Rushing Claw Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide
The Rushing Claw Spiritborn Endgame Guide utilizes the Gorilla and Jaguar spirit halls, combined with strong Damage over Time effects and powerful direct damage procs. Consume your active DoTs to annihilate your enemies instantly!
Toxic Skin is the core skill of your build. Due to absurdly high skill ranks and tons of Cooldown Reduction your Toxic Skin is permanently active, poisoning everything you touch. Maximize your area coverage and zoom at the same time, by using Rushing Claw.
Noxious Resonance causes your Poisons on an enemy to burst, dealing all of the total Poisoning damage instantly, while spreading 20% to surrounding enemies. Noxious Resonance's damage is increased by 30% of your total Critical Strike Damage bonus. The Hunter provides an execute, additional mobility and overcaps your Ferocity increasing your damage through Plains Power.
Your defenses are phenomenal as Counterattack and Armored Hide are permanently active due to Temporal Incisions. Perseverance and Auspicious provide additional tankiness.
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. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
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.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Ashava's Poison Breath - As Rushing Claw Spiritborn you are constantly working with Poison Damage over Time effects which naturally synergizes with this Boss Power.
Modifiers
- Andariel's Flaming Skull - Adds additional damage as well as a Damage over Time multiplier to your build.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste - Provides additional Critical Strike Chance.
- Sinerat's Flames - Grants a permanent additional damage multiplier.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Torusk's Rage - Provides additional Attack Speed.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - Providing you can kill the spawned Blister Clones this is a very strong addition to your build.
- Lord Zir's Blood Pool - Helps counteract Jacinth Shell's health drain.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Toxic Skin provides your biggest source of Poison Damage over Time. The passive portion lets you Poison attackers for a substantial amount of Damage over Time, while the active portion of the Skill lets you create a Poison Damage trail behind you. Measured Toxic Skin makes your Poison Damage deal an additional 25% of its Damage over Time as Critical Strikes to Vulnerable enemies. This procs Noxious Resonance, closing the loop.
- Rushing Claw serves as your mobility skill, while also providing an incredible tool to spread your Poison from Toxic Skin's poison trail even faster. Due to your massive amount of Cooldown Reduction and additional Rushing Claw stacks on your gear, you are constantly dashing across the battlefield.
- The Hunter overfills your Ferocity, increasing your damage through Plains Power, while also functioning as an additional movement skill.
- Scourge fears and slows targets for 3 seconds, while also applying an additional source of Poisoning Damage to your targets. Additionally, each time you hit an enemy with Scourge, you gain 1% increased damage versus Crowd Controlled enemies for 6 seconds, up to 50%.
- Armored Hide lets you block all incoming attacks during its uptime. You have permanent uptime on this skill through Temporal Incisions.
- Counterattack makes you dodge all incoming attacks during its uptime, while also increasing your Critical Strike Damage for every Close enemy. Temporal Incisions also keeps this up all of the time.
The more Toxic Skin ranks you have, the stronger the build becomes. Additionally every 5 Skill Ranks, your Toxic Skin receives a substantial damage increase. Compare the following Rank 24 Toxic Skin to the Rank 25 Toxic Skin here, to spot the immense difference:
- Rank 24: Toxic Skin
- Rank 25: Toxic Skin
Reaching Ranks 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and so on for Toxic Skin is, therefore, a massive increase in power, which gets considerably smaller after Rank 25. Check out our Mechanics section to learn more!
Skill Rotation
- Rushing Claw to dash from pack to pack, while keeping the following buffs constantly active:
- Toxic Skin
- Armored Hide
- Counterattack
- Use Scourge for additional damage or when you need healing.
- (On Elites & Bosses) Use The Hunter for additional Damage.
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: Jaguar grants an additional stack of Ferocity to fuel your Attack Speed even more, while also generating 1 Ferocity whenever you kill an enemy or damage a Boss.
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.
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
- Fester
- Spirit
- Bane
- Canny
- Fitness
To Level 46
- Spirit
- Fitness
- Bane
- Fester
- Canny
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
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
- Bac + Que - Grants additional barrier through Earthen Bulwark.
- Moni + Kry - Increases your effectiveness in AoE encounters.
Alternative choices
As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Jah - A fantastic mobility tool, replacing your Evade with Teleport.
- Vex - Tremendous increase in your Damage, if this gets your Toxic Skin to Rank 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25.
- Xal - For extra defense.
- 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.
- 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 Rushing Claw Spiritborn to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. 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 Rushing Claw 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 Rushing Claw Spiritborn from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants T1 Starter, Ancestral and Mythic.
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 for survival, 3334 armor for damage through Unyielding Hits as early as possible, 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 is to acquire as much Critical Strike Damage as possible to boost your Noxious Resonance procs.
- Additionally try to boost your Toxic Skin ranks as high as you can. Every 5 levels tremendously boosts your Toxic Skin damage, but every step in between is also extremely valuable.
- Temporal Incisions ties your offense and defense together by extending all your Incarnate skills whenever you use Rushing Claw.
- Last but not least you try to reach 3334 Armor for Unyielding Hits as early as possible.
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 & Skill
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 for survival, 3334 armor for damage through Unyielding Hits and 70%+ resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- In the Ancestral version you have access to the powerful Wound Drinker. With up to 8 Toxic Skin ranks this item skyrockets your damage as soon as you equip it.
- Continue increasing your Critical Strike Damage and Toxic Skin ranks.
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 for survival, 3334 armor for damage through Unyielding Hits and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Harlequin Crest tremendously decreases your Cooldowns, as well as the incoming damage. On top of that, you also receive +4 Skill Ranks to all Skills, further increasing Harlequin Crest's effectiveness.
- Shroud of False Death provides a multitude of small benefits that add up to a ~40-60% damage gain on top of more survivability.
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 the Rushing Claw Spiritborn does not change, because you are already going at insane speeds and oneshotting everything.
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. For the meta full bug abuse version to clear 150s easily, check out the variant for it.
- In the Pit Pushing variant the Rushing Claw Spiritborn currently does not change.
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.
- Rushing Claw's last charge refills 4 Charges by consuming 4 stacks of Ferocity.
- Make sure you have a Rushing Claw temper on your boots. As an intermediary solution you can also get one for your Amulet instead of the Auspicious ranks.
- The more Cooldown Reduction you stack on your character, the easier maintaining buffer charges of Rushing Claw becomes.
- If you notice you are running low on Rushing Claw charges, make sure to make your last ones count by traveling as far as possible with them, to make the most use out of Swift.
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.
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
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
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.
In the table below you can see how valueable your Toxic Skin ranks on your gear are. Every 5 Ranks of Toxic Skin its duration increases, resulting in higher overall damage. The early ranks are worth much more, than the later ranks, as seen in the "Relative Increase %" column.
| Rank | Duration Multiplier | Skill Damage % | Relative Increase % |
| 1 | 36 | ||
| 2 | 39.6 | 10 | |
| 3 | 43.20 | 9 | |
| 4 | 46.80 | 8 | |
| 5 | 1.66667 | 84 | 79 |
| 6 | 90 | 7 | |
| 7 | 96 | 7 | |
| 8 | 102 | 6 | |
| 9 | 108 | 6 | |
| 10 | 1.285714286 | 159.60 | 48 |
| 11 | 168 | 5 | |
| 12 | 176.4 | 5 | |
| 13 | 184.8 | 5 | |
| 14 | 193.2 | 5 | |
| 15 | 1.285714286 | 259.2 | 34 |
| 16 | 270 | 4 | |
| 17 | 280.82 | 4 | |
| 18 | 291.60 | 4 | |
| 19 | 302.40 | 4 | |
| 20 | 1.22222 | 382.80 | 27 |
| 21 | 396 | 3 | |
| 22 | 409.2 | 3 | |
| 23 | 422.4 | 3 | |
| 24 | 435.6 | 3 | |
| 25 | 1.18181818 | 530.4 | 22 |
| 26 | 546 | 3 | |
| 27 | 561.60 | 3 | |
| 28 | 577.20 | 3 | |
| 29 | 592.82 | 3 | |
| 30 | 1.153846154 | 702 | 18 |
| 31 | 720 | 3 | |
| 32 | 738 | 2 | |
| 33 | 756 | 2 | |
| 34 | 774 | 2 | |
| 35 | 1.13333 | 897.60 | 16 |
| 36 | 918 | 2 |
Summary
- The Rushing Claw 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.
- Critical Strike Damage scales Noxious Resonance's damage into absurd heights.
- Use Measured Toxic Skin and naturals crits to proc Noxious Resonance. Vulnerable is applied by Fell Soothsayer's.
- Attack Speed affects Rushing Claw and is a vital part of your kit!
- Jump from pack to pack with your mobility skills and keep your Resolve stacks up with Armored Hide.
- Happy blasting 🚀!
Credits
Written by Chronikz