Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Leveling Guide

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.

Leveling Boss Powers

Alternate Boss Powers

• Ashava's Poison Breath  - Either as main or modifier, this deals great extra damage while leveling (add Scourge instead of Rushing Claw or Soar in that case).
• Avarice's Explosive Ore (main) - Provides big bursts if you time it well.
• Wandering Death's Chest Beam (modifier) - Great to slot in if you get it as we trigger our main power all the time.
• Flesh Reaper's Disruption (modifier) - Can be included alongside a temper of "Crowd Control Duration" for another damage boost (used in the Endgame build).

Speed & Damage

Rushing Claw is a staple for early game Spiritborn mobility. Use it whenever you can to go from pack to pack or close the distance to your target. Soar is used for the early game to increase your mobility further but eventually replaced once you have more base movement speed. Lastly, Ravager is an amazing secondary damage source that applies extra hits to all targets you hit with any ability, making it easy to trigger Jaguar or take out smaller enemies with a single use of Crushing Hand.

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, helping out with Vital Strikes procs. 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

Vital Strikes is our key passive of choice for this leveling setup. On top of a great damage boost it also single-handedly solves most resource and life recovery under the condition that we can apply Vulnerable frequently. Our best options to rely on are Replenishing Soar & Exalted Seeker. At this point you should be able to spam Crushing Hand nearly non-stop as long as you cycle in these two skill from time to time. Your ultimate also brings other perks such as Supremacy, Resolution and Intricacy.

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

While perhaps not necessary early on, we replace The Seeker with The Hunter in the transition to Torment difficulties to increase our damage output and gain more Ferocity. Finally, we change our primary spirit hall bonus to Centipede to benefit from the massive slow and damage reduction bonuses as the Eagle feathers fall off later on. Find more details in the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Guide.

Spirit Hall

Primary: Eagle allows our Evade to deal damage and apply Vulnerable, helping out with resource generation from Vital Strikes.

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 Gorilla 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)
2. Fell Soothsayer's (Ularian Sepulcher - 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 Aspects

• Moonrise + Adaptability (enables Rock Splitter Thorns and Thrash Endgame Builds)

Build-defining Uniques

1. Sepazontec (enables Rock Splitter Thorns and Thrash Endgame Builds)
2. Loyalty's Mantle (greatly enhances multiple Endgame Builds)
3. Jacinth Shell (greatly amplifies multiple 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 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
• Ahu + Que - Replaces the Jah combo for higher end content like Pit Pushing and Bossing

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

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

• Spam Crushing Hand, ideally 3x in a row for the extra hits from Unrelenting.
• Solve your resources either with Vulnerable + Vital Strikes.
• Keep up your Resolve stacks for more damage and defense.
• Kapow!

Written by wudijo