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Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide

Season 8 - Belial's ReturnEndgame

Last Updated:May 1, 2025|Changelog|FAQ

Welcome to the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Guide! This build relies on Gorilla Skills and combines extreme speed with high AoE damage by spamming combos of 3x Crushing Hand that trigger Prodigy's Tempo, resetting all our cooldowns easily and making this one of the fastest speedfarming builds in the game.

This build doesn't need much to get started besides one Dungeon Codex Power, but Spiritborn has access to many strong aspects that amplify this build. Unyielding Hits and Redirected Force are powerful legendary effects that buff our damage by stacking armor and block chance. Later on, we include Harmony of Ebewaka to combine the effects of three Spirits including primary Centipede and secondary Jaguar at the same time to benefit from various synergies.

Our resources are solved differently depending on the tools available to us, starting with Vital Strikes and various ways of triggering Vulnerable which is later replaced by Prodigy's Tempo and the Rod of Kepeleke + Ring of the Midnight Sun combo. This allows us to permanently crit with massive extra damage on every attack once we reach a high enough resource generation threshold.

All in all, the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn represents a fun AoE machine that excels at speedfarming but still packs a punch against tough enemies. Let's get started!

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Setup
Note

This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Spiritborn Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.

Boss Powers

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.

There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.

Best-in-Slot Boss Powers

Main Power

Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - This build barely benefits from any of the main powers, however with more cooldown reduction the gameplay becomes a little bit more lenient and doesn't require you to reset everything actively with Prodigy's Tempo as much.

Modifiers

  • Flesh Reaper's Disruption - With one temper of Crowd Control Duration, we can nearly max out this bonus for a great damage buff.
  • Torusk's Rage - More attack speed improves our damage further. The Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies buff is automatically acquired from Paragons later (on the Revealing board).
  • Lilith's Wind of Hate - The blisters spawned from this power are extra targets that either pop and help take down elite, or at a minimum provide us with more lucky hits for various effects.
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Boss Powers

Alternate Boss Powers

  • Varshan's Life Steal (main) - Tons of healing if you need it.
  • Lord Zir's Blood Pool (modifier) - Even more healing.
  • Hatred's Embrace's Haste (modifier) - Great for the early game before Rod of Kepeleke.
  • Allek's Talons (modifier) - To go faster.

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn
  • Crushing Hand is our main ability. It's a simple skill that creates two AoE effects on your sides which overlap in the center. Focus elites while smaller enemies just explode on the side. With more Resolve stacks its damage increases, so way aim for a high count at all times. We also build extra barriers while attacking with this skill.
  • Ravager adds chip damage against targets we hit. It also allows us to dash into packs using Crushing Hand and increases resource generation while active. This is an important part of the infinite resource engine with Ring of the Midnight Sun and we aim for 100% uptime.
  • d4-skill id=1871801]Scourge[/d4-skill] grants us lots of extra damage and healing, but fears enemies away.
  • However, we have Vortex to keep everything grouped up and pull in far away enemies.
  • Armored Hide is our defensive tool and main source of Resolve. Keep an eye on your stacks and activate it as needed for a powerful defensive buff from Perseverance and offensive with Colossal. Rock Splitter can be used early on to gain Vigor and a block chance buff and more Resolve stacks if needed. In the lategame, there is no need for a generator.
  • The Hunter is our Ultimate Ability. It does a good amount damage on its own but is mainly used for a large range of offensive buffs: Supremacy, Resolution, Intricacy and Harmonious Hunter.
  • Before the above final setup comes online by acquiring Ring of the Midnight Sun, we play with Soar (over Armored Hide), The Seeker (over The Hunter), Rock Splitter (over Counterattack) and Vital Strikes (over Prodigy's Tempo) to solve our resources.
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Skill Tree

Skill Rotation

  • Use Crushing Hand to deal damage. Ideally, overlap the two AoEs on elites and cast it 3x in a row every time to trigger Prodigy's Tempo.
  • Keep Ravager active at all times for resources and to jump from pack to pack.
  • Use Scourge on tough elites.
  • Activate Armored Hide when low on Resolve stacks, when you're crowd controlled or when taking heavy damage.
  • Activate The Hunter as often as possible for various buffs like Supremacy and Resolution.
  • Press Counterattack to dodge all incoming hits (doesn't work against ground effects).

Spiritborn Spirit Hall

Primary: Centipede adds damage reduction and slow, making us very tanky in long fights and allowing us to profit from various passives on the tree.

Secondary: Jaguar grants us more Ferocity and together with Harmony of Ebewaka we can also benefit from Jaguar passives.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Spirit Hall

Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Spiritborn Class Overview.

Paragon & Glyphs

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn
!
Important

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.

Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

← Use the slider for progression steps →
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Paragon
Tip

Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

To Level 15

  1. Fitness
  2. Spirit
  3. Outmatch
  4. Colossal
  5. Turf

To Level 46

  1. Spirit
  2. Outmatch
  3. Fitness
  4. Colossal
  5. Turf

Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.

Runes

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

  • Poc + Xan - We constantly spend all of our resources, triggering an Overpower every few attacks for a big burst
  • Neo + Jah - With the high tankiness and barrier generation we constantly gain free Teleport casts and can go even faster
  • Qax - Replaces Jah for higher end content like Pit Pushing

Alternative choices

As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:

  • Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows execute at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other Runeword it also generates large amounts of offering
  • Cir - Generates a large amount of offering regularly
  • Igni - Another good way of generating offering
  • Gar - For more crit (before Rod of Kepeleke)
  • Tam - We spam our core skill all the time
  • Yul - Another efficient way of generating offering

Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.

Mercenaries

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

Hired: Raheir

He provides us with Fortify, Stuns, some extra damage, more armor for Unyielding Hits and prevents us from getting oneshot every 30 seconds thanks to Valiance. Beware that he's not present when playing in groups and make sure you remain armor capped without him.

Reinforcement: Varyana

We choose Earth Breaker for extra crowd controls which preferably happens exactly when we cast Scourge so monsters don't run away.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Mercenaries

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

Stat Priorities & Item Progression

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

To enable the Quill Volley Spiritborn to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed, and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

  • 17+ total Crushing Hand ranks
  • 100%+ Resource Generation
  • 50%+ Attack Speed
  • 1800+ Dexterity
  • 4,000+ Armor
  • All Resistances 60%+
  • 6,000+ Life
  • 160%+ Movement Speed

Use Soothing Spices and Song of the Mountain to cap out your Armor and Resistances if necessary.

It is critical that Ring of the Midnight Sun fully restores your Vigor every time you hit. If it doesn't you won't do any damage. You need at least 100% resource generation with a perfect 50% roll on Ring of the Midnight Sun. Here are a few data points showing Ring of the Midnight Sun roll and the required Resource generation to fully restore Vigor:

  • 35% roll on Ring of the Midnight Sun requires 186% resource generation
  • 40% roll on Ring of the Midnight Sun requires 150% resource generation
  • 50% roll on Ring of the Midnight Sun requires 100% resource generation

This means that a good affix on Ring of the Midnight Sun is required to have a chance of making the combo with Rod of Kepeleke work. Resource Generation stacks multiplicatively with each source. In this build sources are: Intelligence, Vigorous, Measured Ravager, Paragon nodes on the Sapping board. This leaves you with Vigorous ranks from Rod of Kepeleke, Yen's Blessing and/or Resource Generation tempers on jewelry to finish the rest.

With good endgame gear, one of these is enough, but before that you may need to add extra tempers and masterwork crits to achieve this result. Stacking more Resource Generation after you have reached the critical point no longer provides any benefit, and if you are overshooting, you instead want to go with Resource Cost Reduction (tempers on Rings), which increases the damage done by Rod of Kepeleke's consumption effect. Learn more about this interaction in the mechanics section below.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic

Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.

Build Variants

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

This section is designed to guide your Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.

Starter
Ancestral
Mythic
Speedfarming
Pit Pushing

If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.

Gear & Skills

Starter Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Gear
Starter Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills
  • Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% All Resistances and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
  • Before acquiring Ring of the Midnight Sun and great rolls on your gear, Vital Strikes is your ticket to infinite Vigor. For this to work, we include Soar & The Seeker instead of Armored Hide & The Hunter, among other smaller adjustments on the tree.
  • Redirected Force scales your damage through Armored Hide, Patient Guard and your weapon if you're using a quarterstaff. Keep an eye on your buffs and time your defensive skill to boost it.
  • Unyielding Hits is a weapon damage buff that we activate automatically with our skills. This aspect is so powerful that we overcap armor massively in order to scale it (up to 5000).
  • Plains Power & Forest Power spawn Mystic Circles that grant you insane barriers, armor (for Unyielding Hits) and extra damage. Try to make the best use of these circles especially on bosses but don't let them slow you down when they're not in the right place.

The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.

Gear & Skills

Ancestral Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Gear
Ancestral Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills
  • As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher Paragon, your Armor & Resistance values are constantly shifting. Ensure to stay capped at with at least 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in to maximize survivability.
  • Focus on reaching high Attack Speed and ranks to Crushing Hand as your primary damage attributes on gear.
  • Rod of Kepeleke is the first major upgrade. With it we no longer need to worry about resources and can switch to the endgame skill tree. However, just casting your Core Skill for free is only the beginning as we aim to gain the guaranteed empowered crit on every hit later on.
  • In addition, this item allows you to benefit from buffs to Basic Skills like Basic Damage tempers, Basic Skill Ranks on pants, Follow Through and Prodigy's Tempo. We also add Moonrise instead of Unrelenting.
  • Ring of the Midnight Sun is the second piece of the resource puzzle. With a good roll and enough extra Resource Generation, it's possible to fill your entire resource bar at once after Rod of Kepeleke consumed it all, creating an infinite loop of full and empty resources between every attack. In order to achieve this, we combine the bonus from Intelligence, resource tempers on jewelry, Yen's Blessing, Measured Ravager and paragon nodes like Opportunist on the Sapping.
  • Resource Generation bonuses multiply with each source, so with a 50% Ring of the Midnight Sun roll you actually need less than a combined nominal 100% bonus from other sources. If you are not hitting the full resource reset on every attack, add or masterwork Resource Generation tempers or rank up Vigorous. See more in the Mechanics section below.
  • Harmony of Ebewaka is an incredible damage buff with the combo of three separate Spirits.
  • Yen's Blessing (alternatively Rakanoth's Wake) is almost exclusively used for its huge all resistance bonus but also comes with a good amount of movement speed and helps us to reach the Resource Generation target. With it we can focus on stacking armor instead of resistances for Unyielding Hits.

This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.

Gear & Skills

Mythic Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Gear
Mythic Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills
  • Shroud of False Death provides a multitude of small benefits that add up to a ~40-60% damage gain on top of more survivability. It also comes with resource generation that makes Yen's Blessing obsolete, but we keep these boots anyway for their resistance buff.
  • Tyrael's Might is an alternative to the above to achieve near-immortality thanks to its high damage reduction and bonus to Maximum Resistances. With it we no longer need to rely on resistances from Yen's Blessing or Rakanoth's Wake and go with regular boots + Apprehension.
  • As you min/max your setup, aim to keep your resistances capped and get your armor as close as possible to 5000 for Unyielding Hits. Don't forget you can use consumables, too!

This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.

Gear & Skills

Speedfarm Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Gear
Speedfarm Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills
  • The setup stays largely the same, but you can add Soar instead of Vortex to jump over cliffs.

This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.

Gear & Skills

Pit Push Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Gear
Pit Push Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills
  • For high tier pushing, we replace Ring of the Midnight Sun with Ring of Starless Skies. This removes the guaranteed resource refill on every attack, but averages out to more DPS thanks to the amazing stats, extra skill ranks, bonus damage effect and the resource cost reduction allows Rod of Kepeleke to consume more for a bigger multiplier.
  • For this to work, you also need another pair of gloves with "Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Resources" which is now fuels your Rod of Kepeleke. Unfortunately, Crushing Hand has a relatively low Lucky Hit Chance, so this resource effect doesn't trigger reliably on single targets. This means that your damage output now greatly fluctuates with the number of enemies hit, and single target bosses die much slower than those that spawn adds.
  • We pick up Ohm instead of Jah for the War Cry buff.
  • Take note that this build has a few crowd control-based damage modifiers such as Dominant and Revealing, which cannot activate on Unstoppable targets and non-staggered bosses.
  • When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because they can freely retaliate and it's difficult to keep them into the right position for shotgunning.

FAQ & Mechanics

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

Mechanics

Video Guide

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

The setup in the video is still largely the same as the written guide.

Summary

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

The Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn is powerful AoE speedfarmer that nukes everything around it with ease.

  • Spam Crushing Hand, ideally 3x in a row for the cooldown reset of Prodigy's Tempo.
  • Combine Rod of Kepeleke and Ring of the Midnight Sun with enough resource generation to proc a guaranteed crit every time.
  • Stack Armor, Attack Speed and Critical Strike synergies.
  • Keep up your Resolve stacks.
  • Kapow!

Credits

Season 8 - Belial's Return
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Written by wudijo

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