Best Diablo 4 Rogue build in Season 5 for levelling & endgame

If you're all about the damage in Diablo 4, gearing your Rogue up with a quality build and the right levelling will let you burst down some of the toughest enemies.

They're light-footed, and take a lot of damage, but they can dish out even more if you know what you're doing.

What is the best Rogue build?

According to Maxroll.gg, one of the best Rogue builds for levelling in Season 5 of Diablo 4 currently revolves around the Penetrating Shot ability - and will catapult you through the levels and towards success.

This is primarily a ranged build for the Rogue, as the Penetrating Shot ability is one of your Core Skills that allows you to attack from afar and pierce through groups of enemies. This does, of course, come with the downside that you'll have to be on your toes with consistently managing your position on the battlefield.

Here's a full list of the skills and abilities that you'll want to employ within the Penetrating Shot Rogue build in Diablo 4 for the current meta:

Penetrating Shot Rogue Active Skills list

These Active Skills combine to make an extremely dangerous ranged build that lets you deal with crowds and single targets quickly and effectively. The Rogue is well known for its high damage output, and this class more than displays this in action.

Penetrating Shot Rogue Passive Skills list

These Passive Skills will only continue to boost the sheer damage potential of the build, enhancing almost every aspect of your skillset to ensure that any enemy becomes merely a momentary hurdle in your journey.

Rogue Specialisation

You can pick one of three specialisations for the Rogue, giving you powerful passive effects. I recommend the following:

• Combo Points - Use Basic Skills to boost your subsequent Core Skills

Essentially, this displays a bar next to your XP bar, and when you use a Basic Skill, it will grant you Combo Points. Using a Core Skill will then spend these points, boosting its damage and effects.

With how rapid-fire you can be with the Rogue's skills, this is a powerful tool to add on. It also doesn't require much additional management, as you just use your skills as normal, but with extra damage potential.

Penetrating Shot item stats list

As is the case with many of the best builds for any of Diablo 4's classes in the current meta, it's less the specific weapons that you're after and more the stat boosts and effects that you'll want to integrate within your equipment.

Here are the stats that you will want to try and integrate into your equipment in Diablo 4 when using the Penetrating Shot Rogue build:

Weapons

• Critical Strike Damage
• Dexterity
• Maximum Life

Armour

• Cooldown reduction
• Maximum Life
• Ranks to Penetrating Shot
• Ranks to Dark Shroud
• Critical Strike Damage
• Attack Speed
• Dodge Chance
• Dexterity
• Energy per Second

Jewellery

• Cooldown reduction
• Movement speed
• Dexterity
• Critical Strike chance
• Critical Strike damage
• Attack Speed

You are almost guaranteed success if you get as many of the stats listed above in your weapons, armour, and jewellery, so keep an eye out on your travels.

Legendary Aspects

Legendary Aspects are also a key part of maximising your potential, allowing you to imprint extra effects onto Rare or Legendary items. The three I recommend are:

• Trickshot Offensive Aspect - Whenever Penetrating Shot damages an enemy, 2 additional arrows split off to either side. These side arrows deal [10-25]% of Penetrating Shot's Base damage and don't split
• Rapid Offensive Aspect - Basic skills gain [15-30]% Attack Speed
• Offensive Aspects of the Expectant - After attacking enemies with a Basic Skill, increase the damage of your next Core Skill cast within 5 seconds by [5-10]% up to 30%

Best Gems for Rogues

Essentially being a glass cannon with high damage output potential at the cost of low survivability, the best Rogue gems to use in Diablo 4 are ideal for further boosting the class' damage and for making your build more durable. 

Listed below along with their uses, the best Rogue gems in Diablo 4 for the Season 5 meta are as follows:

Best endgame Rogue build in Season 5

While Twisting Blades was the go-to endgame Rogue build for a long while, in Season 5 it's best to just stick with the Penetrating Shot build that I've laid out above.

By all means you can still stick with a Twisting Blades build if you're running it right now, as it still remains a super strong way to deal up-close cluster damage, but the ranged aspect of the Penetrating Shot focus gives it the edge, especially when you're facing the toughest bosses.

Just make sure that you're taking advantage of the crafting and item-boosting methods available from the Season of Loot, like the new Masterwork and Ancestral Tempering mechanics that can seriously enhance your gear.

How good is the Rogue in Diablo 4?

According to the latest version of our Diablo 4 PvE class tier list, the Rogue sits in the S tier as the best solo class, while also dropping slightly to B tier when it comes to group play.

While the Rogue does have the lowest health pool of all classes in Season 5, the sheer amount of damage you can deal completely outweighs this fault, making the Rogue the top choice if you know what you're doing - which you can be if you use the builds below.

This perhaps makes playing as the Rogue not the best choice for beginners in Diablo 4, but anyone who is able to manage their positioning and stay on top of their healing is almost guaranteed to have great success.

Furthermore, there is no better class in the game for players who value speed over everything, so if you're a lover of all things fast, then you might want to give our dagger-wielding friend a try.

With the introduction of Season 5 too, there is no better time than now to try out the Rogue as you can jump straight in with a completely fresh seasonal character.

We used a variety of resources, including Maxroll and IcyVeins, as well as our own experience with the game when putting this build together.

If you mainly use a different class in Diablo 4 or want to try something new, we've got the best build guides for the other classes listed below:

• Druid build
• Barbarian build
• Sorcerer build
• Necromancer build