Stinger Centipede Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Stinger Centipede Spiritborn Endgame Guide! This build relies on Centipede Skills and focuses on high Poison damage output to unleash devastating explosions with the Noxious Resonance Key Passive.
There are multiple ways to play Stinger and this build focuses on the Poison from Pestilent Swarms, an effect created and amplified by various aspects and uniques such as Pestilence, Infestation and Ring of Writhing Moon. While the two aspects are amazing, we actually skip the unique as it is more of a downside than it helps and instead pick up other damage buffs such as Unyielding Hits and go for armor stacking. The final result is that this character eventually transforms from merely hitting enemies with its ground AoE into a good ol' Hammerdin thanks to the spiraling Pestilent Swarms!
Even though this setup sports potent damage over time effects, you mainly scale Critical Strike Chance and Damage to get the most out of your Noxious Resonance pops. Compared to most other Spiritborn builds, you don't go for either of the two class specific unique helms and instead aim for Heir of Perdition, as the other two don't boost the swarms.
All in all, the Stinger Centipede Spiritborn offers incredible damage output and scales very well into the lategame. Let's get started!
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
Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - This build greatly benefits additional cooldown reduction, so we slot this in, allowing us to press all buttons more often while draining less life with Jacinth Shell.
Modifiers
- Sinerat's Flames - A great damage buff that we stack up anyway due to our resistances in the lategame.
- Andariel's Flaming Skull - This is a DoT build so we directly benefit from this effect.
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - We don't use a Basic Skill, but can benefit from the increased Vulnerable damage permanently using The Hunter with enough cooldown reduction.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Varshan's Life Steal (main) - Tons of healing if you need it, helps with Jacinth Shell.
- Lord Zir's Blood Pool (modifier) - Even more healing (same).
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste (modifier) - Great for the early game if you don't pop Noxious Resonance reliably enough yet.
- Allek's Talons (modifier) - To go faster.
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption (modifier) - Can be included alongside a temper of "Crowd Control Duration" for another damage boost.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate (modifier) - The blisters spawned from this power are extra targets that either pop and help take down elites, or at a minimum provide us with more targets for Noxious Resonance AoE procs.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Stinger is your main ability. It comes with a hefty resource cost that you work to make up for with effects such Vigorous, Velocity, Ring of the Midnight Sun and eventually Ring of Starless Skies. Most of the damage done comes from Noxious Resonance explosions of Poisons applied by Pestilent Swarms from Pestilence + Infestation.
- Ravager adds extra damage as chip damage against targets you hit, allows you to dash towards enemies and brings extra resource generation with Measured Ravager.
- Armored Hide is your defensive tool and an important source of Resolve. Keep an eye on your stacks and activate it as needed for a powerful defensive buff together with Perseverance. Rock Splitter can be used to gain Vigor, Resolve and block chance if needed in the early game until you get to the point of infinite resources.
- Counterattack is your defensive cooldown and allows you to negate almost all incoming damage. It may be used for its passive effect with Ring of the Midnight Sun.
- Scourge is a powerful offensive tool and helps to generate resources.
- Vortex groups up enemies which is helpful to overlap swarm spirals and Noxious Resonance explosions.
- The Hunter is your Ultimate Ability. It does a good amount damage on its own but is mainly used for a large range of offensive buffs: Supremacy, Resolution, Intricacy and Harmonious Hunter.
Skill Rotation
- Gather enemies with Vortex.
- Activate Scourge.
- Spam Stinger to deal damage.
- Keep up Ravager and Armored Hide for resources, damage buffs and Unstoppable.
- Activate The Hunter as often as possible for various buffs like Supremacy and Resolution.
Spiritborn Spirit Hall
Primary: Gorilla allows us to build barriers and trigger Unyielding Hits easily with all of our attacks
Secondary: Centipede helps us out with extra healing to negate the drain of Jacinth Shell
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Spiritborn Class Overview.
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 the 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.
Stinger Centipede 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
- Fitness
- Bane
- Spirit
- Consumption
- Fester
To Level 46
- Bane
- Consumption
- Spirit
- Fitness
- Fester
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 if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Stinger Centipede Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Que - We aim for high uptime on Earthen Bulwark for extra defense and synergy with Viscous Shield.
- Igni + Tal - Spawns more swarms which are weaker than our own, but still contribute lots of damage and stack Consumption even higher.
Alternative choices
As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cir - Generates lots of offering regularly
- Poc - Another way of generating offering
- Xal - For extra defense
- Ohm - War Cry provides a substantial damage buff
- Wat - It's a good combo to trigger the cheap Decrepify to then trigger another rune with Xol
- Jah - Allows us to go faster with free Teleport
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 us with Fortify, Stuns, some extra damage, more armor for Unyielding Hits 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 armor capped without him.
Reinforcement: Varyana
We choose Earth Breaker for extra crowd controls.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Stinger Centipede 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.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 22+ total Stinger ranks
- 50%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 2500%+ Critical Strike Damage
- 80%+ Attack Speed
- 2000+ Dexterity
- 4,000+ Armor
- All Resistances 60%+
- 8,000+ Life
- 70%+ Vortex Size
- 175%+ Movement Speed
Use Soothing Spices and Song of the Mountain to cap out your Armor and Resistances if necessary.
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Stinger Centipede 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 Stinger Centipede Spiritborn from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
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 penalty of -250 Armor and -25% All Resistances 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.
- Pestilent Swarms are the core of the build. Pestilence can be unlocked from dungeons but Infestation is drop-only. Focus on getting this aspect as soon as possible.
- Before acquiring Ring of the Midnight Sun you most likely don't have infinite resources. Resource aspects like Starlight or Umbral ease things up until then.
- Redirected Force scales your damage through Resolve stacks + Interdiction as well as Armored Hide. Keep an eye on your buffs and time your defensive skill to boost it.
- Unyielding Hits is a weapon damage buff that you activate automatically with your skills. This aspect is so powerful that you overcap armor massively in order to scale it.
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, your Armor & Resistance values are constantly shifting. Ensure to stay capped at with at least 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in to maximize survivability.
- Focus on reaching high Attack Speed, Critical Strike Chance & ranks to Furnace & Stinger as your primary damage attributes on gear.
- Once you acquire Ring of the Midnight Sun, you should never have resource issues again and can replace Rock Splitter with Scourge which brings a massive damage buff and its own share of resource generation.
- Godslayer Crown is amazing as it pulls enemies together for your swarms. Stacking up enemies yields a massive DPS boost as the swarms spiral out from their spawn location, hitting enemies multiple times on the way. If enemies are spread out, you hit them way less.
- Jacinth Shell massively speed up our cooldown recovery. With it you can keep up all of your buffs permanently with ease but it comes at a hefty life cost. With all the built-in healing of this setup, it's easy to maintain our life at full as long as we are engaged in combat but it will leave you at low HP when out of combat. Play around your barriers to survive and for example, use healing potions when entering a boss arena.
- Rakanoth's Wake is almost exclusively used for its huge all resistance bonus but also comes with a good amount of movement speed, additive damage and cooldown reduction. With it we can focus on stacking armor instead of resistances for Unyielding Hits.
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
- Heir of Perdition is a powerful damage boost and one of the few ways to really buff Pestilent Swarms, easily overshadowing Godslayer Crown.
- Ring of Starless Skies replaces Ring of the Midnight Sun. In the lategame you can still sustain resources with Scourge, Sapping and Endurance and you get a powerful offensive buff on top.
- As you min-max your gear, focus on stacking armor as much as possible (up to 5000) while staying resistance capped.
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.
Gear & Skills
- This is largely the same setup as the mythic variant.
- We also don't worry about Potent and instead pick up other damage passives on the tree.
- Play around your barriers to survive and for example use healing potions when entering a boss arena.
- If you are mainly focusing on easy outdoor content and you're way too powerful, you can also replace Ring of Starless Skies with Ring of Writhing Moon.
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.
Gear & Skills
- When fighting monsters in high tiers of the Pit, remember that after crowd controlling elites for 5 seconds, they become Unstoppable for 8 seconds. This may be the right moment to start kiting them around because they can freely retaliate and it's difficult to keep them into the right position.
- We replace Ravager with Counterattack for more defense and damage. If you run into resource issues, undo this 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.
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.
This build's biggest upgrades for resource management are either Ring of the Midnight Sun (early on) or Ring of Starless Skies (lategame). In addition, you can add the following to reach a point where your resources feel comfortable:
- Vigorous
- Velocity
- Resource Cost Reduction on rings
- Block Chance to synergize with Enhanced Rock Splitter
- Vigor per Second rolls on Helm, Chest and Boots
- High uptime of Measured Ravager
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.
- Potent is one of the strongest passives in the entire game, ramping up damage in boss encounters which are this build's main weakness while AoE damage is a breeze.
- Even without going for Jaguar primary spirit hall or Harmony of Ebewaka, we can ramp up the damage buff slowly via Ravager and The Hunter.
- If you are doing easy content and bosses melt in seconds, you can replace this passive and pick up other choices. It's only worth it in long fights lasting at least half a minute.
- The "Chance to Extra Hit" temper for Stinger doesn't spawn more Pestilent Swarms. These swarms (or their explosions from Noxious Resonance) are the bulk of our damage (ca. 80%), making it worth it to instead temper Ravenous on your weapon to buff them.
- Ring of Writhing Moon makes Pestilent Swarms spawn centered on you instead of where you hit with Stinger. While this is a great advantage in easy content where you one-shot everything, it doesn't benefit you very much in situations that matter.
- Pestilent Swarms only last a short time, so you can't stack up a lot to carry them over into another pack of monsters.
- Because the center of the spawn changes, you can no longer hit your primary targets as much as before. This ring effectively cuts your DPS roughly in half.
Mechanics
- Pestilent Swarms are spawned from effects like Pestilence, Infestation, Ring of Writhing Moon, Exalted Devourer or Tal.
- Swarms scale with general damage multipliers (e.g. Unyielding Hits, Dexterity) and Stinger's base damage (e.g. more skill ranks) with Pestilence. They are a Centipede-based subskill and benefit from Centipede damage bonuses such as Centipede Damage tempers, Ravenous and Oppressive.
- Effects that specifically boost your skills but don't actually raise the base damage of Stinger such as Harmony of Ebewaka do NOT work for swarms.
- Pestilence makes swarms spiral outwards from the center of the Stinger AoE. Since they start with small circles, they can hit the same target up to 5 times.
- Ring of Writhing Moon displaces the spawn location to center it on the player, removing this multi-hit effect and reducing damage output.
- Jacinth Shell effectively reads the same as "67% cooldown reduction" or "200% 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)
- 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 (but its barrier doesn't scale with max. life)
- 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.
Video Guide
This video is still largely the same as the written guide.
Summary
The Stinger Centipede Spiritborn is a powerful endgame build with incredible AoE damage.
- Use Stinger to deal damage and spawn Pestilent Swarms that hit everything around you.
- Work on acquiring Infestation and Jacinth Shell as soon as possible.
- Stack Critical Strike synergies for Noxious Resonance.
- Use your defensive cooldowns as needed and keep up resources with Ring of the Midnight Sun, Ring of Starless Skies and Ravager.
- Become the Swarm!
Credits
Written by wudijo