Toxic Skin 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

• Vulture Talon - Incredible DPS upgrade for your Toxic Skin.
• Friend of the Bog - Grants more primary stat, increased Maximum Life and makes you permanently Unhindered.
• Moonlight Ward - Grants Damage Reduction and Maximum Resistance to All Elements.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Hungering Void - Pulls monsters close every 8 seconds.

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 Seeker for additional Poisoning Damage over Time, CC and Noxious Resonance procs.

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.

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, 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.

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: Varyana

She provides you with additional Attack Speed for more Rushing Claws and higher DPS in single target encounters.

Reinforcement: Raheir

Bastion provides additional defense and can save your life in spicy situations.

To enable the Toxic Skin 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.

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Toxic Skin 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 Toxic Skin Spiritborn from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants T1 Starter, Ancestral and Mythic.

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.

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.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

What can I do when I run out of Rushing Claw charges?

• 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 on 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.

Mechanics

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.

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.

Barrier Generation

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

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.

How valueable are Toxic Skin ranks?

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

• The Toxic Skin 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 The Seeker and Measured Toxic Skin 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 🚀!

Written by Chronikz