This guide covers the Spirit Walker Ascendancy for the Huntress, including Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.
Spirit Walker Overview
Spirit Walkers have become attuned to the Wildwood Spirits, granting her access to various Boons from each of the three Wildwood Spirits: Primal, Vivid, and Wild.
With the aid of the Wildwood Spirits, the Spirit Walker has a good mix of buffs and other utility at her disposal. The Primal Spirit empowers Projectile Skills, granting them Additional Projectiles and Projectile Speed.
The Vivid Spirit conjures stags that deal Lightning Damage and leave behind Shocking Ground. The Wild Spirit conjures a Bear Companion capable of Intimidating and Maining Enemies.
In addition to the Wildwood Spirit, the Spirit Walker has access to an upgraded version of Tame Beast, which allows her to tame Beast-type Bosses to use as Companions.
Primal Bounty
Primal Bounty allows you to gain Owl Feathers every 4 seconds, up to a max of 3 feathers. With the Primal Bounty Skill also granted by this passive, Dodge Rolling will empower your next Projectile Skill with Additional Projectiles and Projectile Speed.
While there are obvious synergies with Primal Bounty and skills like Twister that the Huntress has easy access to, this benefit also applies to Spells as well. This allows it to support a diverse range of skills.
The skills that are likely to be at the forefront of taking full advantage of this are likely to be Fireball, Spark, Twister, and Falling Thunder. All of these skills easily take advantage of every benefit of this buff, and have the potential to be screen-clearing monsters.
Though several skills can easily take advantage of just the increased projectile count as well. Skills like Explosive Grenade, Cluster Grenade, Lightning Rod, and similar skills that don’t particularly care about the Projectile Speed.
There’s also a notable synergy with effects that can preserve the Empowered effect or add supplementary effects, such as the Premediation and Murderous Intent Supports.
Unfortunately, as the Owl Feathers are completely separate from Primal Bounty, there isn’t a way to speed up the rate of gaining Owl Feathers outside of the Mhacha’s Gift Passive.
The Mhacha’s Gift
Mhacha’s Gift reduces the time between gaining Owl Feathers to once every 2 seconds. Additionally, you can now expend all of your stored feathers at once, with each feather providing the full effect.
If you’re already planning to invest in Primal Bounty, this provides even more Additional Projectiles and Projectile Speed if you allow the Owl Feathers to build up. The faster speed at which they build up allows for more flexible use as well.
This upgraded version of Primal Bounty is what will really be the tipping point for skills like Fireball, Spark, Twister, and Falling Thunder. Combined with Nova Projectiles and other bonuses to Projectile Count, it will make that slow build-up worth it, particularly for mapping.
Vivid Stampede
Vivid Stampede grants a Vivid Wisp for every 20 metres traveled, storing up to a maximum of 3 Vivid Wisps. When attacking, these will be consumed to send out Spirits of the Stag that deal Lightning Damage, with an increased chance to Shock as well as leaving Shocked Ground behind.
This has a lot of interesting synergies with skills that can consume or leverage the Shock this can provide. Primal Strikes, Shockburst Rounds, and Elemental Sundering are among these skills and would reduce the amount of setup time to get these skills to deal their full damage.
One of the more interesting ways this could be used is as a low-cost way to get Shocked Ground from a skill like Pounce on a non-attack build. This also has the extra synergy of the added movement and being able to help charge the Wisps for the Stag. Options like this work because of the separation of generating Wisps and the Vivid Stampede Skill itself.
The Shocked Ground has a weird limitation of only being created when a Stag travels its full distance. With it having an AoE skill tag, there’s potential for Concentrated Area to limit its max range, adding a lot of potential damage, and overlapping area damage to help make it more consistent.
The Shocked Ground does have a couple of synergies, particularly with Whirling Slash, Twister, and Eye of Winter. While there are better ways to get these ground effects
The Mórrigan’s Guidance
With The Mórrigan’s Guidance, Vivid Stampede will grant a Vivid Wisp once Vivid Stampede ends. Additionally, the Spirits of the Stag gain 20% more Damage and Shock Magnitude per leap.
The Vivid Wisp gained after a use of Vivid Stampede reduces the skill’s reliance on having to be mobile, making it far more usable in boss encounters. If the Concentrated Area also reduces the leap range, this could make for a very consistent and powerful Shock, especially with investment into Shock or even Support Gems to boost it with lower investment.
If you intend to lean on this effect as a source of Shock, The Mórrigan’s Guidance will make it far more reliable and be a strong combo piece for the skills mentioned above, particularly Primal Strikes and Shockburst Rounds.
Wild Protector
Wild Protector grants the Wild Protector Skill, a powerful Bear Companion packing a lot of utility, primarily Maim and Intimidate, slowing and weakening enemies.
One important effect of this Skill is that, despite being a Companion, it will not count toward your Companion Limit. This will allow for any Tamed Beast you want to pick up to be a purely offensive boost, as the Bear Companion boasts great defensive utility.
The Companion was also shown to be fairly aggressive, engaging enemies from a considerable distance and not waiting for you to attack to get them charging forward. This aggression also means they’ll likely get targeted by enemies over you, almost acting as a defensive layer.
As a standalone Companion that doesn’t require Spirit also gives it the niche of enabling passive nodes like Inspiring Ally while still allowing your Spirit to be used for other Spirit Skills. This gives access to a lot of generic damage that can be implemented into various build archetypes.
The Catha’s Balance
The Catha’s Balance grants your Companions 60% of the damage of your Main Hand Weapon, working similarly to the Tactician Ascendancy’s Watch How I Do It Passive.
This effect has decent Synergy with Notables like Giant’s Blood, allowing you to carry a Powerful Two-Handed Melee Martial Weapon, as well as still being able to use a Sceptre in your off-hand slot for more Spirit. However, this also demands an extreme amount of Strength to be able to use that Two-Handed Weapon.
In a lot of cases, despite how powerful this bonus may seem, it is often still going to be worse in a lot of aspects. The new Minion Rings being added via the Genesis Tree, which were said to also have affixes for minions on top of their base effect, will allow a much better scaling potential, without having to focus on stacking Strength.
There is a slight synergy with the new Sylvan’s Effigy, which has the primary benefit of removing the cap on Companions, so long as they’re different types. This allows you to get more mileage out of the Passive, by having it affect more than just 2 Companions. However, this also lacks the added benefits of a Rare Sceptre, such as the powerful Presence affixes or even Minion Levels.
Sacred Unity
Sacred Unity empowers Primal Bounty, Vivid Stampede, and Wild Protector, granting each additional effects. Those effects are as follows:
- The middle projectile of skills empowered by Primal Bounty will leave behind Soaring Ground.
- Vivid Stampede will actively target enemies, instead of just moving forward in a straight line.
- Wild Protector gains the Embrace of the Wild Buff.
This Ascendancy Passive is only available when allocating Primal Bounty, Vivid Stampede, AND Wild Protector. It will not consume an Ascendancy Point to activate, making it a solid upgrade to all three skills.
This does, however, mean you’ll only have 2 points left over, forcing a choice between further upgrading any of the three Skills, taking Idolatry, or taking The Natural Order. Taking the Catha’s Balance in combination with this seems like the worst possible choice of the remaining Ascendancy passives, but the others all seem viable for different archetypes.
Primal Bounty
Primal Bounty gains access to Soaring Ground, a unique Ground effect that provides a ton of power: 30% increased Evasion Rating, 40% Damage on Full Life, and Onslaught to both you and allies standing on it.
Onslaught alone is more than enough reason to include this if you’re already going for the route of taking Mhacha’s Gift. If utilized well, it has the potential to very easily improve clearing speed and DPS.
Vivid Stampede
Vivid Stampede is a slightly less interesting buff, as it only makes the path towards targets. It will allow them to help with clear speed to some extent, but that also requires investing in them more heavily.
The real benefit would be if they’re able to turn enough to hit an enemy a second time, but the current showcase of this effect doesn’t make this seem possible. But if possible, and the expectation of the Concentrated Area Support lowering their travel distance actually works out, they could provide meaningful damage.
Wild Protector
The Wild Protector Bear Companion gain the Embrace of the Wild Buff, granting allies in range 2% of Maximum Life Regenerated per second while redirecting 8% of incoming damage towards itself.
Given the Bear’s existing pile Defensive Utility, this just adds even more to that. However, the one downside here is that if utilized alongside other Companions or Minions, it will redirect from them as well. This can result in the Bear Companion going down rather quickly, unless built purely for durability. It does, however, reduce the need for something like Skeletal Clerics to keep them alive, thanks to the constant life regeneration.
The Natural Order
The Natural Order allows Tame Beast to work on Unique Beasts, or rather, Beast-Family Bosses. Additionally, Tamed Bosses will gain 30% increase in Movement Speed and cycle between random Azmeri Spirits for additional buffs every 20 seconds.
In total, there are 11 different Azmeri Spirits, which provide the following buffs when possessing a Monster, or in this case, your tamed Boss.
| Spirit | Effects |
|---|---|
| Spirit of the Owl | 20% of Damage as Extra Cold Damage 60% Increased Maximum Energy Shield 80% increased Damage |
| Spirit of the Serpent | Poison on Hit All Damage Contributes to Poison Magnitude 80% increased Damage |
| Spirit of the Primate | 60% increased Freeze Buildup All Hits Contribute to Chill Magnitude 80% increased Damage |
| Spirit of the Bear | 20% Maximum Life 60% increased Stun Buildup 60% increased Stun Threshold 20% reduced Damage Taken |
| Spirit of the Boar | 20% of Damage as Extra Fire Damage Bleed on Hit 20% reduced Damage Taken |
| Spirit of the Ox | 60% increased Armour 60% increased Elemental Ailment Threshold 50% reduced potency of Slowing Debuffs 20% reduced Damage Taken |
| Spirit of the Wolf | Break Armour equal to 10% of Hit Damage Attacks have a 50% Chance to Maim on Hit 15% increased Movement Speed 30% increased Skill Speed |
| Spirit of the Stag | 20% of Damage as Extra Lightning Damage +30% to All Elemental Resistances 15% increased Movement Speed 30% increased Skill Speed |
| Spirit of the Cat | 60% increased Evasion Rating 100% increased Critical Strike Chance 15% increased Movement Speed 30% increased Skill Speed |
| Spirit of the Fox | 20% Movement Speed 30% increased Damage 20% Attack and Cast Speed |
| Spirit of the Rabbit | 20% Movement Speed 30% increased Damage 20% Attack and Cast Speed |
From these Spirits, there are some clear outliers for how powerful each of these are. There are potent Offensive buffs offered by the Cat, Stag, Serpent, Owl, Fox, and Rabbit, which are great for allowing your powerful Companion to rip through foes. There is also the Bear, Boar, and Ox, providing solid defensive buffs to make them more durable.
Given the random nature of the buff that will be provided, and having it cycle every 20 seconds, leaves this in a spot where none of the effects are reliable. If they were more controlled, you could use some of them to open up new build paths, but for now, consider them nice bonuses on top of what is offered.
As for what Bosses will be strong options, it’s hard to say. In terms of Damage, the big standouts here would be the Great White One and most of the Trial of Chaos Bosses. All of these offer quick and powerful attacks that make them appealing options.
There are other iconic boss options as well, such as Crowbell and Mighty Silverfist, among others that will be worth trying out, particularly for their strong AoE Attacks.
Idolatry
Idolatry provides 10% increased Companion Damage and 2% Reservation Efficiency per Idol socketed in your Gear. However, it will apply a Penalty of -4% All Elemental Resistance for every non-Idol Augment in your gear.
Idolatry’s Companion Damage has a very strong and obvious synergy with the Inspiring Ally Notable Passive, sharing similar wording to Companion Damage passives, and thus increasing your own damage as well as any Companions you have.
The increased Reservation Efficiency also appears to be for all skills, making ALL Spirit Gems cheaper, not just Tamed Beast or Minion Skills. With Idols in all sockets, not accounting for any added by corruption, will grant a total 12% increased Reservation Efficiency. Combined with an Idol of Ralakesh in your Helmet, this totals up to 20% Reservation Efficiency, but only for Minion Skills.
This also works well with the Darkness Enthroned Unique Belt (the Helmet variation specifically), offering two more slots that can be used to boost the general Reservation bonus by 4%, and up to an additonal 8% Minion Reservation Efficiency from an Idol of Ralakesh if socketed there instead. This brings the general Reservation Efficiency to 16%, with Minion Reservation at 32% total.
The downside to taking full advantage of these upgrades, however, is that currently, there aren’t many Idols, and most do not grant great stats.
If you wanted to maximize the benefits of this, below are the recommended Idols for each slot, the slots they go in, and their effects. This does not account for the rarity of some idols, so it may take a longer time or more currency to get all of them.
| Item Type | Idol | Efect |
|---|---|---|
| Sceptre | Primate Snake Rabbit | Allies in your Presence deal 30% increased Damage Allies in your Presencehave 8% increased Attack Speed 10% increased Spirit |
| Shield | Ox | 10% inceased Block Chance |
| Helmet | Ralakesh Eeshta Primate Bear | 8% increased Reservation Efficiency of Minion skills 12% increased Cost Efficiency Minions have 12% increased Maximum Life 8% increased Area of Effect |
| Body Armour | Rabbit | 5% increased Rarity of Items Found |
| Gloves | Sirrius Boar | 8% increased Attack Speed Gain 1 Rage on Melee Hit 5% increased Curse Magnitude |
| Foci | Owl | 10% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate |
| Belt | Ralakesh Egrin Primate Bear | 12-16% increased Reservation Efficiency of Minion skills Enemies you Curse take 9-12% increased Damage Minions have 18-24% increased Maximum Life 12-16% increased Area of Effect |
The main problem you might have noticed with this is that, outside of more Idols being added in future updates, your boots will always force you to take at least one penalty, as there are no idols that can be socketed in them. It’s only a loss of 4% All Elemental Resistance, so it’s not a big penalty by any means.
You’ll almost certainly want to pick up a Darkness Enthroned to get maximum benefits, which can get very expensive for a good roll, but if you’re playing a Companion or Minion Build, you’ll want this eventually anyways.
