Resistances, 100% Crit Avoidance, Life on Hit, 60% Endurance, High Movement Speed, Dodge and Glancing Blow.

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.

It is really important to get defensive ailments like Frailty, Chill and Slow on our gear to help out while staying at range.

Your playstyle and game knowledge is responsible for you survivability at the end. Try to learn the game, be patient and have fun!

The whole Skill/Passive Tree Progression is already included in the Build Guide.

The Build Guide is made for a fresh SSF experience with no uniques available.

That's why i recommend to start using Puncture without Penumbral Ambush first, so that you don't have to worry on high mana regeneration on gear.

Try to target farm or use Rune of Ascendance for the required/recommended uniques in this order:

1. Mourningfrost (most important unique for dmg scaling)
2. Shadow String (only makes sense with Penumbral Ambush because of high mana cost and the ability to cast Shift twice for better mana sustain)
3. Li'raka's Claws (another great unique for dmg scaling)
4. Siphon of Anguish (easy to target farm)
5. Peak of the Mountain (easy to target farm, only recommended with 2LP/3LP+)
6. Throne of Ambition (good for additional dmg in endgame)
7. Arrowguard (only if you need more Armour and Glancing Blow)

If you already have all uniques you can start using Penumbral Ambush early on. I would recommend to have at least 18-19 mana regeneration in the character sheet.

Don't forget, the build mechanically works without all the listed uniques. They are just a great addition to the build.

Once you have all the recommended uniques, your main goal is to target farm them again for legendary potential.

As you can see in my build guide video, my gear is not perfect and i could easily farm 200 corruption monolith probably to around 300-400.

I would not recommend to play this build in arena. Use it as a pure monolith farmer. T4 Bosses are possible with this build but requires game knowledge and player skill.

The most important thing is to enjoy it and play the content that you prefer.

The build is using a bow. How can you trigger Shadow Cascade and the kill threshold node with Shift? It says ''if using a melee weapon''.

Both Dancing Shadows and Consumed by Shadow work while wielding a bow. I think it's just a tooltip bug because both interactions work since Rogue came out in 0.8.

I hope EHG will adjust this tooltip because i really like the interaction and it opens up more build variety with different weapon types.

Normally i don't like to abuse bugs. But this already feels like a day 1 feature to me :)