Best Early Game Rogue Build in Diablo 4

Building out your character is a core component of successfully fighting your way through the challenges of the quests and main story campaign in Diablo 4. Things can get tough quickly, especially on higher difficulties and when going up against things like the World Bosses, so it’s always important to use your skill points to create a build that is strong, effective, and will help you make it through the content without struggling. This guide will offer the best Rogue class leveling build from level 1 to 50, covering the best Aspects, Skill Build, Specializations, Gems and Caged Hearts for Season One.

The Best Rogue Leveling Build for Diablo 4 Season One

Skill Build

For this Rogue build, we’ll focus on getting the most out of the Twisting Blades skill, a strong ability that can easily be scaled with the Rogue’s kit to carry you through the campaign to the endgame. Twisting impales enemies, damaging them and causing them to take increased damage while impaled before the blade returns to you and causes more damage. It’s an ability that focuses on your melee weapons, so you’ll want to keep in mind they’ll take priority over your bow for gearing and upgrades.

For your basic skill, you’ll want to use Puncture for the best energy regeneration. As mentioned above, we’ll be taking Twisting Blades as your core skill because of its incredible damage output. Next, take Shadowstep for its ability to get us out of tough situations thanks to its granting Unstoppable; it also increases movement speed and allows us to stun and damage enemies. We also take Dash for extra mobility. It helps you reposition and get the most out of your Twisting Blades, plus it’s nice to have in the open world to get around faster until you get a mount. Next, we take Dark Shroud for a very nice damage mitigation cooldown, which is especially useful when taking on elites or fighting bosses. Lastly, we take Poison Trap because adding in some damage over time is never a bad idea and we have plenty of passives to scale the damage output of the poison.

You can find a full breakdown of the build here—simply head over to the skill tree tab to see the full skill point allocation.

Aspects

There are only a handful of aspects that really increase the build’s capability as you level. We’ll be applying these to Jewelry as they’re the least replaced pieces of gear. You can focus on swapping out other gear pieces for increased stats as you level. These are the Aspects to keep an eye out for:
Blade Dancer’s Aspect to enable Twisting Blades to Orbit you.
Ravenous Aspect to improve energy generation.
Edgemaster’s Aspect for increased skill damage.  

Rogue Specializations

For the Specialization, we’ll go with Inner Sight. This ability allows us to mark enemies and fill up a gauge, which, once full, provides unlimited energy for 4 seconds. This means we can do a ton of DPS in a 4-second burst window every time we fill up the gauge. 

Gems & Caged Hearts

Gems are simple. Use Emeralds for your Weapon to increase Crit Damage and Rubies for your Armor to increase Life %. Usually, you would take Skulls for the Jewelry slots, but in Season One of Diablo 4, you can get Infested Jewelry sockets and a new socketable item type called Caged Hearts, which are very powerful and far superior to regular gems. You’ll want to be using Caged Hearts in all 3 of your Jewelry sockets and these are the best to use: The Vile Apothecary, Revenge, and The Dark Dance. Swap these in as soon as you get them, but you can use any other Caged Heart that you find that looks decent in the meantime. 

That covers it for the build. If you follow this Rogue build guide for Season One, I guarantee you will have the best Rogue that will see you slaughtering your way through Sanctuary and the main campaign in Diablo 4 with ease! For more, check out our guides for best Necromancer build and best Druid build.

Related: Best DPS Class in Diablo 4 on Gamer Journalist