[VESSEL OF HATRED] Poison Thorns - Spiritborn Build for Diablo 4

Build Introduction

Poison Thorns focuses on reflecting incoming damage back to enemies, using the Razorplate chest and Wound Drinker uniques to deal heavy Thorns damage. This build combines Poison damage with Scourge and Toxic Skin to improve your damage-over-time (DoTs) and maximize Thorns damage through your basic skill, Rock Splitter. Choosing the Gorilla as your Spirit Guardian will also increase your overall Thorns damage, making this build highly efficient in punishing enemies.

For more details on how exactly this build works, please read our mechanics and playstyle section.

However, before we jump into the build details, keep in mind that this endgame guide assumes your Spiritborn is Level 60 and meets all the build requirements. If you are just starting out with a new Spiritborn character, we recommend heading over to the Quill Volley Leveling Build and then switching to this endgame build when ready.

For information on Season 6, you can check out our Season Hub.
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Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

Thorns reflects damage passively
Resource management

Weaknesses

Requires specific gear and aspects
Poisoning enemies is essential

To see how this build compares to the other builds on our site, you can check out our build tier lists.

Build Requirements

Required Uniques

Required Aspects

Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points

Follow the points allocated in the Skill Tree above for the completed build. If you are missing skill points, complete Renown Tier 1-4 in every zone to get the missing additional points.

Spirit Hall Choice

The Spirit Hall allows you to combine two different Spirit Guardians or stick with just one.

Primary: Gorilla
- Casting a Gorilla Skill deals 100% Thorns to enemies you hit and grants a Barrier for 5% of Maximum Life, up to 30%, for 3 seconds. All Skills are now also Gorilla Skills.
Secondary: Gorilla
- Maximum Resolve increased by 2. When you have at least 5 stacks of Resolve, you are Unstoppable.

For this endgame build, we choose the Gorilla as both the primary and secondary Spirit Guardian. Using Rock Splitter, with the Gorilla as a primary spirit guardian, we will significantly scale Thorns’ damage, allowing us to deal huge damage to enemies or bosses.

The passive of having the Gorilla as a secondary guardian, when combined with the Armored Hide skill, will drastically improve our Resolve stacks generation, make us Unstoppable, and increase our damage even further.

Paragon Board

Paragon unlocks after reaching Level 60 and is considered an endgame progression system. Leveling up your paragon greatly increases your character’s power! We recommend using the following Legendary nodes and Glyphs to improve the build even further as you grind through the endgame. Note that each Glyph’s information and radius are based on the Level 46 version.

Gear, Stats, Gems, Runes, and Elixirs

The following sections cover all systems that are important if you want to improve the power of your character in the endgame of Diablo 4.

Legendary Aspects

Each Aspect is listed with its matching gear slot. Do your best to keep each Aspect in the assigned slot. Remember to salvage Legendary Items with higher Aspect values to unlock them in the Codex of Power, and then imprint them onto gear pieces with the preferred affixes.

Additionally, if you are trying to farm a specific item, we recommend using your Obols to target farm them!

Gear Slot	Gems/Runes	Aspect / Unique	Legendary Aspect / Unique Power
Helm	Grand Amethyst	Loyalty’s Mantle	While your Spirit Hall choices match: Their bonuses are 100% more potent. Skills of their Base Spirit gain {x}% Vigor Cost Reduction and {x}% Cooldown Reduction.
Chest	Xol Kry	Razorplate	Thorns have a 10% chance to deal {x}% increased damage.
Gloves		Aspect of the Moonrise	Damaging an enemy with a Basic Skill grants you {x}% Attack Speed for 10 seconds, stacking up to 5 times. Upon reaching maximum stacks, you enter a Vampiric Bloodrage, gaining x{x}% Basic Skill damage and {x}% Movement Speed for 10 seconds.
Pants	Grand Amethyst	Aspect of Might	Basic Skills grant {x}% Damage Reduction for 2 seconds.
Boots		Yen’s Blessing	Casting a Skill has a {x}% chance to cast a Non-Mobility, Non-Ultimate Skill that is currently on Cooldown. Can only occur once every 8 seconds.
Amulets(50% bonus)	Grand Skull	Aspect of Simple Reprisal	When you cast the 3rd attack of your Basic Skills you have a {x}% chance to unleash Payback.
Ring	Grand Skull	Needleflare Aspect	Thorns damage dealt has a {x}% chance to deal damage to all enemies around you and your minions.
Ring	Grand Skull	Wound Drinker	Every time you deal Thorns damage, you gain {x} Vigor. Gain Toxic Skin’s Passive Effect.
Weapon (200% bonus)	Poc Que	Sepazontec	Your Basic Skills deal {x}% increased damage and always use their 3rd attack. Every 3rd cast of a Basic Skill strikes three times.

Stat Priority and Tempering Affixes

Affixes on the same line are considered to be equally important. Bolded affixes are the most important targets for Masterworking upgrades. To masterwork, you will need rare materials that only drop from Nightmare Dungeons. Be sure to check our Tempering and Masterworking guides, for more details about these topics.

Slot	Targeted Gear Affix	Tempering Affixes
Helm	1. All Stats 2. Movement Speed 3. Damage Reduction 4. Ranks to Velocity	N/A
Chest	1. Thorns 2. Thorns 3. Thorns 4. Thorns	N/A
Gloves	1. Attack Speed 2. Maximum Life 3. Rank to Core Skills	Gorilla Finesse (Offensive): + Bastion Natural Schemes (Utility): Thorns
Pants	1. Thorns 2. Maximum Life 3. Dexterity	Worldly Endurance (Defensive): Total Armor Natural Schemes (Utility): Thorns
Boots	1. Movement Speed 2. All Stats 3. Resource Generation 4. Resistance to All Elements	N/A
Amulet	1. Ranks to Unrestrained 2. Total Armor 3. Attack Speed	Worldly Endurance (Defensive): Dodge Chance Gorilla Finesse (Offensive): + Bastion
Ring	1. Thorns 2. Damage Reduction From Poisoned Enemies 3. Damage to Poisoned Enemies 4. Ranks to Toxic Skin	N/A
Ring	1. Maximum Life 2. Attack Speed 3. Lucky Hit: up to a chance to make enemies Vulnerable for 2 seconds or Critical Strike Damage	Gorilla Finesse (Offensive): + Bastion Gorilla Efficiency (Resource): Rock Splitter Resource Generation
Weapon	1. Chance for Basic Skills to Deal Double Damage 2. Ranks to Follow Through 3. Dexterity 4. Basic Skill Lucky Hit Chance	N/A

The priority order of Resistances is Lightning > Poison > Fire > Cold > Shadow.

Make sure to reach the Armor Cap of 1,000 for survivability. However, as this builds scales with armor, we benefit from having more than the minimum.

Gems and Runewords

Listed below are the recommended Gems and Runewords to socket into your gear.

Gems

Weapon Gems	Armor Gems	Jewelry Gems
Runeword or Grand Emerald For more Critical Strike Damage	Grand Amethyst For more Barrier Generation	Grand Skull For more Armor

Runewords

Runewords are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and can be used to strengthen or fill a build’s weaknesses. Two Runewords have to be combined to create a new effect:

A trigger Runeword of Ritual that provides Offerings when the condition is met
An effect Runeword of Invocation that costs Offerings and triggers an action.

Once the Runeword of Ritual has generated enough Offerings, the Runeword of Invocation will trigger its effect. Some Runewords of Invocation will have overflow effects, meaning that extra Offerings that have been created will be used to empower the triggered effect. For more information on how Runewords work, take a look at our comprehensive Runeword Guide.

Runewords replace Gems in gear.
Only two Runeword pairs (4 Runes in total) can be equipped at a time.

The following are recommended Runeword combination options for the Poison Thorns endgame build of the Spiritborn:

Runeword Combination	Runeword Effects
Xol Kry	Xol – Gain: 150 Offering. Evoke Power from another Class. Kry – Requires: 300 Offering. Cooldown: 3 seconds. Evoke the Spiritborn’s Vortex, dealing damage and Pulling in enemies.
Poc Que	Poc – Gain: 5 Offering. Spend 5% of your Maximum Resource. Que – Requires: 300 Offering. Cooldown: 1 Seconds. Evoke the Druid’s Earthen Bulwark, granting yourself a Barrier.

Which Elixirs Should You Use?

Visit the Alchemist and craft an Elixir providing any Resistance you need most, or the Assault Elixir to increase Attack Speed. Some Elixirs cannot be crafted and only drop from activities like Helltides or Nightmare Dungeons. Additionally, make sure to keep your health potion upgraded!

The following Elixirs are useful for most Spiritborn builds:

Elixir of Precision provides the highest damage output increase.
Elixir of Advantage increases your attack speed
Elixir of Fortitude for additional survivability

Mercenaries

During the Vessel of Hatred campaign, you will unlock different NPC Mercenaries who join you on your travels. For this build, we would advise selecting Raheir as your main companion, for the added survivability he provides, and Varyana as Reinforcement.

Raheir Skill Tree choices:

Core Skill: Shield Charge
Core Passive: Raheir’s Guard
Iconic Skill: Provoke
Iconic Passive: Mocking Lure

Varyana Reinforcement choices:

Opportunity Skill: Select “Skill Cast”
Reinforcement Skill: Bloodthirst

Build Mechanics and Rotation

This Poison Thorns build revolves around maximizing Thorns damage while poisoning enemies with abilities such as Scourge and Toxic Skin. Thorn damage is significantly improved by gear like Razorplate, Wound Drinker, and the Needleflare Aspect. You will increase Thorns procs with Toxic Skin, Armored Hide, and Rock Splitter, making the reflected damage devastating to your enemies. Additionally, theSepazontec unique weapon improves your basic skill usage, boosting your Thorns further.

Rock Splitter as your basic attack is key for Vigor recovery, while Wound Drinker regenerates Vigor through Thorns damage. Loyalty's Mantle Loyalty’s Mantle plays an important role in reducing Vigor costs so that you can manage your resource more easily.

With the Aspect of Simple Reprisal, you will also passively trigger Payback by using Rock Splitter, after casting Vortex to gather enemies. Payback slams enemies in front of you dealing extensive damage, further adding to your offensive power.

Overall, this build is straightforward: use your abilities to poison enemies apply damage while your Thorns reflect enemy attacks, making it incredibly effective against large groups. This combination of high Thorns damage and efficient Vigor management results in an easy and powerful playstyle.

Engage with Vortex to gather your enemies.
Use Armored Hide to boost your survivability and block chance.
Cast Scourge.
Activate Toxic Skin to increase Thorns damage.
Use The Hunter for additional damage.
Spam Rock Splitter.

Uniques and Mythic Uniques

Below you will find information on Uniques and Mythic Uniques that are useful and recommended for this build. Moreover, if you are interested in target farming Mythic Uniques, check out our How to Farm Mythic Uniques guide.

If a Unique or Mythic Unique is not listed here, it is NOT recommended and won’t benefit this specific build in any way.

Uniques

Listed below are the recommended and optional Unique Items for this build.

Loyalty’s Mantle (Required): While your Spirit Hall choices match: Their bonuses are 100% more potent. Skills of their Base Spirit gain {x}% Vigor Cost Reduction. Skills of their Base Spirit gain {x}% Cooldown reduction.
Razorplate (Required): Thorns have a 10% chance to deal {x}% increased damage.
Yen’s Blessing (Required): Casting a Skill has a {x}% chance to cast a Non-Mobility, Non-Ultimate Skill that is currently on Cooldown. Can only occur once every 8 seconds.
Sepazontec (Required): Your Basic Skills deal {x}% increased damage and always use their 3rd attack. Every 3rd cast of a Basic Skill strikes three times.
Wound Drinker (Required): Every time you deal Thorns damage, you gain {x} Vigor. Gain Toxic Skin’s Passive Effect.

Mythic Uniques

The Poison Thorns Spiritborn does not require any Mythic Uniques!

Obol Gambling

Obol gambling is a great way to potentially find item upgrades or items missing from your build. Similar to Kadala in Diablo 3, you can use Obol vendors in town to try and get any specific item that you are missing. When a Level 60 Character spends Obols, all gear from that vendor will be 750 item power, the highest non-Ancestral item power in the game, allowing you to fill out gear with the affixes or Legendary Aspects you need. There is also a small chance to receive an Ancestral piece with item power 800.

You can check out our Obol Gambling Tool Guide here!

Changelog

October 20th, 2024: Guide created for Vessel of Hatred, Season 6.

Poison Thorns – Spiritborn Build for Diablo 4