Payback Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide

If there are times when your Payback isn't doing damage it is because you of one of three things:

• MAJOR: don't have 275 maximum Vigor
• MAJOR: don't have enough resource generation to fully restore Vigor from Ring of the Midnight Sun
• MINOR: Low Overpower damage due to low current life or low Fortify

Rod of Kepeleke and Poised Payback spend all of your resource to significantly increase the damage of Payback. If your maximum Vigor is 275 when you cast Payback it activates Banished Lord's Talisman causing the next attack to be guaranteed to Overpower and critically strike with extra multiplier 60%[x].

Here is a list of the bonuses at 275 maximum Vigor for EVERY cast of Payback:

• 50%[x] Critical Strike - guaranteed from both Rod of Kepeleke and Banished Lord's Talisman
• 825% - 3% per resource from Rod of Kepeleke.
• 137.5% - 0.5% per resource from Poised Payback.
• 60%[x] - Banished Lord's Talisman
• 50%[x] Overpower - guaranteed from Banished Lord's Talisman

• Overpower isn't just a 50%[x] multiplier. It also does increased damage based on your life points and Fortify
  • For a more information on Overpower check out Ava's damage guide

If you don't have enough maximum Vigor you can use Elixir of Resourcefulness II for another 25.

Rod of Kepeleke and Poised Payback spend all of your resources to significantly increase the damage of Payback. If your maximum Vigor is 275 when you cast Payback it activates Banished Lord's Talisman causing the next attack to be guaranteed to Overpower and critically strike with an extra multiplier of 60%[x].
Here is a list of the bonuses at 275 maximum Vigor for EVERY cast of Payback:

• 50%[x] Critical Strike - guaranteed from both Rod of Kepeleke and Banished Lord's Talisman
• 825% - 3% per resource from Rod of Kepeleke.
• 137.5% - 0.5% per resource from Poised Payback.
• 60%[x] - Banished Lord's Talisman
• 50%[x] Overpower - guaranteed from Banished Lord's Talisman

Sources of Maximum Vigor:

• Elixir of Resourcefulness II
• Sapping paragon board has a lot of Maximum vigor
  • 8 from Opportunist
  • 4 each from Two magic nodes
  • 8 from Eager Prey
  • 4 each from Three magic nodes
    • You can use Glyph Socket to boost Eager Prey to 15
• Rod of Kepeleke
• Tibault's Will
• Harlequin Crest
• Legendary helm's can have maximum Vigor

If you don't have enough maximum Vigor you can use Elixir of Resourcefulness II for another 25.

• Overpower isn't just a 50%[x] multiplier. It also does increased damage based on your life points and Fortify
  • For a more information on Overpower check out Ava's damage guide

One common issue players face with this build is failing to restore Vigor fully after casting Payback. This build doesn't function unless Ring of the Midnight Sun fully restores your Vigor. Ring of the Midnight Sun restores 20 - 50% of the Vigor spent in the last two seconds. The higher the roll the easier it is to reach enough resource generation to fully restore your Vigor each attack. If you don't have enough resource generation you do no damage!

Here is a table showing Ring of the Midnight Sun roll and the required Resource generation to fully restore Vigor as well as how to calculate resource generation.

The build works exceptionally well when you decimate everything in seconds, but it may struggle during longer fights against high-level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:

• Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
• Use defensive consumables.
• Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
• Make sure you use Scourge to heal.

Payback Spiritborn has multiple ways to trigger Unstoppable. Keeping Armored Hide up 100% of the time gives you Unstoppable.

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on armor & resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Include a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

The most important stat on Ring of the Midnight Sun is the Vigor restore percent. Ring of the Midnight Sun restores 20 - 50% of the Vigor spent in the last two seconds. The higher the roll the easier it is to reach enough resource generation to fully restore your Vigor each attack. If you don't have enough resource generation you do no damage.

To find out how much resource generation your Ring of the Midnight Sun roll needs to fully restore your Vigor follow this formula:

• (100% / Ring of the Midnight Sun roll) - 100%

Here is a table showing Ring of the Midnight Sun roll and the required Resource generation to fully restore Vigor:

Resource Generation:

Sources of resource generation:

• Intelligence
• Jewelry Tempers
• 8% from Opportunist - Sapping Paragon board
• 2% on each of Three magic nodes - Sapping Paragon board
• 30% from Measured Ravager
• 15% from Vigorous

When calculating resource generation it is important to remember resource generation is multiplicative.
Here is the formula for calculating resource generation:

Resource generation = ((100% + Source 1) x (100% + Source 2) x (100% + Source 3) …) - 100%

((100% + Vigorous) x (100% + Measured Ravager) x (100% + Rare node) x (100% + Magic node) x (100% + Magic node) x (100% + Magic node) x (100% + Temper) x (100% + Int)) - 100%

((115%) x (130%) x (108%) x (102%) x (102%) x (102%) x (127.5%) x (131%)) - 100%

(286.18%) - 100% = 186.18%

I strongly suggest aiming for a Ring of the Midnight Sun roll of 40% or higher

• Cooldown: Rod of Kepeleke turns Payback into basic skills, thus removing the cooldown.
• Damage: When you cast Payback with full Vigor, you get the bonus from Poised Payback and Rod of Kepeleke. If you are also using Banished Lord's Talisman and have over 275 maximum Vigor, you can cast Payback with the following benefits
  • 137.5%[x] damage from Poised Payback.
  • 825% [x] Critical Strike Damage from Rod of Kepeleke.
  • 50% [x] Overpower from Banished Lord's Talisman.*
  • 60%[x] Critical strikes that Overpower from Banished Lord's Talisman.
• Your Payback critically strikes and Overpowers every attack.
• Overpower is misleading as the damage increase is generally much higher than 50% thanks to the additive Overpower damage. This is why you are using Assimilation, and Shield Charge*

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Spiritborn, these two caps are distributed in the following way:

Cap 1

• Gear rolls
• Paragon nodes
• Elixirs
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine

Cap 2

• Adaptive Stances
• Rapid
• Ferocity
• Accelerating

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss temporarily takes less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.