Spiritborn Reveal and First Impressions by DonTheCrown – NEW Diablo 4 Class

New Diablo 4 Class, Spiritborn – Breakdown & Release Date

In this breakdown, DonTheCrown goes through his impressions and the mechanics of the new Diablo 4 Spiritborn class.

He was able to take part in an early preview for content creators at Blizzard HQ, so some of the numbers and stats may change for the class before its release.

The new Spiritborn release date will be with the Vessel of Hatred expansion, coming October 8th, 2024.

Let’s dive in!

Spiritborn Class Overview and Flavor

“What does it mean to summon a god into battle?”. That was the core question that drove the creation of the Spiritborn and Blizzard has definitely captured the feeling of playing a character who is able to draw on the power of something greater than themselves to fight.

The Spiritborn come from the jungles of Nahantu where children are tested at a young age to see if they can survive contact with the Spirit Realm which is a mystical realm outside the bounds of Sanctuary.

If they survive the brutal testing then they are trained to become Spiritborn, who protect Nahantu and the Spirit Realm from Demonic threats.

The Four Spirit Guardians

Spiritborn, the upcoming Diablo 4 class, can call upon the power of four Spirit Guardians: The Jaguar, The Eagle, The Gorilla, and The Centipede.

Every skill that the Spiritborn uses comes from one of these four Guardians and has a corresponding theme and damage type.

Check out our individual breakdowns of each animal here:

• Jaguar
• Eagle
• Gorilla
• Centipede

• The Jaguar
  • Fire
  • Aggressive
  • Multi-hits
  • Ferocity (a new buff that provides 5% attack speed per stack up to 4 stacks baseline)
• The Eagle
  • Lightning
  • Agility
  • Mobility
  • Projectiles
  • Spirit Feathers that do lightning damage while they are on the ground or recalled to you.
• The Gorilla
  • Physical
  • Resilient
  • Defenses
  • Blocking
  • Resolve (a new buff that increases your Damage Reduction by 20% while active. Taking direct damage consumes Resolve and it can be stacked 8 times).
• The Centipede
  • Poison
  • Debilitating
  • Damage over time
  • Pestilent Swarms (a mechanic that allows Centipede skills to spawn bugs that attack your enemies)

These different archetypes also share different themes such as the Gorilla and Eagle both granting Barriers, Eagle and Centipede providing Vulnerability, Centipede and Jaguar having healing options, and Jaguar and Gorilla having dodge chance. Gorilla and Centipede also have Thorns interactions while Jaguar and Eagle have crit.

This class is designed so that you will mix and match different skills from different spirit guardians for your build and there is a lot of customization.

Spiritborn Class Mechanic – The Spirit Hall

The Spirit Hall is the Spiritborn’s unique class mechanic and this allows you to specialize in two Spirit Guardians, one major and one minor, to empower your build.

Major Spirit Hall choices will provide a buff that aligns with the chosen spirit and will also make all skills have the corresponding spirit tag.

Minor Spirit Hall choices provide a minor buff and you can change both options at any time.

Major Spirit Hall

Jaguar

• Every 4th time you deal direct damage to an enemy with a Jaguar Skill, unleash additional slashes dealing 100% of the damage of the 4 hits.
• All Skills are now also Jaguar Skills.

Eagle

• Casting an Eagle Skill grants 2 Storm Feathers, up to a maximum of 8. When you Evade, all Storm Feathers are fired dealing 100% Lightning damage and making targets Vulnerable for 3 seconds.
  • Note: this did appear to focus fire bosses.
• All Skills are now also Eagle Skills.

Gorilla

• Casting a Gorilla Skill deals 100% Thorns to enemies you hit and grants a Barrier for 10% of Maximum life, up to 40%, for 3 seconds.
• All Skills are now also Gorilla Skills.

Centipede

• Hitting an enemy with a Centipede Skill reduces their Damage by 2.5% and Slows them by 10% for 3 seconds, stacking up to a maximum of 8 times.
• All Skills are now also Centipede Skills.

Minor Spirit Hall

Jaguar

• Maximum Ferocity is increased by 1. Gain 1 stack of Ferocity whenever you kill an enemy or damage a Boss.

Eagle

• For every 4 meters you move, your Critical Strike Chance increased by 4%[+]. This bonus is reset 2 seconds after you Critically Strike.

Gorilla

• Maximum Resolve increased by 2. When you have at least 5 stacks of Resolve, you are Unstoppable.

Centipede

• Heal for 1% of your Maximum Life, for every Nearby enemy you’ve poisoned in the last 3 seconds, up to 5%.

Spiritborn – First Impressions after the Early Playtest

In the playtest, we were given four premade level-30 characters that were each built around one of the four Spirit Guardians with about 2 hours to try everything out. I started off with the Jaguar but I ended up playing everything.

One of the first things I noticed about Spiritborn is how fluid and mobile the class feels. Three of their four basic skills have short dashes like the Barbarian’s Lunging Strike and they have two movement skills Soar and Rushing Claw. Soar is somewhat like Sorcerer’s teleport that applies Vulnerable and it can also trigger Vortex, a skill that pulls enemies inward and potentially knocks them down if you have a Barrier.

These have a unique pair of boots that replace your Evade with Soar, so you can get even more skills on your bar. Their other movement skill, Rushing Claw, is a four-charge Jaguar skill that can reset its own cooldown by consuming Ferocity stacks. Rushing Claw has similar damage to HoTA at 50% and scales with the number of times you hit the enemy.

The other major thing I noticed is that each skill has animations that really show off the fact that you are using the power of a Spirit Guardian. Rake slashes with giant fiery Jaguar claws, Quill Volley fires off feathers, Payback sends forth a shockwave of power, and Toxic Skin leaves behind a poison trail that you can see the Centipede crawling within.

Every move has its own identity and animation that makes you feel like you’re empowered by the spirits you’re using in your build.

Resource generation felt pretty solid, especially for a level 30 character, with generators feeling fast and responsive and Core Skills not costing a large amount of Vigor.

Ultimates have been somewhat hit or miss for Diablo IV but the Spiritborn’s Ultimates are all top tier. Each Ultimate directly summons the Spirit Guardian directly into our world and they do a lot of damage.

Jaguar Impressions

My favorite Spirit Guardian was The Hunter, aka the Jaguar, who bursts onto the scene before spinning around and doing a good amount of fire damage. While the Hunter is going all spin-to-win you have a 15% chance per kill to reset its cooldown for another cast and this works up to 4 times.

In Helltide, I was repeatedly resetting my Ultimate over and over which was a lot of fun. Ultimates also have several passive points that will empower your character but most notably was Intricacy which gives you 3 seconds of free casting of the last Potency, Defensive, or Focus skill you cast.

For the different build archetypes, I felt like Centipede was head and shoulders above the other builds; however, it was quickly revealed that it was benefitting from a couple bugs that were causing Touch of Death to create persistent minions that were doing an obscene amount of damage. Jaguar felt pretty good once I swapped the Main Spirit Passive to Jaguar and realized how to play the build a bit better.

Centipede Impressions

The second build I checked out was Centipede which felt really really good with lots of poison abilities flying all over the place. It somewhat reminded me of the Witch Doctor from Diablo 3 but as a melee fighter instead of a caster.

While this class doesn’t have minions or summons like Necromancer or Druid it does have the ability to spawn swarms that follow you around biting enemies to death. The Centipede Ultimate feels great because it bursts forth from the ground and starts spewing poison everywhere like you have your very own mini Dune sandworm.

Centipede seems to also have one of the most interesting Key Passives, Noxious Resonance which causes critical strikes to burst for the amount of poisoning they have on them.

Gorilla Impressions

Next, the Gorilla playstyle feels a lot like a tanky HoTA Barbarian. The Core Skill Crushing Hand slams down on both sides of you with an overlap zone directly in front and behind of your character. This leads to a lot of area clear and decent single-target damage. Gorilla’s skills frequently provide some sort of barrier which leads to feeling like you never take damage as long as you keep hitting buttons.

Besides Barrier, you also get a lot of block bonuses and thorns from Gorilla skills which I think will be a big endgame build. Unfortunately for our test, we did not have great thorns gear but there are aspects like Bristleback Aspect: “When you Dodge or Block an attack you trigger a [200-350]% Thorns attack against the attacker.” Which will likely cause Gorilla Spiritborn to be a strong candidate for a thorns build.

Eagle Impressions

Lastly, the Eagle build was a lot of fun. Most Eagle skills have quite a bit of range to them such as Quill Volley which shoots out a fan of feathers or Razor Wings which is somewhat like a boomerang.

Eagles also have a lot of access to the Vulnerability debuff, perhaps more than any other class, with almost every skill giving you the chance to apply it. Eagle skills themselves don’t provide a lot of mobility, except Soar which is equivalent to Sorcerer’s teleport, but instead they encourage you to use your Evade skill for bonuses.

You can spec into making your Eagle Basic skill trigger automatically whenever you Evade and it will apply Vulnerability. The Eagle Spirit Hall also makes you stack up Feathers with each skill use that will fire out at enemies doing damage and applying Vulnerability whenever you Evade. Overall the spec offers a lot of utility but could also be the main focus of a build as well.

There’s also a lot of interesting interactions between the different Guardians like the skill Razor Wings will throw out this boomerang of feathers that will return to the player. With the Defensive Aspect of Deflection you’ll be able to use Jaguar’s Counterattack to reflect incoming Razor Wings back out again.

With Invasive Razor Wings you can make Razor Wings consume 3 Charges to send out a spiral of 3 wings at once which then can be bounced back out repeatedly if you have good timing.

The Ultimate for Eagle is also really unique because it has a total of 3 charges so it is slightly less impactful per use; however, Spiritborn have a section in the passive tree around using their Ultimates for example:
Intricacy: Upon casting an Ultimate Skill, the last Potency, Defensive, or Focus Skill you cast prior becomes free to cast for 1/2/3 seconds.

So you could cast Razor Wings, cast your Ult, then spam free Razor Wings for 3 seconds and then bounce all those Razor Wings back out with Counterattack several times.

This is just one of the cool interactions you’ll find between the skills and aspects in this class. I am looking forward to theorycrafting and build-making for the Spiritborn.

In Conclusion

Thanks for checking out this impressions article by DonTheCrown!

For a 30+ page deep dive into the Diablo 4 Spiritborn, be sure to also check out Don’s info compilation.

We’ll have more Spiritborn content on the way leading up to its release so stay tuned for more.