Rouges are fast-moving, damage-dealing masters of both blades and bows in Diablo 4, but they're not always the easiest class to play. While rogues have the potential to blaze through the story faster than any other class, you'll need to level them in the right way to do so, balancing both damage and damage mitigation as well as possible.

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There are plenty of builds that can strike this delicate balance, but some work better than others. If you're trying to get to max level as fast as possible, here's how you should level your rouge, the items you should grab, and which gems you should prioritize.

Best Skills For Leveling

Rouges are one of the best classes in the game when it comes to leveling builds, and standing atop all those viable rogue builds, is the high-risk, high-reward Twisting Blades build. This build will have your character zipping through packs of enemies, decimating minions and elites alike with devastating AOE attacks and consistent crowd control, and it's all possible with the namesake of the build: the Twisting Blades Skill.

Twisting Blades is a devastatingly powerful melee attack that plants blades in an enemy before pulling them back to your current location after a few seconds, damaging anything that happens to be in the path. This works great for both single target and crowd control purposes, but it comes with one major downside: You'll have to stay close and personal with very few healing or damage reduction options.

Agility skills like Dash and Shadow Step are key to this build since they'll let you line up better paths for your blades to return to you, and if you're ever in a tight spot, you can use these abilities to get to safety. The Shadow Imbuement Skill adds a whole new dimension to your AOE potential by causing all the minions to explode when killed by your imbued Twisting Blades, and with a few upgrades, this also serves as an energy generation and Vulnerable creation avenue.

For the final skill, this build opts for Poison Trap instead of an ultimate skill. While Shadow Clone is a viable and interesting alternative, the additional stun and damage over time of Poison Trap make it a valuable tool to disable troublesome elites and speed the fight along even when you have to retreat. The additional critical strike and crowd-controlled synergies implicit in Poison Trap act as icing on top and help it merge into the build seamlessly.

This build uses quite a few passives to help take the edge off of the damage and provide some additional utility. While it might be tempting to go with a skill like Dark Shroud instead, you'll end up hurting your potential in combat severely as you'll either have to give up the additional damage from Shadow Imbuement or the crowd control from Poison Trap. Instead, it's much better to grit your teeth a bit in the early levels and wait until you can unlock the Momentum Key Passive with your thirty-fourth skill point.

For energy generation, the main strategy is to use Shadow Imbuement to kill a handful of minions, as with two levels in Consuming Shadows, you'll only need to kill five at a time to fully replenish your energy pool. When there are no minions around, however, or when you don't even have enough energy to cast Twisting Blades, you can rely on Puncture with its additional energy generation upgrade and the Lucky Hit effect that the Innervation passive gives to keep you topped up.

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Best Gear & Stats

Another advantage of the Twisting Blades build is that it doesn't rely on your gear all that much for damage. Everything you need to create devastating combos is included in the skills, but the affixes on your armor can help you out quite a bit in terms of making you more survivable.

The main effects you'll want to look for solve key problems with the build. Life regeneration lets you better utilize a hit-and-run style and conserve your healing potions while critical hit chance will increase your total damage and give you more chances to benefit from the Siphoning Strikes passive. Dexterity is also an amazing stat for this build since it'll provide both more damage and an additional dodge chance.

Of course, while armor can help you solve the survivability issue with this build, more damage is more damage. Keep an eye out for armor that buffs your raw damage, all of your stats, and damage to states that you put enemies in frequently. Shadow Step, Poison Trap, and Puncture all consistently apply crowd control and stunned effects, while Puncture and Shadow Imbuement both have the potential to make entire groups of enemies Vulnerable.

Outside of affixes, you'll want to pick up legendaries that help you with damage reduction and healing. These can act as bandages and buy you valuable time to pull off your combos in a fight. On top of that, you'll want to pick up the Bladedancer's Aspect in the Jala's Vigil dungeon located in the top right of the Scosglen region when you can. This aspect adds a third phase to Twisting Blades, where revolves around your character after returning, adding even more AOE potential and doing so in an easier-to-manage way.

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Recommended Gems

Once you start picking up gems at level 15, you'll want to keep your eyes out for a few ones that can really help the building shine. You'll want to socket skull gems into your weapons to get additional healing that will activate whenever you manage to take out a pack of enemies, and diamonds are simply the best choice for jewelry as they can help with your survivability ever so slightly.

Topazes are the only gem you should put in your armor, as crowd control effects are the biggest threat to this build. Twisting Blades rogues thrive on quick movements and Agility Abilities that let them dart in and out of danger. When you're slowed, stunned, or knocked down, you lose your best form of damage resistance: not getting hit, and while topazes alone won't fix this problem, they will help take the edge off.

NEXT: Diablo 4: Druid Leveling Guide