It doesn’t take much to convince me to return to Blizzard’s fantastic action-adventure RPG, Diablo 4, which has seen an impressive series of seasonal content and updates in the year since its debut. But after an extensive hands-on experience with the upcoming character class, the Spiritborn, I might be saying goodbye to my free time altogether. This multi-tasking man impressively blends Diablo’s ecosystem with its most customizable and diverse class yet, opens up a whole new, unexplored side of Diablo lore, and most importantly, lets you summon a giant, ghostly gorilla to crush demons into pink guts. By the end of my time exploring the eerie forests and dark dungeons of Vessel of Hatred, I was ready to abandon my rogue ways and declare myself a Spiritborn main character, and that’s no small feat.
A quick note on housekeeping: My time playing Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred was focused almost exclusively on the Spiritborn character class. After selecting my preferred Spiritborn warrior, I was dropped into the new Nahantu region to craft my build and slash everything in sight. Despite having all the following stuff there, I didn’t see any story, meet any NPCs (except vendors), or get to check out the new mercenary hire feature. Still, my introduction to the Spiritborn class and all it has to offer was pretty stressful, so I’ll focus on that. Let’s dive in!
The Spiritborn is a brand new class to the Diablo series, complete with its own lore tied to the ancient civilization of Nahantu—as seen in the jungles of Diablo II’s third chapter—and the ethereal spirits it communicates with. Unlike other Diablo IV classes, where you dive deep into a specific fantasy like defending with a Barbarian or dealing insane DPS with a Rogue, the Spiritborn is more customizable and versatile, thanks to the four guardian spirits you can choose to build. These four spirits are: the Eagle, which focuses on movement, evasion, and lightning damage; the Gorilla, which is all about survivability and physical damage; the Jaguar, which is the king of DPS, attack speed, and fire damage; and my personal favorite, the Elf, which uses poison, weakening effect, and lifesteal to dominate the battlefield and feed on your enemies’ misfortune.
Each of these spirit guardians is represented by a giant, ghostly incarnation that grants you power and sometimes takes to the battlefield itself to destroy your enemies, such as how the Elf rushes onto the scene to start spitting giant gobs of poison at everything in sight, or the Eagle, who swoops down to turn your enemies to dust. The skills and abilities that correspond to each of these spirits appear in the Spiritborn skill tree as color-coded nodes, so you can easily identify what you might want to focus on depending on your favorite spectral friend.
These four distinct styles, and the varying designs you can create from them as a result, make Spiritborn feel like four new classes in one. For example, the slow-moving, highly agile gorilla design will look very different from the jaguar design as you teleport around the map. But while you’ll need to choose one of them as your primary guardian, one of the most distinctive features of the character class is the ability to infuse your design with some of the powers offered by other guardian animals. So, for example, if your jaguar design is feeling a little weak, you can reach across the aisle to your gorilla spirit and add some of its powerful abilities to your repertoire, making you significantly more durable.
It’s a whole new take on the more specific fantasies offered by other character classes, and at first I was worried that it would make me feel like I was a jack of all trades and a master of none. But the longer I played, the less I worried about the class feeling weak, as I delved into a four-footed eagle build (a four-footed eagle?) that had me littering the battlefield with life-draining poisons, then running away when things got heated. “You’d think it would have some kind of identity crisis, but if you play the build it doesn’t—it just works,” Diablo IV game director Brent Gibson told me. “And I think the team did a great job of picking the right things within each path that make it unique and distinct without trying to turn it into a giant cream puff.” Based on what I’ve played so far, I tend to agree.
After trying out half a dozen different builds, I’m pretty sold on this very unconventional class, and I’ve really enjoyed how different each Spirit is and how flexible the class is in allowing me to take on different roles depending on my current needs or imagination. It remains to be seen if any of these builds will be able to compete with the five current, more focused classes, but so far I’m really encouraged by what I’ve seen, and I have a feeling I’ll be using Spiritborn exclusively when I tackle Vessel of Hatred later this year.
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