Crushing Hand Spiritborn Leveling Guide

The Season 9 theme is the Sins of the Horadrim. This season allows you to craft unique Horadric Spells using three different components: a Catalyst, an Infusion, and three Arcana. You earn Catalysts and Infusions through the Seasonal Questline, and Arcana can be found while exploring Nightmare Dungeons. You choose a Skill as the trigger for your Horadric Spell. Once in Torment I or higher, Horadric Jewels can be crafted, which replace the Gems in your Jewelry, adding additional power to your build.

Leveling Horadric Spell

Optional Arcana

• Invigorating Helix - Can be used for extra healing.

Spirit Hall

At level 15, you can unlock your class mechanic called Spirit Hall. There you may choose one out of the four spirit guardians for both the primary and secondary slots. In this case, you go with Eagle (primary) and Jaguar (secondary). The first allows your evade to shoot out feathers that deal a good amount of flat damage and apply Vulnerable. Try to get boots with "Attacks reduce Evade cooldown" on them to benefit from this effect even more. It also allows you to benefit from Eagle passives Brilliance and Acceleration. The second hall bonus gives you easy access to Ferocity for extra attack speed and Invasive Rushing Claw cooldown resets.

Key Passive & Ultimate

Prodigy's Tempo is our key passive of choice for this leveling setup. By using combos of x3 Basic Skill followed by x3 Core Skill, you can activate both buffs for more damage and reset all your cooldowns easily. This also allows permanent uptime of The Devourer which deals additional damage but more importantly keeps up Supremacy very easily.

Final Journey to Level 60

At this point, most of the key synergies are unlocked and the gameplay loop is almost complete. As you level up, you unlock a lot of extra points that go into various offensive and defensive passives or max out certain skills. Check out the skills progression above to see where to put your points as you go, but feel free to deviate from the order displayed as necessary. For example, you can pick up Resilient earlier for extra defense or leave out some of the Ultimate passive cluster nodes until later if you find yourself rarely using The Seeker.

Endgame Swaps

The endgame build looks significantly different from the leveling version after you acquire specific key uniques that supercharge the setup. At some point we'll switch to the The Hunter and drop our Basic Skill to spam Crushing Hand non-stop, among other changes. Find out more details in the Crushing Hand Spiritborn Endgame Guide.

Spirit Hall

Primary: Eagle allows our Evade to deal damage and apply Vulnerable.

Secondary: Jaguar provides us with easy access to Ferocity for more Attack Speed and further synergies down the line.

Unlocking the Spirit Hall

Once you reach level 15, you have to complete a short questline starting in Gea Kul, Kehjistan. A Priority Quest leads you there to help out Tarka. After a few stops outside of town you have to enter the Sacred Hunting Grounds and defeat the Spirit Beast. While inside this dungeon you have to use the emote wheel at two separate stops, once for "Help", once for "Thanks" in order to progress. The boss fight is relatively long and difficult for low level characters, so it's recommended to do this quest on normal. After finishing the quest your secondary Spirit Hall unlocks automatically at level 30.

To get started as a Crushing Hand Spiritborn, focus the most on upgrading your weapon as its damage is the base for all further damage calculations. Otherwise, follow the priority list below. While you don't have all of the desired temper manuals available, simply try to get anything useful on your gear until you acquire the right ones. For example, % Damage, Damage to Close, Vulnerable Damage, etc. all work as long as you activate their conditions. Likewise, you can temper multiple defensive options such as Resistances, Life, Armor to fill gaps in your survivability. Tempering low level gear is relatively cheap and the results can be very impactful.

Tip: For the early game, Elemental Surge Weapon Tempers are very powerful due to their high base damage, especially if you are twinking. If you find these, you may want to keep imprinting them on your weapons for an easy time.

The Codex of Power is a collection of Legendary Aspects you can imprint onto Rare or Legendary items at the Occultist. They unlock after completing specific Dungeons located around Sanctuary or salvaging items with these powers. Check out our Map Tool to locate these Dungeons.

For leveling, there are a few powers that can significantly help us if we have the funds to imprint them. In addition, keep an eye out for powerful Unique items you may find for this or other builds.

Must-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Unrelenting (Remnants of Rage - Nahantu)

Nice-to-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Haste (Seething Underpass - Nahantu)

Great Uniques for this build

1. Harmony of Ebewaka
2. Ring of the Midnight Sun
3. Peacemonger's Signet
4. Mother's Embrace

Jackpot Drops

As you level up, you may get lucky and find some great random drops. Some of these can massively amplify your power and speed up the leveling by switching to another build. Keep in mind that there are many more Aspects and Uniques that can be useful to multiple builds; this just lists some of the most impactful ones. While we usually recommend starting with Endgame Builds at level 60, you often can make them work earlier with these drops:

Build-defining Uniques

1. Sepazontec (enables Rock Splitter Thorns Endgame Builds)
2. Loyalty's Mantle (greatly enhances multiple Endgame Builds)
3. Jacinth Shell (greatly amplifies multiple Endgame Builds)
4. Balazan's Maxtlatl (enables powerful Thorns/Poison Endgame Builds)

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 Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Cem + Lum - An easy solve for resources that you can just refill when evading
• Cir + Ceh - Spawns wolves that deal damage and freeze enemies

Alternative choices

If you have access to higher level runes, you can also explore the following 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
• Que - Earthen Bulwark helps with defense and later synergy with Viscous Shield
• Igni - Another good way of generating offering
• Gar - For more crit (before Rod of Kepeleke)
• Tam - We spam our core skill all the time
• Thul - The Freeze adds more defense and an extra damage buff
• Jah - Allows us to go faster with free Teleport

In Diablo 4, you can level by completing the Campaign, collecting Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers, completing Helltide activities, grinding Dungeons, clearing Strongholds, fighting in the Undercity of Kurast or interacting with the Seasonal Mechanics. While there are many ways to level up in Diablo 4, not all of them are equal.

Paragon & Glyphs

Use the slider to see 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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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

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

• Nuke enemies in combos to trigger Prodigy's Tempo and Unrelenting.
• Keep up The Devourer and Supremacy as much as possible.
• Stack Resolve for more damage and defense.
• Use Evade regularly for free damage and Vulnerable application.
• Kapow!

Written by wudijo