Touch of Death Centipede 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.
• Twilight Warding - Provides additional Barrier generation for Viscous Shield.

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. 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

• Moonlight Ward - An incredible defensive power, granting 15% Damage Reduction and 5% Maximum Elemental Resistances at max rank.
• Dust Stone - With all the Witchcraft Powers above, this Occult Gem provides additional multiplicative damage.
• Hungering Void - Pulls monsters close every 8 seconds.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Killing Wind - A great intermediate Occult Gems if you need some help reaching Critical Strike Cap of 100% or additional Movement Speed.

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.

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.

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 Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Que - You are constantly moving, triggering Earthen Bulwark for extra defense and synergy with Viscous Shield.
• Xol + Kry - Insatiable does not have the biggest area, therefore this Rune combination gains a lot of value.

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.

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 if necessary and prevents us from getting oneshot every 30 seconds thanks to Valiance. If you already have enough Armor to fully satisfy Unyielding Hits, use Vanguard instead. 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 which preferably happens exactly when you cast Scourge so monsters don't run away.

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. 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 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.

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.

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.

Why Noxious Resonance without Critical Strike Damage stacking?

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

Drive

• 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.

In-Fighter

• 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

• 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.

Ravager

• 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

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

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
• 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.

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 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.

The Touch of Death Centipede Spiritborn is a unique combo-based playstyle with a great mix of single target and AoE damage.

• Touch of Death to deal damage.
• Stack armor for Unyielding Hits.
• Use Noxious Resonance for farming & general gameplay and Vital Strikes for pit pushing.
• Pop pop pop pop pop!

Originally written by wudijo

Maintained by Chronikz