Diablo 4 Spiritborn Leveling Build - Unleashed Hunter

Oct. 6, 2024

Diablo 4 Spiritborn Leveling Build – Unleashed Hunter

In thisDiablo 4SpiritbornLevelingBuild, I’ll teach you how to make an easy to play and powerful build with few gear requirements, good damage, and excellent growth to carry you all the way to Torment. This Build is FUN above anything else, and you’ll love its fast paced feel. It is not the most optimized or perfected build because I tried to make sure it would work even when you don’t have the right equipment, so you can be flexible in how you approach it.

I used this build during my first expansion journey during the review period, which means I didn’t have any materials, aspects or anything at all unlocked so I got to experience the game and expansion like a completely new player would. I completed content with ease, cleared Level 20 Pit to unlock torment, and was able to amass paragon points without using them while I checked out all activities. I could complete Torment Nightmare dungeons, Hell Hordes and even had a run of the Undercity without progressing into legendary tempers. I want to note that you’ll see I have many unused paragon points at points of this video, I did not use any until I moved on to the endgame build, which we’ll publish soon.

I chose the Jaguar because I love cats, people who follow us know we have 7 of them, so this was a no-brainer for me. It also really appeals to me as this is a critical & attack speed line which are always fun because they are very engaging to play. The objective of your equipment hunt will be to get more attack speed, more critical chance, more critical damage and more movement speed while adding some cooldown reduction to pounce your way through any content with ease.

The gameplay rotation for the Unleashed Hunter is quite simple. You will use the core skillRaketo attack most of the time, weaving in your basic skillThrashif you run out of Vigor, your primary resource. When facing groups, you will buff yourself withRavager, pop your Counterattack andSoarinto them to apply vulnerable and then useThe Hunterultimate to deal devastating AOE damage while you Rake through them, and if anything dies there’s a 40% chance that your ulti comes off cooldown, allowing you to do it again right away.

Most of the time, most enemies die, so you get to repeat this loop about 3 times before you’re caught on a cooldown, so it is excellent for clearing mob-dense content likeHelltides, Hell Hordes,Nightmare Dungeons, the new Undercity, the Pit and of course regular content. The only disclaimer here is thatSoaris VERY hard to aim on controllers so you may fly off the screen a few times until you figure out how to position yourself. Keyboard & Mouse users will have no issues.

We will be sticking to the Jaguar tree mostly. I know that a lot of people will want to experiment with centipede’s poison, get the defensive buffs from the gorilla or see how Eagle can improve crits, but in this case we want to keep things simple and this tree really has everything we need.

If you are a returning player, you will have many points to use on your character right away from World Rewards. But you can follow the same pattern as a new player: Unlock and buff basic and core skills, then getRavager& the two passives, take some ranks into Counterattack and go straight for the ultimateThe Hunter. Once you have put enough points here go down to get your unique passive, and then getSoar, vulnerable bonuses and defensive passives.

The idea of your skill allocation is to max out your core attack to deal AOE damage and reduce cooldowns. As you progress, you will unlockRavagerthat gives you a buff, and then get Counterattack to boost your dodge chance and its enhancements to boost your Critical Damage for up to 30%. I continued down the tree rather than get other passives as I wanted to get to ultimate ASAP, so we’ll take Potent & Furnace next, which are damage and crit damage buffs. Then we finally arrive atthe hunter and its enhancements, before going down to collect the Key Passive “Adaptive Stances”.

The idea of your skill allocation is to max out your core attack to deal AOE damage and reduce cooldowns. As you progress, you will unlockRavagerthat gives you a buff, and then get Counterattack to boost your dodge chance and its enhancements to boost your Critical Damage for up to 30%. I continued down the tree rather than get other passives as I wanted to get to ultimate ASAP, so we’ll take Potent & Furnace next, which are damage and crit damage buffs. Then we finally arrive atthe hunter and its enhancements, before going down to collect the Key Passive “Adaptive Stances”.

This is an important point as this stance makes it so that every skill type you cast gives you a specific buff. The Jaguar skills will give you +30% attack speed (glorious!). We’ll now also unlock the Eagle skillSoar. This will mean that when we cast that Eagle skill, we briefly get a 30% movement speed boost, but when you return to Jaguar you will get +50% to ALL your core attributes. This means that you want that Eagle off cooldown as often as possible as you’re going to be getting a huge buff to your stats whenever you do the rotation.

Once you haveSoarand its enhancements, you can apply vulnerable reliably so we’ll take several passives to improve damage vs vulnerable, and finally we’ll boost our ultimate spam by giving ourselves bonuses to life regen and unstoppable, as well as extra damage while unstoppable. All of this together with Ferocity should be giving you a great boost to attack speed and making it so you can easily move through anything in your way.

You can adapt these options as best suits the gear you have gotten and your overall playstyle, as long as you make it so you have a source of vulnerable, a way to heal, and enough damage so that your Ultimate can cooldown reset from itself.

Spirit Hall Choices

I tried several mixes for the Spirit Hall, but I eventually found that doubling down on Jaguar was the best choice for me, as I won’t be casting many other skills. I also did some experimentation and found that skills from Runewords don’t count for the Adaptive Stances bonus, so it made more sense to stick to Fire Cat.

The Jaguar will first give you a damage boost after repeatedly attacking with Jaguar skills, and using it a second time in your Spirit Hall will also allow you to have more Ferocity, and give you +1Ferocitywhen you kill an enemy or damage a boss, keeping you pretty much permanently maxed if you’re moving fast.

Equipment is the most important part of anyBuild, but because it is random it should not stop your leveling build from being able to progress through content. With this specificBuild, the skill distribution is powerful and you can be very unoptimized and progress, but you can look at the gear recommendations to see what you should be looking for. You will notice in my footage that my gear is very far from perfect as I didn’t have all the manuals or materials to reroll tempers and farm, yet it still worked fine for progression even into areas I should not have been in (torment without any paragon points!). Try to useLegendary Aspectsto adjust to your needs while you farm levels and better gear. In general you should not bother tempering items until after level 60, when you will get Item Power 750 items that will be your default for a while.

My currentBuildis making use of a unique item that I got really early. However your build will work just fine without it, and it seems that uniques are quite common in the Expansion, be it from bosses or if you do the new endgame “Undercity” activity. You can even use a specific item to guarantee a unique drop. That said I didn’t have to farm at all and got these items playing naturally so I think they should be easier than they were before.

As a general note, try to prioritizeDexterity,Cooldown Reduction,Critical Strike Chance, Counterattack & main skill Ranks, Crit Damage, Vulnerable Damage, Life & Armor. You will need to re-evaluate this for elemental resistances once you move into Torment, but even with 11% resistances I could complete Torment content thanks to our amazing dodge & heals.

Helmet

Assimilation Aspect: You have 8% increased Dodge Chance. When you Dodge, Fortify for 12% of your Maximum Life.

We pick this item because it synergizes well with our counterattack dodge build, and we’ll usually be 100% fortified making us a lot more survivable when facing large groups or big AOEs.

Affixes to look for:

Aspect of the Crowded Sage: You have 8% increased Dodge Chance. Successful Dodges restore 25% of your Maximum Life.

OurBuildis made to dodge and heal while also applying fortify, so this aspect is perfect for us. I had almost no advancement into the imprinting of this aspect and only 5% and it still worked amazing, so if you max it you will have epic heals that open other opportunities.

Affixes

Accelerating Aspect: Critical Strikes with Core Skills increase yourAttack Speedby [10-30]% for 5 seconds.

Doubling down on our skills attacking as quickly as possible, this aspect will contribute to your overall attack speed buff. Remember this is a crit build so you want to make sure to boost your crit chance whenever you can, by as much as you can.

Affixes

Aspect of the Undying: When you cast a Skill, you heal for X% Life. Double this bonus while below 50% Life.

Since we attack so fast and continuously, we will take full advantage of the incoming heals to keep ourselves topped up through the many poison pools the devs have added to the expansion.

Affixes

Legendary Aspect

Aspect of the Binding Morass: Close enemies or those you deal indirect damage to are Slowed by [30 – 70]% for 3 seconds. You deal 20%[x] increased damage to Slowed enemies. (SpiritbornOnly)

You will be close to everything, all the time, so this debuff is excellent for us, particularly when we pair it with a ring to get resources back from crowd controlled enemies. Make sure your boots have movement speed through because theSpiritbornis a very slow moving class and it gets annoying.

Affixes

Two-handed Polearms have “Damage to Vulnerable Enemies” built-in and it is a huge boost for yourBuild. Quartersaves have block, which we don’t really want, and Glaives have Damage to Elites, which is great but not what we want because there is a specific skill we took above that gives our Polearm 30% chance to make enemies vulnerable when we lucky hit. This is, to me, a much better synch with the build so I recommend Polearms despite their slower attack speed as we offset it with a myriad of other buffs.

Aspect of the the Wild Claws:Rakemanifests a Spirit Jaguar which also castsRakeat a random enemy, dealing [90 – 130]% Base damage. (SpiritbornOnly)

This is an amazing aspect for our build, and it will be buffed by the two-handed weapon so it’s the best it can be. it will essentially cast a separateRakein addition to the one you’re casting, giving you extra damage to enemies you’re not even paying attention to.

Affixes

Aspect of Plains Power:

Lucky Hit: Up to a 25%[+] chance to create a Mystic Circle for 10 seconds.

Casting a Jaguar Skill in Mystic Circles empowers them to keep your Ferocity at Maximum and increase your damage by [5 – 10]%[x] per stack while you remain within. (SpiritbornOnly)

This aspect will give you a special circle underneath where you stand, and staying within it will buff you damage and keep your Ferocity from going down. Later on, when we get paragon points, it will also reduce your incoming damage by synergizing with the Ritual glyph.

Affixes

Aspect of Alacrity: Your Defensive Skills Cooldown [10 – 70]% faster while you are moving. (SpiritbornOnly)

We’ll be constantly on the move, and we want to have Counterattack up as much as possible so this is a very good aspect to have. You can swap this for something else if you feel you want to squeeze out a bit more damage or you want to get more resource generation back.

Affixes

Starlight Aspect: Gain [25.0 – 45.0] of your Primary Resource for every 20% of your Life that you Heal or every 200% Life that you Overheal while at Maximum Life.

OR

Aspect of the Umbral: Restore 8.0 of your Primary Resource when you Crowd Control an enemy.

Either one of these aspects will work well with the build and give you resources back so you can chainRakeand useThrashonly very sparingly. The Starlight aspect will pair extremely well with the Aspect of the Crowded Sage and our life on attack, and the Umbral one is perfect for our boots withAspect of Binding Morass, as we’re constantly slowing everything. However, there’s something better than either of these, and this is a specialSpiritbornUnique.

Ring of the Midnight Sun

Implicit Modifiers

Unique Modifiers

This ring is perfect for thisBuildbecause we are focusing on Criticals and using vigor-hungryRake, so using this one will feed us a great amount of vigor back whenever we crit, which is amazing and, when combined with paragon, will allow you to pretty much never need resources.

I played around a lot withRunewordstrying to find something that worked, and so far they have been a thoroughly disappointing experience, at least for levelling builds. The Runeword casts do not count towards your Key Passive for the stat boost, and the skills that I found where overall lame. So I decided to simply focus on gems. For gems, you’ll want to slot:

Pick your Mercenary

The Vessel of Hatred Expansion will allow you to hire aMercenaryto fight with you constantly. The best match for ourBuildisVaryana, because her skills boost your Attack Speed. You can get Varyana quickly by doing her quest as soon as it appears from the Den, then equip her and kill Elites to level up Rapport and unlock skill points. Select:

For your reinforcements you can really pick anything you like, as it’s a situational decision and it doesn’t happen all that often. But that attack speed buff from Varyana can be quite awesome so work on her rapport.

This is a levelingBuildintended to get your feet wet with the class and allow you to have fun exploring the areas of the game and starting activities. However, this is also a powerful and engaging build that can make content exciting and you will probably want to stick to this gamestyle as you continue.

I will be releasing a higher level build with actually optimized gear, aspects and progression aimed at completing the new activity, the Dark Citadel, that is a new and unique mode with full on raid mechanics that you are probably unprepared for. Your Torment progression will be heavily based on finding Ancestral gear with Greater Affixes that matches the right bonuses and gives you the right amount of resistances while not nerfing your damage, while you hunt for the legendary manuals so you can temper the best stuff in.

If you want to continue this build and begin your paragon progression, you will want to work toward these boards andglyphs:

These boards have useful blue and yellow nodes such as damage to close enemies, healing received, or damage vs crowd controlled enemies. You’ll also want to get as many elemental resistance and damage reduction nodes as you need to counter the negative effects of Torment.

In general, theSpiritbornis an incredibly versatile class and you can build it so many ways that there’s almost no wrong way to go about it. So feel free to try things out as you level and make sure to run the Undercity with the offerings to trigger a guaranteed unique drop so you can experience the game-changing effects that uniques can have on yourBuilds.

So what do you think of my Cat Attack Spiritborn build? Will you become a pussy pouncer? Let me know, in the comments below.

Fexelea

MMO raider by day and guide writer by night, Fex enjoys multiplatform gaming, good books and animes, and streaming with a cold beer.