Diablo 4's new Spiritborn class is a tad broken... is something we wrote three days ago, but for a very different reason. At the time, Blizzard had just killed an uber-popular build that essentially turned Diablo 4 into Vampire Survivors thanks to a bug that made the Spiritborn's Evade cast animation go all wonky. Now, the Diablo 4 DLC class is broken in such a way that makes it vastly, disproportionately more powerful than any other class in the game.
The situation with the Spiritborn build is intensifying at a frightening rate. Just two days ago, our pals at PC Gamer caught my attention when they reported on a Spiritborn build that had landed a staggering 235 trillion damage hit thanks to stacked bugs that allowed for infinite damage scaling. Looking around Reddit and YouTube today, those are rookie numbers.
Students of Diablo 4 meta are tirelessly identifying new bugs and new ways to stack 'em to do absolute stupid numbers. I'm but a mere filthy casual who just likes to click demons to death with my wife, but this build overview from Mobalytics user AceOfSpades is referenced in the above video showing a player dealing an eye-watering 65,767 quadrillion damage using a revised version of the popular Quill Volley build, which pairs the Banished Lords Talisman with the Rod of Kepeleke to guarantee overpowers on every attack.
Just to demonstrate how quickly these bugged Spiritborn builds are evolving to do more and more damage, just yesterday the estimate on a soft cap was 100-200 trillion. At the time, Redditor KinGGaiA posted an in-depth analysis contextualizing that amount of damage compared to the typical Diablo 4 non-Spiritborn build. They estimated "the class is literally 100.000 times stronger than any other class."
With Spiritborn starting to hit for over 100 trillion dmg, the class is literally 100.000 times stronger than any other class. from r/diablo4
"Just an example to showcase in what kind of dimensions we are currently," KinGGaiA said. "Lets say both builds have 1 attackspeed/s. The target has 500 Trillion HP. A spiritborn needs 5 seconds to kill the target. a 1 bil/s dps build needs 5 days and 19 hours of non stop DPS. now lets say you do 10 times the dmg, so 10 bil DPS. just for science. That would still take you almost 14 hours."
The wildest part of all this is the fact that the people making these builds don't see an end to the damage scaling any time soon. Streamer Goblin Inc., who made the above video, chimed in: "It's getting silly. Obviously I have to keep all the builds up to date with the latest discoveries from around the world, but this is a lot of bugs piling up. I lost track and put Quintillion on the Thumbnail, I guess that's next week, right now it's Quadrillions, sorry for the error!"
I suspect the developers in charge of balance are sweating bullets watching this all unfold, trying to decide whether to poke the bear by nerfing the ever-loving heck out of the Spiritborn class or ride it out until Season 7. So far we haven't heard a peep from the devs about the bugged builds, but it seems like it can only be a matter of time before they chime in with an official response.
Until then, read our Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred review to find out why we think "It's a reason to return to Sanctuary."
