Touch of Death Spiritborn Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn Endgame Guide! This build relies on Centipede Skills and focuses on high Poison damage output. Touch of Death has a small direct damage component with a huge DoT, but what's really doing the damage here are the explosions from the Insatiable Aspect. In order to trigger this reliably, you use Noxious Resonance to remove the DoT effect from a target without having to wait its entire duration. In order words: spam right click, kaboom!
With the Poised Touch of Death upgrade you remove the cooldown and unlock its full potential. While progressing through the game, you solve your Vigor generation through Jacinth Shell and Starlight, as well as Endurance and Ring of Starless Skies.
Your Spirit Hall choices are Gorilla (primary) and Jaguar (secondary) for extra damage, Resolve stacks and easy access to Unyielding Hits damage scaling via armor stacking with Harmony of Ebewaka and later Heir of Perdition.
All in all, the Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn offers an interesting Poison proc playstyle that melts their enemies. Let's get started!
Requirements for this build:
- Insatiable
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 Touch of Death 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
- Touch of Death is your main ability. It applies a huge Poison Damage over Time and spawns swarms that hatch from the targeted enemy. With a cap of only 3 swarms, the oldest gets replaced while spamming the skill, triggering Insatiable which is your main damage output.
- Noxious Resonance is your key passive. While it usually offers great synergy for Poison builds, you mainly use it to burst swarms immediately without having to wait until Touch of Death expires or a target dies. This is crucial as nearly all of the damage done in this build comes from Insatiable bursts. You are not actively scaling Noxious Resonance's Critical Strike Damage scaler.
- 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.
- Scourge grants you lots of extra damage, helps negate the life drain of Jacinth Shell, but most importantly helps fuel your Starlight Vigor generation.
- Ravager increases your Vigor generation, deals additional damage and lets you dash to your target every time you use Touch of Death.
- The Seeker is your Ultimate ability, providing damage, Crowd Control and Vulnerable. Furthermore you activate Resolution and Supremacy when The Seeker is used.
- (T1 Starter only) Rock Splitter solves your Vigor generation early on. Not only do you generate Vigor on use, but also when you block. Together with Interdiction this constantly is the case.
Skill Rotation
- Spam Touch of Death to deal damage.
- Keep up Ravager and Armored Hide at all times.
- Activate Scourge for extra damage when nuking elites and packs and to gain resources.
- Activate The Seeker as often as possible for various buffs like Supremacy and Resolution on Elites and Bosses or to Crowd Control enemies.
Spiritborn 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.
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.
Touch of Death 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
- Fester
- Bane
- Colossal
- Turf
- Canny
To Level 46
- Colossal
- Fester
- Bane
- Canny
- Turf
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 Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Que - You are always casting a non-channeled Core Skill with Touch of Death, triggering Earthen Bulwark for extra defense and synergy with Viscous Shield.
- Igni + Gar - Grants additional Critical Strike Chance.
Alternative choices
As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows execute at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other Runeword it also generates large amounts of offering
- Cir - Generates offering by spamming your skills.
- Mot - Generates Dark Shroud for extra defense.
- Ohm - War Cry is a powerful offensive buff.
- Tam - You spam your core skill all the time.
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 Touch of Death 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
- 15+ total Touch of Death ranks
- 80%+ Attack Speed
- 60% Vortex Size
- 75%+ Touch of Death Swarm Duration
- 1,800+ Dexterity
- 4,000+ Armor
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 7,000+ Life
- 100%+ Resource Generation
- 150%+ Movement Speed
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Touch of Death 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 you 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 Touch of Death 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.
- Redirected Force scales your damage through Armored Hide, Patient Guard and your weapon if you're using a quarterstaff. Keep an eye on your buffs and time your defensive skill to boost it.
- Unyielding Hits is a massive damage buff that you activate automatically thanks to the Gorilla primary hall bonus. With it you can convert excess armor into more damage.
- Ravager on Kill Duration extension tempers make the setup really smooth from the start, helping us with extra resource generation from Measured Ravager.
- Touch of Death Swarm Duration tempers directly multiply the damage done by Insatiable and are really valuable. These are great to have while you're still running with many legendary gear pieces until you equip more uniques later.
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 Armor, Attack Speed, Critical Strike Chance, Ranks to Potent & Touch of Death and Touch of Death Swarm Duration as your primary damage attributes on gear.
- Sunstained War-Crozier is a tremendous damage increase for your Touch of Death.
- Harmony of Ebewaka is an incredible damage buff as you combine a total of 3 Spirit types in this build.
- Jacinth Shell massively speeds up your cooldown recovery. With it you can keep up all of your buffs permanently with ease but it comes at a hefty life cost. Luckily, Touch of Death provides a ton of healing by itself and this downside isn't very noticeable, but it leaves 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. This solves your Resources together with Starlight.
- Yen's Blessing (alternatively Rakanoth's Wake) is almost exclusively used for its huge all resistance bonus but also comes with a good amount of movement speed and helps us to reach the Resource Generation target. 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
- Ring of Starless Skies increases your overall damage output, while also fixing Resources.
- Heir of Perdition lets you get to 100% Critical Strike Chance, providing more damage overall than Harmony of Ebewaka.
- Keep min/maxing the existing setup further, scaling damage with better rolls, masterworking and more armor.
- Make sure to stay resistance capped as you enter Torment 4. You can freely swap between resistance rolls and armor rolls on your gear and then tweak it further with gems ins your jewelry.
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
- If you want to fly through easy content, replace Scourge with Soar.
- Replace The Seeker with The Hunter for even more zoomies.
- Make sure to keep Ravager up at all times to dash to enemies.
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
- For pushing, use Prodigy's Tempo instead of Noxious Resonance. The main reason for this is that in long fights, slightly accelerating your first Insatiable pops has little relevance. In this case, you free up your chest slot, removing Jacinth Shell to slot in Shroud of False Death.
- Shroud of False Death is a powerful item because it grants +1 to ALL passives. Most importantly it adds a lot of extra damage from sources such as Ravenous, Oppressive, Nourishment, Potent, Supremacy, Unrestrained, Apex and extra defense from Antivenom, Resilient, Patient Guard, Perseverance, Diminishment, Auspicious and more. Offensively this is roughly a 50-80% damage increase in most situations.
- You don't worry about the Stealth but it's a nice extra when you just want to travel fast and safely.
- 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.
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.
- Noxious Resonance is usually an enabler for Crit / Poison combo builds, but in this case, it's only used to trigger Insatiable pops from Touch of Death spamming which are the main damage source in this build.
- Whenever Noxious Resonance triggers, the Touch of Death infection counts as "expired", hatching a swarm instantly.
Mechanics
- Touch of Death swarms hatch after 9 seconds. This duration can be extended with Touch of Death Swarm Duration tempers.
- Even though you have a cap of 3 swarms, these swarms can only replace each other after their entire duration has run its course or you kill the target, leading to a long delay before dealing any damage in most situations.
- This waiting time is bypassed when Noxious Resonance, removes the Touch of Death from the target instantly and popping Insatiable without delay.
- For high end content with fights lasting multiple minutes, this delay doesn't have a huge impact as it only slows you down at the start.
- 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)
- 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.
Summary
The Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn is a unique combo-based playstyle with a great mix of single target and AoE damage.
- Pop your Insatiable swarms by spamming Touch of Death.
- Stack armor for Unyielding Hits to boost offense and defense at the same time.
- Keep up Armored Hide and Ravager at all times to feel block permanently, dash to your targets instantly and generate more Vigor.
Credits
Written by Chronikz