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Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Leveling Guide

Season 6 - Season of HatredLeveling

Last Updated:October 13, 2024|Change Log

Welcome to the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Leveling Guide! This build relies on Gorilla Skills and focuses on high AoE damage output by spamming combos of 3x Crushing Hand combined with Unrelenting. While the build relies on Gorilla skills to deal damage, we choose primary Eagle and secondary Jaguar in our Spirit Hall to benefit from lots of extra raw damage, Vulnerable procs and Ferocity stacks.

This build doesn't need much to get started besides one Dungeon Codex Power, but Spiritborn has access to many strong aspects that amplify this build. The primary milestone for this leveling build is unlocking the Vital Strikes Key Passive and ideally combining it with Accursed Touch. This instantly gives you insane recovery and solves most of your resource issues since the aspect allows you to profit from all the upsides of the Key Passive without suffering from its downside. However, as Accursed Touch is a drop-only Aspect, you need to rely on your own tools until you find it. In this build, you include Eagle primary hall, Soar & Exalted Seeker and if available Chance to make Enemies Vulnerable on a ring as sources of Vulnerable until then.

In the endgame, you aim to enhance the setup further with Harmony of Ebewaka and stacking Maximum Resolve for benefits such as Perseverance, Colossal and Rampant Crushing Hand. Redirected Force and Unyielding Hits are powerful legendary effects that buff your damage later on. There are more things to unlock down the line, which are explained in the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Guide. Until then, this guide teaches you all about how to reach the endgame in Diablo 4 with the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn. Let's get started!

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Leveling Setup
Note

This build guide takes you up to level 60 and gets you started for the early Endgame on Torment 1 difficulty. If you're looking for in-depth Endgame guides, check out our Spiritborn Guides section!

Pros
  • Great AoE
  • Easy to Play
  • High Defense
Cons
  • Triple Combo Attack
  • Resource Management
  • Mediocre Boss Damage

Check out our Leveling Builds Tier List to see how this build compares to others.

Season Theme

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

  • Seething Opal of Equipment
  • Seething Opal of Gold
  • Seething Opal of Materials
  • Seething Opal of Torment
  • Seething Opal of Socketables

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.

Skills & Gameplay

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Getting Started

To start off we have to put 2 points into Basic Skills to unlock the other sections. Rock Splitter is your choice because it grants block chance, lots of resources and Resolve. Crushing Hand is the main ability that you want to spam as much as possible, ideally in combos of 3 to trigger Unrelenting. This attack overlaps in the center, so focus on elites while other enemies die in the AoE.

Solving Resources

Until you acquire the Vital Strikes + Accursed Touch combo, your strategy is to invest into resource recovery and Vulnerable application where possible in order to spam Crushing Hand. Passives like Vigorous and Velocity help a great deal early on.

As long as your Vigor generation is still not perfect you have to be more mindful about positioning and timing with Crushing Hand. In order to trigger Unrelenting, you need nearly a full Vigor bar. Gather enemies into a pack around you and unleash your attacks.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Skills

Speed & Damage

Rushing Claw is a staple for early game Spiritborn mobility. Use it whenever you can to go from pack to pack or close the distance to your target. Soar is used for the early game to increase your mobility further but eventually replaced once you have more base movement speed. Lastly, Ravager is an amazing secondary damage source that applies extra hits to all targets you hit with any ability, making it easy to trigger Jaguar or take out smaller enemies with a single use of Crushing Hand.

Spirit Hall

At level 15, you can unlock your class mechanic called Spirit Hall. There you may choose one out of the four spirit guardians for both the primary and secondary slots. In this case, you go with Eagle (primary) and Jaguar (secondary). The first allows your evade to shoot out feathers that deal a good amount of flat damage and apply Vulnerable, helping out with Vital Strikes procs. Try to get boots with "Attacks reduce Evade cooldown" on them to benefit from this effect even more. It also allows you to benefit from Eagle passives Brilliance and Acceleration. The second hall bonus gives you easy access to Ferocity for extra attack speed and Invasive Rushing Claw cooldown resets.

Key Passive

Vital Strikes is our key passive of choice for this leveling setup. On top of a great damage boost it also single-handedly solves most resource and life recovery under the condition that we can apply Vulnerable frequently. Before we find Accursed Touch that makes it permanent on all targets, our best options to rely on temporarily are Replenishing Soar & Exalted Seeker. At this point you should be able to spam Crushing Hand nearly non-stop as long as you cycle in Soar and The Seeker from time to time. Your ultimate also brings other perks such as Supremacy, Resolution and Intricacy.

Final Journey to Level 60

At this point, most of the key synergies are unlocked and the gameplay loop is almost complete. As you level up, you unlock a lot of extra points that go into various offensive and defensive passives or max out certain skills. Check out the skills progression above to see where to put your points as you go, but feel free to deviate from the order displayed as necessary. For example, you can pick up Resilient earlier for extra defense or leave out some of the Ultimate passive cluster nodes until later if you find yourself rarely using The Seeker.

Accursed Touch & Endgame Swaps

Once you acquire Accursed Touch, you can make multiple swaps in your setup because this aspect's Vulnerable effect cannot be removed by Vital Strikes. While perhaps not necessary early on, we replace The Seeker with The Hunter in the transition to Torment difficulties to increase our damage output and gain more Ferocity. Finally, we change our primary spirit hall bonus to Centipede to benefit from the massive slow and damage reduction bonuses as the Eagle feathers fall off later on. Find more details in the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Endgame Guide.

Check out our Renown Guide to unlock all your additional Skill Points efficiently. 

Spirit Hall

Primary: Eagle allows our Evade to deal damage and apply Vulnerable, helping out with resource generation from Vital Strikes.

Secondary: Jaguar provides us with easy access to Ferocity for more Attack Speed and further synergies down the line.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Spirit Hall

Unlocking the Spirit Hall

Once you reach level 15, you have to complete a short questline starting in Gea Kul, Kehjistan. A Priority Quest leads you there to help out Tarka. After a few stops outside of town you have to enter the Sacred Hunting Grounds and defeat the Spirit Beast. While inside this dungeon you have to use the emote wheel at two separate stops, once for "Help", once for "Thanks" in order to progress. The boss fight is relatively long and difficult for low level characters, so it's recommended to do this quest on normal. After finishing the quest your secondary Spirit Hall unlocks automatically at level 30.

Learn more details in our full Spiritborn Spirit Hall Guide.

Gear & Stat Priorities

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

To get started as a Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn, focus the most on upgrading your weapon as its damage is the base for all further damage calculations. Otherwise, follow the priority list below. While you don't have all of the desired temper manuals available, simply try to get anything useful on your gear until you acquire the right ones. For example, % Damage, Damage to Close, Vulnerable Damage, etc. all work as long as you activate their conditions. Likewise, you can temper multiple defensive options such as Resistances, Life, Armor to fill gaps in your survivability. Tempering low level gear is relatively cheap and the results can be very impactful.

Tip: For the early game, Elemental Surge Weapon Tempers are very powerful due to their high base damage, especially if you are twinking. If you find these, you may want to keep imprinting them on your weapons for an easy time.

1-60 Leveling
T1 Starter

Read more about itemization in our Beginner Articles about Damage, Defense and Stats.

Legendaries & Uniques

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

The Codex of Power is a collection of Legendary Aspects you can imprint onto Rare or Legendary items at the Occultist. They unlock after completing specific Dungeons located around Sanctuary or salvaging items with these powers. Check out our Map Tool to locate these Dungeons.

For leveling, there are a few powers that can significantly help us if we have the funds to imprint them. In addition, keep an eye out for powerful Unique items you may find for this or other builds.

Must-have Dungeon unlocks

  1. Unrelenting (Remnants of Rage - Nahantu)

Nice-to-have Dungeon unlocks

  1. Haste (Seething Underpass - Nahantu)
  2. Fell Soothsayer's (Ularian Sepulcher - Nahantu)

Other useful Aspects (drop/gamble)

  1. Accursed Touch
  2. Unyielding Hits
  3. Redirected Force
  4. Plains Power
  5. Forest Power
  6. Duelist's
  7. Binding Morass
  8. Concussive Strikes

What to Gamble

OffensiveGloves
DefensiveHelm, Chest, Pants
Utility, MobilityBoots
ResourceRings

Great Uniques for this build

  1. Harmony of Ebewaka
  2. Ring of the Midnight Sun
  3. Peacemonger's Signet
  4. Mother's Embrace

Jackpot Drops

As you level up, you may get lucky and find some great random drops. Some of these can massively amplify your power and speed up the leveling by switching to another build. Keep in mind that there are many more Aspects and Uniques that can be useful to multiple builds; this just lists some of the most impactful ones. While we usually recommend starting with Endgame Builds at level 60, you often can make them work earlier with these drops:

Build-defining Aspects

  • Moonrise + Adaptability (enables Rock Splitter Thorns and Thrash Endgame Builds)

Build-defining Uniques

  1. Sepazontec (enables Rock Splitter Thorns and Thrash Endgame Builds)
  2. Loyalty's Mantle (greatly enhances multiple Endgame Builds)
  3. Jacinth Shell (greatly amplifies multiple Endgame Builds)

Learn more details in our articles covering the Codex of Power and Unique Items.

Runes

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

  • Poc + Que - We constantly spend all of our resources, triggering Earthen Bulwark for extra defense and synergy with Viscous Shield
  • Xol + Jah - With the free Teleport cast we can go even faster and jump from pack to pack while oneshotting screens
  • Ohm - Can be used instead for the War Cry damage buff if needed, especially in pit pushing

Alternative choices

As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:

  • Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows execute at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other Runeword it also generates large amounts of offering
  • Cir - Generates offering by spamming your core skill
  • Xal - For extra defense
  • Gar - For more crit (before Rod of Kepeleke)
  • Mot - Generates Dark Shroud for extra defense
  • Tam - We spam our core skill all the time
  • Yul - Another efficient way of generating offering

Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.

Mercenaries

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

Hired: Raheir

He provides us with Fortify, Stuns, some extra damage, more armor for Unyielding Hits and prevents us from getting oneshot every 30 seconds thanks to Valiance. Beware that he's not present when playing in groups and make sure you remain armor capped without him.

Reinforcement: Varyana

We choose Earth Breaker for extra crowd controls.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Mercenaries

Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.

How To Level

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

In Diablo 4, you can level by completing the Campaign, collecting Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers, completing Helltide activities, grinding Dungeons, clearing Strongholds, fighting in the Undercity of Kurast or interacting with the Seasonal Mechanics. While there are many ways to level up in Diablo 4, not all of them are equal.

Campaign Leveling
Seasonal / Alt Leveling
Tips & Tricks
Speedrun Route

Campaign Leveling

  • For your first character in Diablo 4, completing the Campaign provides all the background lore information but is not necessary.
    • The Campaign is the slowest way to level, but it's worth experiencing the Campaign and Diablo 4's storyline at least once.
    • To play Seasonal Content you need to have completed or skipped the Campaign.
    • If your account is below Rank 4 Renown in each zone, focus on completing your Renown.
      • This only needs to be done once per realm (Softcore / Hardcore).
    • After finishing the campaign, you should focus on earning experience in Helltides by combining Helltide activities with Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers or completing Gathering Legion Events.
    • Strongholds provide a big boost of experience for little time investment. Make sure to clear all of them after around level 40.

Seasonal / Alt Leveling

  • Complete the Seasonal Questline in order to progress your Seasonal Journey to unlock additional Legendary Aspects and work on your Seasonal Powers.
  • If your account is below Rank 4 Renown in each zone, focus on completing your Renown.
    • This only needs to be done once per realm (Softcore / Hardcore).
  • Complete the Dungeons needed for any Legendary Aspects from your Codex of Power.
  • From level 1-60 you should focus on earning experience in Helltides by combining Helltide activities with Grim Favors for the Tree of Whispers or completing Gathering Legion Events.
  • Strongholds provide a big boost of experience for little time investment. Make sure to clear all of them after around level 40.
  • If you're playing an Alt, make sure to use Tempers and Leveling Caches crafted from the Alchemist to speed up your progression.
  • Find the most efficient way of leveling your character in detail with our Speed Leveling Guide.

Tips and Tricks

  • Don't Imprint Your Weapon
    • It is a better idea to put your best Offensive Aspect on your Amulet, which will usually not be replaced as often as your Weapon.
  • Compare Your Items
    • Press Shift to activate item comparison. Use this build guide's Stat Priorities section to identify potential upgrades.
  • Choose an Easy Difficulty
    • Ideally, start on Hard difficulty for the extra XP modifier, then try to go higher when it's way too easy. If that slows you down noticeably, it's better to stay on a lower difficulty.
  • Use Your Materials
    • There's no point in holding on to your gold or materials for later. Use everything to speed up your journey to 60. If you're twinking, make sure to craft the Allowance Caches from the Alchemist at level 20 and if available, equip your Mythic Uniques at level 35 to make the leveling a breeze.

Speedrun Route

  • If you're looking to min/max your time spent on the way to 60 instead of following a generic guideline, you need to use a specific strategy.
  • This usually includes farming certain activities up to a specified level and then switching to other tasks while gathering XP in high density areas and pushing the difficulty as high as you can.
  • We update this strategy seasonally in our Speed Leveling Guide.

Endgame Transition

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

As you approach level 60 with the Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn, you unlock higher item power gear that represents a massive jump in character power. This is a good time to refresh your setup with new tempers and imprints.

At level 60, Paragon Levels and The Pit unlock. Work towards Tier 20 to enter Torment 1, where the Endgame begins. Focus on overcapping your Armor (1000+) and Resistances (70%+) as you receive some penalties to your character's stats:

  • -250 Armor per Torment difficulty
  • -25% All Resistances per Torment difficulty

At this point, your setup should look roughly like this before you dive into min/maxing with Uniques, Mythics & Masterworking. With better gear, more levels and Glyphs, you can push further and eventually unlock higher difficulties for increased rewards.

This step marks the end of the leveling guide. Below is the Paragon setup to get you started in Torment difficulty, but ideally, you should now transition towards the endgame version of this build or choose another of your liking.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Starter Setup

Paragon & Glyphs

!
Important

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.

Use the slider to see progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn Paragon
Tip

Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

To Level 15

  1. Fitness
  2. Spirit
  3. Outmatch
  4. Colossal
  5. Turf

To Level 46

  1. Spirit
  2. Outmatch
  3. Fitness
  4. Colossal
  5. Turf

There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.

Video Guide

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Summary

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

The Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn is powerful AoE speedfarmer that nukes everything around it with ease.

  • Spam Crushing Hand, ideally 3x in a row for the extra hits from Unrelenting.
  • Solve your resources either with Vulnerable + Vital Strikes.
  • Keep up your Resolve stacks for more damage and defense.
  • Kapow!

Credits

Season 6 - Season of Hatred
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn

Written by wudijo

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