It doesn’t take much to get me diving back into Blizzard’s stellar ARPG, Diablo 4, which has seen a fantastic slate of seasonal content and updates in the year since it made its devilish debut. But after an extensive hands-on with its upcoming character class, the Spiritborn, I might as well kiss my free time goodbye altogether. This jack-of-all-trades game impressively blends the Diablo ecosystem with its most customizable and diverse class yet, opens up a whole new facet of Diablo lore, and most importantly, lets you summon a giant spectral gorilla to bash Hulk demons into pink guts. By the end of my time exploring the spooky jungles and dark dungeons of Vessel of Hatred, I was ready to abandon my roguelike ways and declare myself Spiritborn main, which is no small feat.
A quick housekeeping note: My time with Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred was focused almost exclusively on the Spiritborn character class. After choosing my favorite Spiritborn warrior, I was dropped right into the action in the new region of Nahantu to create my build and dissect everything in sight. While everything that follows is included, I didn’t see any story, encounter any NPCs (other than vendors), or check out the new hireable mercenary feature. That said, my access to the Spiritborn class and all it has to offer was pretty extensive, so I’ll be focusing on that. Let’s dive in!
The Spiritborn are an entirely new class to the Diablo series, complete with their own lore tied to the ancient civilization of Nahantu—as seen in the jungles of Act 3 of Diablo II—and the ethereal spirits they commune with. Unlike the other Diablo IV classes, which have you delve quite deeply into a specific fantasy, like tanking with the Barbarian or doing insane DPS with the Rogue, the Spiritborn is much more customizable and varied, thanks to the four guardian spirits you can choose to build into them. Those four spirits are: the Eagle, who focuses on mobility, evasion, and lightning damage; the Gorilla, who is all about survivability and physical damage; the Jaguar, who is the king of DPS, attack speed, and fire damage; and my personal favorite, the Centipede, who uses poison, debuffs, and lifesteal to control the battlefield and feed on the misfortune of your enemies.
Each of these spirit guardians is represented by a massive ghostly avatar that grants you power and occasionally enters the battlefield to lay waste to your enemies, like the centipede that arrives on the scene to spit giant globs of venom at everything it sees, or the eagle that swoops down to turn your enemies to dust. The skills and abilities corresponding to each of these spirits appear on the Spiritborn skill tree as color-coded nodes, so you can easily identify which one you want to focus on depending on your chosen spectral BFF.
These four distinct styles, and the varied builds you can create as a result, make the Spiritborn feel like four new classes in one. A slow-moving, ultra-bouncy gorilla build, for example, is going to feel very different from a jaguar build that has you teleporting around the map. But while you must choose one as your primary guardian, one of the character class’s defining features is the ability to hybridize your build with some of the powers that other guardian animals offer. So if your jaguar build is feeling a little squishy, for example, you can reach for your gorilla spirit and add some of its tanky abilities to your repertoire, making you considerably more durable.
That’s a very different story than the much more specific fantasies offered by the other character classes, and at first I was worried that it would feel like a jack of all trades and master of none. But the more I played, the less I worried that the class would feel underpowered, as I dug deep into a centipeagle build that let me fill the battlefield with life-sapping poison, then dash out of reach when things got too hot. “You’d think it would have some kind of identity crisis, but when you play the build, it doesn’t—it works,” Diablo IV Game Director Brent Gibson told me. “And I think the team did a great job of picking the right things in each of the lanes that make it unique and distinctive without trying to turn it into giant cream corn.” From what I’ve played so far, I tend to agree.
After trying out half a dozen different builds, I’m completely sold on this wildly unorthodox class, and I really enjoyed how different each spirit felt and how flexible the class was in allowing me to take on different roles depending on my current need or fancy. It remains to be seen whether any of these builds can compete with the five existing and much more focused classes, but I’m very encouraged by what I’ve seen so far, and I have a feeling I’ll be running exclusively as a Spiritborn when I tackle Vessel of Hatred later this year.