Diablo 4's new Spiritborn class is a bit broken… it's something we wrote three days ago, but for a very different reason. At the time, Blizzard had just removed a very popular build that essentially turned Diablo 4 into Vampire Survivors thanks to a bug that caused Spiritborn's Evade's launch animation to become unstable. Now, Diablo 4's DLC class is split in a way that makes it immensely and disproportionately more powerful than any other class in the game.
The situation with Spiritborn construction is escalating at an alarming rate. Just two days ago, our friends at PC Gamer caught my attention when they reported on a build of Spiritborn that had dealt a staggering 235 trillion damage thanks to stacked bugs that allowed for infinite damage scaling. Looking at Reddit and YouTube today, those are rookie numbers.
65,767 QUADRILLION DAMAGE – New SHATTER Quill Spiritborn Build Update – Diablo 4 Guide – YouTube
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Students of the Diablo 4 meta are tirelessly identifying new bugs and new ways to stack them to make absolutely stupid numbers. I'm just a casual creep who likes to kill demons with my wife, but the video above references this build overview from Mobalytics user AceOfSpades, which shows a player dealing 65.767 billion of damage using a revised version of the popular Quill Volley build, combining the Banished Lords Talisman with the Staff of Kepeleke to ensure dominance with every attack.
Just to demonstrate how quickly these buggy Spiritborn constructs are evolving to do more and more damage, just yesterday the estimate for a soft limit was 100 to 200 trillion. At the time, Redditor KinGGaiA posted an in-depth analysis contextualizing that amount of damage compared to the typical non-Spiritborn Diablo 4 build. They estimated that “the class is literally 100,000 times stronger than any other class.”
With Spiritborn starting to deal over 100 trillion damage, the class is literally 100,000 times stronger than any other class. from r/diablo4
“Just an example to show what kind of dimensions we are currently in,” KinGGaiA said. “Let's say both builds have 1bil/s attack speed. The target has 500 billion HP. A spirit born needs 5 seconds to kill the target. A 1bil/s dps build needs 5 days and 19 hours of non-stop DPS “Now let's say you do 10 times more damage, so 10 billion DPS just for science. That would still take you almost 14 hours.”
The craziest part of all of this is the fact that the people creating these constructs see no end to the increased damage anytime soon. Streamer Goblin Inc., who made the video above, 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 a lot of bugs are piling up. I lost count and put Quintillion on the thumbnail, I guess it will be next week, right now it's Quadrillion, sorry for the mistake!”
I suspect the developers in charge of balance are sweating bullets watching all of this play out, trying to decide whether to attack the bear by weakening the ever-loving Spiritborn class or hold out until Season 7. So far we haven't. I've heard some feedback from the developers about buggy builds, but it seems like it may only be a matter of time before they step in with an official response.
Until then, read our Diablo 4 Review: The Vessel of Hate to find out why we think “It's a reason to return to the Sanctuary.”