Diablo 4’s new class is also its best class by far. And I mean like trillions of damage better than the rusty old classes from the distant past of 2023. The spiritborn are so powerful that in the next patch Blizzard is just going to show abbreviated damage numbers to clean up the screen during combat. It’s not, however, going to fix any of the egregious bugs that are keeping almost every spiritborn build at the top of the meta.
The greatest minds in the Diablo 4 community have spent the last few weeks deconstructing the class and they’ve found major bugs that seem to exponentially increase their power regardless of what build you run. One bug in particular is responsible for multiplying their damage by upwards of five times, and utilizing it is incredibly easy.
Basically, there’s a passive damage bonus that rewards you for generating a barrier—Diablo 4’s temporary bonus health—that is equal to the total amount of health you currently have. At least, that’s what the Viscous Shield tooltip says. But it’s actually based on your base health, the tiny number that you’d see if your character was completely naked. This means that if you have a barrier that matches your total health, which therefore greatly exceeds your base health, your damage goes through the roof.
I’m pretty sure if you hit a monster that hard they’re sent all the way back to Diablo 3.
It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it was hard to get a lot of barrier in most builds, but because of how much crossover there is with spiritborn skills, you can add this ridiculous bonus damage into almost any build as long as you include one form of generating barrier. There’s even a runeword combination that does it for free.
And that’s just one bug that is carrying spiritborn damage, here are a few others:
- The jaguar class mechanic that captures all the damage you dealt in the last .5 seconds for an extra big hit incorrectly reapplies all your bonuses a second time
- The bonus “Resolve” stat on your gear can be upgraded far higher than any other stat in the game, tremendously increasing your defense and damage
- The staff that empties your vigor (read: spirit mana) every time you use a skill to guarantee critical strikes boosts your damage the more resource generation you have and nobody knows why
Diablo 4 YouTuber NickTew has a solid explanation of how each of these are broken and why they’re responsible for the majority of the spiritborn’s strength at the moment. The Pit is the game’s hardest dungeon, with monsters that gain billions of health the higher you climb its 150 tiers. Before the Vessel of Hatred expansion, nobody had even touched the highest tier. But spiritborn are able to breeze right through it. Former sorceress player Mekuna cleared it with a build that peaked at 235 trillion damage. I’m pretty sure if you hit a monster that hard they’re sent all the way back to Diablo 3.
Tomorrow, Blizzard is killing the spiritborn build that only required one button with a fix that won’t allow you to repeatedly spam your evade. I suspect it’s not going to touch any of the other bugs until the next season simply because of how devastating it would be to all the people playing the new class. It’s a little ironic that the only reason the bugs are so bad is because the class is so well-designed, letting you augment any skill with the power of one of its four spirit guardians, like a sorcerer’s elemental affinities. Enjoy the spiritborn while you can because next season their astronomical power is probably going to come back down to earth.