Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide

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

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

• Piranhado - This power can be used as an alternative way to group mobs.
• Aura of Siphoning - Can provide some healing in place of Hex of Whispers.
• Shaken Soul - Can help apply Vulnerable if you do not have a reliable method.
• Hex of Shattering - The Damage Reduction is great and it is the most consistent way to apply a Hex when paired with Voice of the Stars.

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 so be sure to slot them in for the defensive stats even if they don't synergize with your chosen Witchcraft Powers. 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

• Cornucopia - Increases Barrier Generation and Thorns, both vital stats for this build.
• Voice of the Stars - Gives your Ultimate all 3 Witchcraft tags for Breath of the Coven
• Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats improve skill damage, Armor, and Resistances, Maximum Life improves defense, and becoming Unhindered helps you move through groups of mobs while also activating Unrestrained Power. This is a great all rounder gem.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Hungering Void - Helps pull in enemies if you do not have a better source.
• Moonlight Ward - An additional layer of Damage Reduction. Maximum Resistance is a rare affix and reduces elemental damage significantly.

Skill Rotation

• Cast The Hunter to initiate combat and overflow your Ferocity
• Use Rock Splitter to deal all of your damage while dashing to your targets. This also increases your Block Chance from Enhanced Rock Splitter
• Activate Scourge on cooldown for ongoing heals and incresed damage to Crowd Controlled enemies.
• Cast Armored Hide to become Unstoppable and replenish your Resolve.
• Continue weaving in other skills every 7 seconds to maintain Adaptive Stances.
• (On Bosses) When Bosses near the Injured threshold, cast The Hunter for a 100% multiplier.

Spiritborn Spirit Hall

Primary: Centipede reduces damage taken while inflicting Poison.

Secondary: Jaguar increases your Attack Speed and maintains your Ferocity buffs.

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

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 Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Moni + Que - Grants consisent Barrier by casting Rock Splitter since it is a Mobility skill.
• Igni + Kry - Pull in enemies with Vortex.

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 - Periodically generates a large amount of offering
• Poc - Another way of generating offering
• Mot - Generates Dark Shroud for extra defense
• Lith - A great way to generate Offering in extended fights
• Zec - Helps reduce The Hunter cooldown
• Ohm - Grants moderate uptime of War Cry to increase damage
• Bac - Consistently generates Offering in Speedfarming.
• Wat - Decrepify helps with Stagger, defense, and executes enemies at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other Runeword it also generates large amounts of Offering
• Xal - For extra defense

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 assist you from time to time in certain situations.

Hired: Varyana

She is primarily used to boost your Attack Speed through Hysteria, Bloodthirst, and Bloodlust. She also gives you a Movement Speed boost as you kill more and more enemies through Massacre.

Reinforcement: Raheir

Call Raheir, the Shieldbearer as your reinforcement Mercenary to when you become Injured to save you with Bastion and prevent nearly all damage dealt to you for 5 seconds.

To enable the Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns 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.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns 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.

This section is designed to guide your Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns 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.

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.

What can I do to improve survivability?

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.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

With the Gorilla secondary, you have an insanely high uptime on Unstoppable however, if you find yourself in a pinch and your Gorilla is inactive, you can use Armored Hide to become Unstoppable.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

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.

Mechanics

Rock Splitter

The following is a quick summary of what Rock Splitter is and what it is not.

• Rock Splitter is an active effect, meaning when you deal damage with Rock Splitter, you trigger the effect.
• Rock Splitter is indirect damage, which means it does not stack effects such as Jaguar Primary Spirit Hall.
• Rock Splitter is a skill, so should carry skill-based modifiers.
• Rock Splitter does retain the skill tags from Rock Splitter

Attack Speed Caps

• 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
• Mercenaries

Cap 2

• Ferocity
• Adaptive Stances

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

Stagger

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.

The Rock Splitter Gorilla Thorns is a fast paced, defensive, area damage dealing machine. You utilize your basic attack to deal all of your damage with thorns, there is no resource management and no downtime in your combat.

• Rock Splitter applies Thorns on every hit with the use of Sepazontec.
• Incredibly defensive build. Rotate your Defensive skills to ensure maximum survivability and activate Adaptive Stances.
• The Hunter can be used both as a mobility skill and a lethal damage skill when mobs are injured.

Written by DeezyTheMonster

Reviewed by Wudijo