Spiritborn Jaguar Guide: Abilities and Builds
In this Diablo 4 Spiritborn Jaguar guide, we’ll be covering its playstyle, skills, potential builds, and more!
The latest addition to the Diablo 4 class roster is the Spiritborn, a ferocious warrior from the Nahantu Jungle that can harness the awesome power of the guardians of the spirit realm.
The Spiritborn is the first class to flex some real depth and up the game in build diversity for Diablo 4, and though the Spiritborn won’t be available until the launch of Vessel of Hatred, we can still learn a lot about this powerhouse and prepare ourselves to jump right into this exciting new addition to the game.
Today we will be breaking down and exploring the Jaguar Spirit, gameplay, skills and everything in between.
Head to our Diablo 4 Build Planner to create your own Spiritborn Jaguar builds now! To learn more about the other three animals, check out our guides on Gorilla, Eagle, and Centipede.
What are the Spirit Guardians?
For those of you who are familiar with the Druid in Diablo 4 imagine Spirit Boons on steroids, but for everyone else, these Spirits bestow powerful passives onto your character.
Spirits also give you access to their respective skills, some have increasing attack speed for ramping damage, others add damage over time melting enemies with a wicked poison or if you prefer some allow you to play pseudo-ranged variant of the Spiritborn.Spirits also add the associated tag to your skills, like how the Claw skill is tagged as “Werewolf skill” meaning the Jaguar Spirit adds the Jaguar tag to all of your skills. What’s really exciting about this is that you can have two Spirit active at any one time – this opens up huge possibilities for builds, unique combinations and gear in general, it’s a theorycrafter’s delight!
The Spiritborn Jaguar Playstyle
The embodiment of ferocity, pure unapologetic aggression, tear your enemies apart with high DPS ramping attack speed and swift movements. If you’re the kind of person who desires wanton carnage and non-stop killing then look no further than this Guardian Spirit.
Selecting the Jaguar Spirit will grant you the Guardians’ passive, making every fourth Jaguar skill attack unleash a flurry of strikes dealing massive damage.
Many Jaguar skills build Ferocity, a stacking buff that grants 5% attack speed to a default total of 20%. Build and maintaining this buff is core to your DPS and you can look to use it in creative ways by carrying this attack speed into skills from the other Guardian Spirit.
Spiritborn Jaguar Skills
- Thrash (Basic): Dive at an enemy and slash into it dealing 10% damage.Your 3rd attack unleashes a rapid series of slashes around your target, dealing a total of 25% damage.
- Rake (Core): Conjure claws that rake through enemies in front of you, dealing [20%] damage before exploding for an additional [40%] damage.
- Ravager (Focus): (Passive) Minimum Ferocity increased by 2. (Active) Unleash a savage roar, causing all your attacks to trigger additional strikes dealing [60%] damage for 6 seconds.
- Rushing Claw (Potency): Slash a short distance through an enemy, striking all enemies along the way twice for a total of [50%] total damage.
- Counter Attack (Defensive): Passive: Gain 20%[+] Dodge Chance and automatically retaliate against Close enemies for 80% damage when you Dodge their attacks. Active: Dodge all direct attacks for 2 seconds.
- The Hunter (Ultimate): Bound across the battlefield with the Jaguar Spirit, dealing [50%] damage upon landing and then rapidly slashing enemies in the area for [200%] total damage over 7 strikes.
Animals Pairings and Spiritborn Jaguar Build Ideas
An exciting and unique prospect of the Spiritborn is the many combinations of Spirit Guardians available.
One combination I’m excited about would is Jaguar + Centipede, the idea is to double up the ramping damage with the addition of a poison and to sustain through the lifesteal and health on kill, which pairs nicely with the aggressive all-out offensive playstyle.
With the Centipede chosen as our secondary Spirit we will now heal for 1% of our maximum HP for each nearby poisoned enemy and we can do alot of poisoning with very little investment. My choice would be Touch of Death.
A vicious poison damage over time skill and an excellent opening skill, but here’s where it gets fun, when the poison expires or the enemy dies we get a living bomb effect.
This means the effect explodes onto nearby enemies spreading the poison.
In any situation where you wade through tons of enemies (which is most of the time) Touch of Death can spread extremely fast throughout massive pacts of enemies.
This pairs nicely with Rake, for incredible AoE clear potential. Adding in another explosion-type attack, the two together should result in some impressive damage output on larger groups of enemies. I can’t wait to test this combo out!
Another exciting combination would be Jaguar + Eagle, this is a no-compromise DPS combination with that same focus on attack speed from Jaguar with the addition of the high crit and incredible mobility of Eagle.
This is the kind of combination that providing you don’t get one shot can turn enemies into puddles of gore in little to no time.
If the glass cannon approach isn’t for you then you could consider pairing Jaguar + Gorilla, with the addition of stronger defensives, barriers and crowd control. This provides a more brawler-esq play style for those of you wanting to jump into each fight with reckless abandon and dish out as much damage as you receive.
This is only the tip of the iceberg and there are many, many more powerful combinations to explore. For a breakdown on the class as a whole, don’t miss our Diablo 4 Spiritborn reveal.