Blizzard released a trailer and gameplay deep dive for the new Spiritborn class coming with the Vessel of Hatred expansion for Diablo 4. This article covers everything we know about the class.
What is the Spiritborn Class
The Spiritborn is a Martial Artist class that hails from Nahantu. The Spiritborn are very few, being survivors of a sacred trial that grants them the power of the Ancient Spirit Guardian. They can call upon these Spirit Guardians to harness their powerful effects in combat.
Regarding gameplay, the Spiritborn is primarily a Melee Fighter with limited range options. By adopting the Spirit Guardian that now follows their command, they’re a highly flexible and diverse class. They have many options available due to their Class mechanic, the Spirit Hall.
Unlike other classes, the Spiritborn is locked to using Two-Handed weapons. This locks them to the lowest number of possible aspects in Diablo 4 and makes their gearing a little more unique than other classes with this added limitation.
Spirit Guardians
The Spiritborn can call upon four different Spirit Guardians through the Spirit Hall: The Jaguar, The Gorilla, The Eagle, and the Centipede. Each spirit grants different abilities and has different strengths and weaknesses. Below are the Major Spirit Hall Boons of each spirit.
The important thing to note with each Major boon is that All skills gain the Skill Tag of your chosen Spirit. This is a big part of what makes the Spiritborn very flexible and allows open build paths.
Rezoka, the Jaguar Spirit Guardian
The Jaguar Spirit Guardian is heavily focused on raw speed and aggression. With plenty of movement options and quick attacks thanks to their Ferocity mechanic, granting stacking Attack Speed.
They also have a high focus on killstreaks and dealing constant damage by staying in combat. Even the Ultimate for the Jaguar, The Hunter, has a chance to reset itself when defeating enemies giving a lot of potential for defeating enemies and resetting their cooldown in rapid succession.
Wumba, the Gorilla Spirit Guardian
The Gorilla Spirit Guardian is focused on mitigating damage and returning it back to enemies. They’re able to generate Barrier as well as their Resolve Stacks, which grant them high damage reduction for as many hits as they have stacks.
With a heavy focus on sending damage back, they have skills that shorten their cooldowns when you get hit or get strong the more times an enemy has hit you. The Ultimate for the Gorilla, The Protector, summons him to the battlefield granting many defensive bonuses while dealing heavy damage in an area around you.
Kwatli, the Eagle Spirit Guardian
The Eagle Spirit Guardian focuses on mid-range aggression and mobility. It’s very similar to the Jaguar Spirit Guardian in that way, but doesn’t always need to get up close and personal with their foes.
There’s also a heavy focus on positioning with the Eagle as well, with many of the ranged options sending out projectiles that also return to you after a set distance. The Eagle’s Ultimate, The Seeker, creates a large zone that deals heavy damage and makes foes Vulnerable before dealing a powerful Critical strike as it ends.
Balazan, the Centipede Spirit Guardian
The Centipede Spirit Guardian is focused on dealing Damage over Time while sapping their foe’s life to heal themselves. They provide consistent damage and high sustain to the Spiritborn in this way.
With a heavy focus on DoT damage to the Centipede’s Ultimate, The Devour spreads and inflicts Poison with the capability to instantly execute enemies that reach a threshold of Poison Damage.
Spiritborn Itemization
The Spiritborn was designed with a focus on having all the Spirit Guardians be able to overlap or share an interaction. This allows you to be able to mix and match them to great effect. Below is a chart they shared to highlight the overlapping focuses of each Spirit Guardian.
This allows them to itemize around certain aspects to benefit from these overlapping values. However, how useful to effective some of these effects remains to be seen.
Legendary Aspects
Quite a few of the Legendary Aspects and Uniques for the Spiritborn were shown off. below are these effects and how we think they may end up playing out.
The Aspect of Rallying Reversal brings together the Jaguar and Centipede Spirits, allowing you to generate Ferocity Stacks through crowd control. This could be a solid alternative for an Attack Speed Aspect, but doesn’t seem like it will be a good or reliable option in the early game.
The Tomentor’s Aspect is meant to bring the Gorilla and Centipede Spirit together, as they both benefit from for this effect. For this particular setup, this will be insane to put on your weapon and be paired with both Razorplate and X’Fal’s Corroded Signet. This leads to a very high base damage for your poison to scale with and plenty of AoE.
The Aspect of Wild Claws has the potential to be good for a Jaguar-focused build, depending on the secondary effects of the Rake skill. At the very least, it should contribute to Ferocity stacks, allowing them to be built up quicker leading to faster attacks.
Bristling Vengeance gives you yet another way to scale damage with Thorns, this time leaning more into the abilities of the Gorilla Spirit. The main power of this aspect comes from the added AoE for the Gorilla’s Payback skill. Used on a weapon with the Gorilla as your Primary Spirit Hall choice will enable you to deal a ton of damage by scaling Thorns, and more importantly, without needing to be hit.
The Aspect of Infestation seems like an interesting way to enable Stinger’s base functionality of echoing onto nearby poisoned enemies by using Pestilent Swarm to more broadly apply Poison. Seeing as only the chance and damage scale with slot, this seems unlikely to be a good candidate for the weapon slot.
The Aspect of Pestilence combines the same two skills, but guarantees the swarm activation while making it move in a set spiral pattern. Alone this could also be very useful or extra AoE. Combined with Infestation though, it’ll become a strong way of propagating Poison very quickly across packs of enemies.
Unique Items
Moving on the the shown Unique items, we see some very interesting options to consider.
The Ring of Centipede Eagle (almost definitely a placeholder name) looks to combine well.. the Centipede and Eagle Spirits. It will periodically spawn Pestilent swarms for you as well as making them orbit you and generate your Primary Resource, Vigor.
This could be quite powerful when combined with the Pestilent Swarm Aspects listed above, but the values shown there would currently be many better options.
Scorn of the Earth is a pair of unique Boots for the Spiritborn that replace your Evade with the Eagle’s Soar Skill. This very heavily leans into the Eagle’s need for mobility and positioning while making your Evade more offensive. This could also free up a skill slot, allowing you to take another skill over Soar.
The Sepazontec is a Unique Quarterstaff for the Spiritborn that greatly empowers your Basic skills by granting additional damage, making every cast the 3rd and more powerful strike, and tripling every cast.
With all of the other support we have for Basic Skills now, there’s no way this weapon doesn’t become absurdly overpowered when built around. The biggest limiting factor will be Aspect Slots, as several strong combinations get even stronger with this weapon.
The Vessel of Hatred expansion is set to release on October 8 2024. It is currently available for pre-order in three editions with a few in-game bonuses added to incentivize you to get it early.
