Rake Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide
The Rake Spiritborn Endgame Guide utilizes the Gorilla and Eagle Spirit Halls combined with powerful permanent Critical Strikes to melt your enemies! Your main skill Rake is used to stack Ferocity and reduce all of your Cooldowns on every single use.
You convert your overcapped Armor into pure damage through Unyielding Hits while guaranteeing permanent Critical Strikes through your Rod of Kepeleke.
You zoom around the battlefield by utilizing Ravager and The Hunter, while grouping up all your enemies with Vortex. Rake's size is further increased through your Gear Tempers to guarantee a very easy to use screen clear.
For survivability you have access to Armored Hide and many Gorilla passives such as Perseverance to keep you safe while also providing a damage multiplier through Colossal.
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. To see how this Build compares against others, check out our various Build Tier Lists.
Season Theme
Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.
There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of four Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay, Psyche, and Lost), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.
Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers
- Soul Harvest - This Power dramatically increases Core Stats based on monster density and is a reliable strong choice.
- Breath of the Coven - Increases your Attack Speed for 10 seconds every time you deal damage.
- Aura of Siphoning - You must equip one "Growth & Decay" Witchcraft Power for Breath of the Coven. Additionally you get a bit of healing on top.
- Aura Specialization - Level this up to Rank 10 for a massive Critical Strike Damage multiplier.
- Abyssal Resonance - Pulls in enemies as well as activating the "Eldritch" Witchcraft Power for Breath of the Coven.
- Vengeful Spirit Servant - Activates the "Psyche" Witchcraft Power for Breath of the Coven, while also providing huge Defense with a Cooldown.
Alternate Witchcraft Powers
- Piranhado - This power can be used as an alternative way to group mobs.
- Twilight Warding - Provides additional Barrier generation for Viscous Shield.
Occult Gems
Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.
Best-in-Slot Occult Gems
- Moonlight Ward - An incredible defensive power, granting 15% Damage Reduction and 5% Maximum Elemental Resistances at max rank.
- Dust Stone - With all the Witchcraft Powers above, this Occult Gem provides additional multiplicative damage.
- Hungering Void - Pulls monsters close every 8 seconds.
Alternate Occult Gems
- Killing Wind - A great intermediate Occult Gems if you need some help reaching Critical Strike Cap of 100% or additional Movement Speed.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Rake is your core skill and your biggest damage source.
- Scourge is used for damage to CC, Vigor generation and to apply poison.
- The Hunter is the best Ultimate skill at your disposal. It increases your damage, over-stacks your Ferocity, acts as a mobility skill and can reset its own cooldown very reliably.
- Vortex is an excellent tool to group up enemies.
- Ravager provides additional Vigor generation and makes you dash to your targets.
- Armored Hide keeps you at maximum Resolve stacks and provides you with great survivability. Spam this skill whenever it is off cooldown.
Skill Rotation
- Hold Rake, dash from pack to pack with Ravager and The Hunter.
- Group up packs of enemies with Vortex.
- Spam Armored Hide whenever it is off cooldown.
- (On Elites & Bosses) Make sure they are poisoned by Scourge.
Spirit Hall
Primary: Gorilla provides the Gorilla tag to all skill, granting you an additional avenue of increasing your damage. Additionally every attack grants Barrier.
Secondary: Eagle grants additional Critical Strike Chance up to 100%, which resets after critically striking.
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.
Learn more details in our full Spiritborn Spirit Hall Guide.
Paragon & Glyphs
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 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.
Rake Spiritborn Endgame Paragon
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
- Wildfire
- Hone
- Spirit
- Revenge
- Colossal
To Level 46
- Spirit
- Fitness
- Colossal
- Wildfire
- Revenge
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Runes
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, Helms, Pants or Chest Armor.
Best in Slot
- Poc + Que - You spend all of your Vigor on every cast with Rod of Kepeleke, making Poc generate tons of Offering for an additional Barrier coming from Que (Earthen Bulwark).
- Xol + Jah - Allows you to fly across the map like no other combination.
Alternative choices
As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Vex - The extra skill ranks help with increasing damage.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Gar - For higher Critical Strike Chance before Rod of Kepeleke.
- Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and executes enemies at 10% HP, can be combined with Xol in your other Runeword to generate large amounts of offering
- Yom - Petrify is a massive damage multiplier.
- Ohm - Another big damage multiplier through War Cry.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
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 you with Fortify, Stuns, some extra damage, more Armor and prevents you 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
Choose Earth Breaker to knock enemies, mainly Elites, down when using Scourge.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Rake Spiritborn to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. 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.
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Rake 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.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Rake Spiritborn from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter and Ancestral.
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
Early on in your progression, focus on armor & resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a 250 armor and 25% all res penalty 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.
- The goal in the T1 Starter variant is to apply and remove Vulnerable as often as possible to generate Vigor, while also profiting of the Vulnerable and Vital Strikes damage multipliers.
- Vital Strikes promotes an interesting playstyle by generating Vigor, while constantly removing Vulnerable from your targets.
- Soar, Eagle, Accursed Touch and Riving help in doing so.
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
As you upgrade your gear to ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing armor & resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 armor and 70%+ resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- In the Ancestral version you have access to the powerful Rod of Kepeleke and Ring of the Midnight Sun combo, solving your Vigor generation and empowering every attack.
- With Rod of Kepeleke you no longer need to worry about Vigor 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 potentially Prodigy's Tempo.
- 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.
- Furthermore Harmony of Ebewaka tremendously buffs your Rake damage, since you have a total of 3 Spirit Halls active on your Rake.
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
As you upgrade your gear to ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing armor & resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 armor and 70%+ resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- 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.
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.
- For the Speedfarming variant you swap Scourge for Soar to maximize your mobility.
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.
- In the Pit Pushing variant the Rake Spiritborn swaps out Ring of the Midnight Sun for Ring of Starless Skies.
- Due to losing your Ring of the Midnight Sun you now have to make space for Counterattack on your bar by removing Vortex.
- Vortex is still active on the build by swapping to Kry in your weapon.
FAQ & Mechanics
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.
The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long 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.
- Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.
Make sure you are spamming Scourge for Vigor generation. Try to find a very high roll on your Wound Drinker ring.
Ring of the Midnight Sun provides this bonus passively which adds a good amount of extra Dodge and Critical Strike Damage.
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.
- Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
Mechanics
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 ring tracks how much is spent on your buff bar and consumes the buff on your next crit, so you can't scale its effect by attacking quickly. The higher the roll the easier it will be to reach enough resource generation to fully restore your Vigor each attack. If you don't have enough resource generation you will 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%
50% Ring of the Midnight Sun
- (100% / 50%) - 100%
- (100% / 50%) = 200%
- 200% - 100% = 100%
40% Ring of the Midnight Sun
- (100% / 40%) - 100%
- (100% / 40%) = 250%
- 250% - 100% = 150%
35% Ring of the Midnight Sun
- (100% / 35%) - 100%
- (100% / 35%) = 285.7%
- 285.7% - 100% = 185.7%
Here is a table showing Ring of the Midnight Sun roll and the required Resource generation to fully restore Vigor:
Ring of the Midnight Sun | Resource Generation | Ring of the Midnight Sun | Resource Generation | Ring of the Midnight Sun | Resource Generation |
35% | 186% | 41% | 144% | 46% | 117% |
36% | 178% | 42% | 138% | 47% | 113% |
37% | 170% | 43% | 133% | 48% | 108% |
38% | 163% | 44% | 127% | 49% | 104% |
39% | 156% | 45% | 122% | 50 | 100% |
40% | 150% |
Resource Generation:
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%
I strongly suggest aiming for a Ring of the Midnight Sun roll of 40% or higher
Rod of Kepeleke "chance to hit twice":
- Grants Payback a chance to deal double damage
- Grants each Quill Volley projectile a chance to be replicated
- Only replicates one of the two hits for Rake
- Only replicates one of the two hits for Crushing Hand
- Allows Touch of Death to reinfect from swarms
- Allows Stinger to replicate a full swing once per attack at a surrounding poisoned target
Rod of Kepeleke "cast at maximum size":
- Adds 2 feathers to Quill Volley
- Enlarges Crushing Hand to 200% size
- Enlarges Stinger to 200% size
- Enlarges Rake to ~400% size
- Enlarges Payback to ~double the size
- Does nothing for Touch of Death
- Does not stack with any size tempers
- Jacinth Shell effectively reads the same as "75% cooldown reduction" or "300% increased cooldown recovery speed" that works in addition to other cooldown reduction effects.
- The drain ticks multiple times per second for partial reductions and stops when you reach 1 HP.
- Drained life does not count as taking damage.
- Unyielding Hits hits adds weapon damage based on your current armor.
- As your armor is reduced by the Torment penalties, so is the damage gain of this aspect.
- The weapon damage added is equal to that from your equipped weapon, which is the base for all further damage calculations and thus adding to it is a massive benefit.
- Unyielding Hits adds a flat amount of weapon damage regardless of base weapon speed, meaning it's more beneficial for faster weapons.
- The total weapon damage can be tracked in the character details.
- To calculate the relative DPS increase, use the following formula:
- ((Armor x Unyielding %) + (Avg. Weapon Damage)) / (Avg. Weapon Damage)
- Mystic Circles can only spawn from the aspects Plains Power, Forest Power, Sky Power, Soil Power.
- They last 10 seconds and have a limit of 1 active at a time.
- They can not be overwritten with a fresh spawn while active.
- The lucky hit effect that triggers the circle will be immediately activated.
- Multiple buffs from multiple aspects can be active at the same time if skills of those spirits are used inside a circle.
- "Mystic Circle Potency" from tempers or Ritual amplifies most effects including damage done, damage gained, barrier gained gained by the aspects.
- "Mystic Circle Potency" does not amplify armor gained from Forest Power.
- When combined with Sky Power you can relocate your active circle to the destination of your Evade.
- Convergence requires you to stack physical or elemental damage bonuses.
- For the maximum of 30%, you need a total of 150% bonus damage to any combination of two damage types, or simply stack one high enough.
- "Non-physical damage" - while adding to each elemental type in your character sheet - does not function for Convergence. Instead you need to rely on other sources such as Bane, Fulminate and Wildfire.
- The stacks from Drive have individual timers and don't refresh when a new stack is acquired.
- While running non-stop at movement speed cap (200%), you can reach up to 7 stacks.
- In order to reach close to the maximum damage bonus, it's required to move very fast at all times including mobility skills such as Soar, Rushing Claw or The Hunter.
- The stacks from In-Fighter have individual timers and don't refresh when a new stack is acquired.
- With a 5 second timer for 9 stacks, you need to dodge or block a hit roughly twice per second in order to keep the bonus at maximum.
- Counterattack can stack a maximum duration of 6 seconds, which can be refreshed indefinitely with enough cooldown reduction.
- There is no forced gap or downtime in the 100% dodge effect.
- Some damage over time and ground effects cannot be dodged, even if they hit instead of dealing DoT damage. Most notably, Explosive Elites are very dangerous when your survivability greatly depends on high uptime of Counterattack.
- The Minimum Ferocity is always active, even when Invasive Rushing Claw consumes 4 stacks to refresh its cooldown.
- Hits with other skills create an extra Ravager hit, once per attack per enemy.
- Replenishing Ravager increases the number of hits against elites, dealing the same damage each.
- Replenishing Ravager stacks are filled up by any individual healing source, such as any life steal, life on hit, life regen etc.
Barrier Generation works with:
- Auspicious
- Forest Power
- Enhanced Concussive Stomp
- The Protector
- Earthen Bulwark from Que
Barrier Generation doesn't work with:
- Gorilla primary hall
- Enhanced Crushing Hand
- 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
- Artillery Shrine
- Moonrise
- Hysteria (Varyana)
- Bloodthirst (Varyana)
- Bloodlust (Varyana)
Cap 2
- Accelerating
- Rapid
- Ferocity
- Adaptive Stances
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 will temporarily take 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.
Summary
- The Rake Spiritborn is a hard hitting, fast-paced build that performs well in any scenario. With many mobility and utility skills at your disposal you are ready for anything that comes your way.
- Jump from pack to pack with your mobility skills and keep your Resolve stacks up with Armored Hide.
- Happy blasting 🚀!
Credits
Written by Chronikz