Rake Jaguar Spiritborn Leveling Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Early Skill Rotation

Your main source of DPS, until you unlock the Spirit Hall is Rake. The idea is to spam Rake as much as possible, generating resources through Vital Strikes and other passives. Until you have a reliable source of vulnerable, resource generation is tight and you need to fill the gaps with your basic skill. Passives like Vigorous and Velocity help a lot here, try to look out for helpful resource affixes like Umbral, Adaptability and Starlight.

Spirit Hall

At level 15, you can unlock your class mechanic called Spirit Hall. This is the strongest tool that the spiritborn has at their disposal and can actually carry you all of the way to T1. There you choose one out of the four spirit guardians for both the primary and secondary slots. For leveling, you select Eagle (primary) and Jaguar (secondary). The Eagle primary Spirit Hall is your main source of damage until you get starter gear for endgame. Every time you evade you create massive amounts of auto-aimed AoE projectiles. Your gear and skills center around reducing the cooldown of your evade as much as possible. Thunderspike reduces the cooldown, and finding boots with attacking reduces evade cooldown is a massive boost to your early leveling damage. The Jaguar secondary gives you easy access to Ferocity for extra attack speed and Invasive Rushing Claw cooldown resets.

Speed & Damage

Rushing Claw is a staple for early 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. 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 hit of Rake.

Key Passive

Vital Strikes is our key passive of choice for leveling. On top of a great damage boost it also solves resource and life recovery once you can reliably apply Vulnerable.

Final Journey to Level 60

As you make your way to level 60 you pick up various offensive and defensive passives. Check out the skills progression above to see where to put your points as you go, but leveling is a fluid situation and your priorities may shift based on what gear you have found thus far.

Accursed Touch Swap

Once you acquire Accursed Touch, you can make multiple swaps in your setup because this aspect's Vulnerable effect cannot be removed by Vital Strikes.

Spirit Hall

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

Secondary: ‍Jaguar provides you 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 Rake Jaguar 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 get 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. 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 you 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. Wild Claws (Hierophant Pyre - Nahantu)

Nice-to-have Dungeon unlocks

1. Haste (Seething Underpass - Nahantu)
2. Disobedience (Hals of the Damned - Kehjistan)
3. Fell Soothsayer's (Ularian Sepulcher - Nahantu)
4. Might (Dark Ravine - Dry Steppes)

Great Uniques for this build

1. Loyalty's Mantle
2. Harmony of Ebewaka
3. Rod of Kepeleke
4. Ring of the Midnight Sun
5. Peacemonger's Signet
6. Razorplate
7. Wound Drinker

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 and Thrash Endgame Builds)

Build-defining Uniques

1. Sepazontec (enables Rock Splitter and Thrash Endgame Builds)
2. Jacinth Shell (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 Rake Jaguar Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Tam + Ohm - You achieve moderate uptime of War Cry granting increased damage.
• Lith + Que - Casts Earthen Bulwark granting a large barrier for defense and more damage with Viscous Shield

Alternative choices

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

• Poc - You continuously gain and spend tons of Vigor, so this is an easy activator
• Vex - The extra skill ranks help by increasing damage
• Xal - For extra defense
• Gar - To reach 100% crit more reliably
• Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger and defense. It s executes enemies at 10% HP and can be combined with Xol in your other Runeword to generate large amounts of offering
• Yom - Petrify is a massive damage multiplier, especially against bosses

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 resistances 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 resistance cap without him.

Reinforcement: Subo

Choose Trip Mines to knock enemies down when you cast Rake.

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 Rake Jaguar Spiritborn is a fast-paced, easy to play leveling build that scales very well into endgame.
• With Vital Strikes unlocked, focus on multiple sources of Vulnerable until you get Accursed Touch.
• Stack critical strike chance, attack speed & defenses on your gear.
• Jump from pack to pack cleaving down foes with your explosive Rake strikes and Spirit Jaguar companion.

Written by Lucky Luciano

Reviewed by Wudijo