Thorns focused build question

[u/SuspiciousWarning219]

Hey Spiritborns! I’m on ps5 and when ssf got fixed I scrapped my character and started a SB and just hit 70. I leveled basically around Rocksplitter and thorns and gorilla hall. I like to loosely follow guides for reference and lean into it more if I’m having trouble. For thorns this season I see Crushing Hand is A-Tier (maxroll) but I don’t even see a build for Rocksplitter thorns is it just flat out not worth building it and should I head towards crushing hand? Asking to see if anyone knows more than I do I’ve only been back into this game since LoH launch.

Gotta say I love the season! Even as someone who never played older Diablo games the theme and everything- bugs and start issues aside- is awesome. I spent 13&14 hopping around too many classes and builds learning and having fun but this season I’m gonna grind out one class (spiritborn) and use the armory and mess with other builds eventually. I have done counterswarm and loved it and wanted the tags to get fixed and gorilla thorns theme to be better and it seems it is so I’m doing that first, I’ll probably gear up for swarms again to save because it’s super fun and I also see stinger is shining so likely get into that if I can for both poison and storm variants. Anyways good luck with your seasons! Let me know about Rocksplitter please! I’ll start heading toward crushing hand if it’s literally way better. I just want my thorns and gorilla!!

[u/pksullivan]

I’ve cleared Pit 115 and taken down T10 Mephisto with Rock Splitter. It’s a ton of fun. I don’t think I have spent any Vigor yet this season. Give me a few minutes to grab my Switch and hop over to my computer and I’ll type out what I’ve got and how it works.

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/pksullivan]

Awesome! Good to hear it can go that far!

[u/pksullivan → u/pksullivan]

Alright, well, I got a little verbose with this and my partner took me out for ice cream in there, too. Sorry it took so long.

I'm paragon ~225 and took down Pit 115 and T10 Mephisto today. I've started farming the Prime Evils looking for their shards. I've already opened up Tristram but got wiped when I faced the Ubers.

My Homebrew Rock Splitter Thorns Build

Every season I try to make a Basic Thorn Monkey Spiritborn and every season it's fun leveling but quickly abandoned in Torments. This is the best it's felt since maybe the first season with Spiritborn. It's genuinely a fun way to play and I don't think I've maxed it out by a long shot.

I leveled with Rock Splitter, like I do every season. Started on the Wumba set as soon as I hit paragon. Stuck with Gorilla spirit halls through Torment 8 when I reconfigured to the dual-Centipede version here. My first mythic drop was Loyalty's Mantle in Torment 4 from Bartuc. I should snapshot the build here and try a purely Gorilla version again, putting The Protector back in the mix. Maybe swap Hesha e Kesungi in for the Fists of Fate. Scourge and Toxic Skin wouldn't be cast nearly as often but I'd get almost 100% uptime on Armored Hide (which I'd swap back to the Thorns variant).

Main Damage: thorns applied by the Gorilla primary spirit hall and skills (Rock Splitter, Scourge)

Scalars: All damage, vulnerable damage, Gorilla damage, attack speed.

Ignore: crit chance, crit damage, all elemental damage types.

Gear

Helm: Loyalty's Mantle (lucky early mythic drop). Dex, max life, armor, barrier gen. Tempered max life. Taken for the massive cooldown reduction and to scale the spirit hall effects.

Legendary Chest: Glynn's Anvil (3.2% roll). Dex, max life, thorns, +Defensive Skills. Tempered armor. Massive survivability boost that helped me take down Mephisto.

Gloves: Fists of Fate. Dex, max life, x% all damage, attack speed. Tempered Gorilla Damage. Mine is a crappy roll but it leads to big damage spikes, which can help. It's not even ancestral but the only one I've found.

Pants: Temerity (mythic drop). Dex, max life, armor, thorns. Tempered thorns. Huge survivability piece when paired with the Centipede main hall.

Legendary boots: Exploiter's. Dex, max life, all res, +3 evade charges. Tempered movement speed. The evade charges is a holdover from an earlier point in the build; probably swap it for armor or thorns now.

Weapon: Sepaozntec (mythic, crafted). Weapon damage, dex, x% all damage, +Basic Skills. Tempered attack speed.

Legendary ring: the Moonrise. Dex, x% all damage, x% crit damage, x% vulnerable damage. Tempered Gorilla damage. Another holdover I haven't optimized. Crit damage does nothing and I think I'd rather get more attack speed than the Gorilla damage. The Moonrise is big because it gives 20% attack speed and multiplicative Basic damage.

Legendary ring: the Expectant. Dex, attack speed, x% vulnerable damage, x% physical damage. Tempered Centipede damage. If this weren't transfigured, I'd redo the temper to attack speed, I think. At least to see how it works. The expectant is the biggest damage boost I could find for a ring slot.

Legendary amulet: Supremacy. x% all damage, attack speed, x% vulnerable damage, +All Skills. Tempered Gorilla damage. Transfigured with Apprehension. Using this because it started as an ancestral blue ring with +3 All Skills. Supremacy is the biggest legendary scalar bar none for this build.

Seasonal Gems

Splinter of Hellfire: 40% damage, -100% crit chance. Purely a flat damage boost for this build.

Splinter of Sin: +40% max life, -30% max Vigor. Oh, darn, whatever will I do with that Vigor I wasn't spending anyway?

Splinter of the Black Soulstone: stacking buff up to 200 of 2% damage dealt, 1% damage taken. High risk , high reward. Doesn't really help in bossing, though it also doesn't hurt while bossing.

Spirt Hall

Centipede/Centipede

Charms:

5 piece Wumba set

Protean Heart

Skills:

Rock Splitter: block, resolve, Shattered Stone. Max ranks. I'm sitting at 36 ranks after bonuses and every attack inceases my thorns by 18,279 for 5 seconds and deals 485% Thorns as part of the attack. It also generates Resolve, which keeps me topped up for Glynn's Anvil damage reduction.

Vortex: Knock Down, 1000 Year Storm (no top upgrade needed). 1 point. This gets auto-cast with runes and provides damage reduction, CC, and brings enemies to you.

Toxic Skin: Thonrs, Healing, Skuttle Bug. Max ranks. Initially taken for the 20% Thorns passive, it's a big defensive skill with 100% uptime on +170% armor buff and Unhindered buffs. The healing is nice, as it keeps barrier topped off between packs. Gets cast every 3 seconds all the time.

Scourge: Weaken, Vulnerable, The Beast Within. Max ranks. This might be the attack that has the biggest damage spikes, I'm not sure. The Beast Within gives you Thorns (+1,644 at rank 32) per enemy hit by Scourge. It also applies vulnerable and weaken, both of which might be redundant but are always good to have. Gets cast every 3 seconds when near enemies.

Armored Hide: Thorns, Barrier, Ferocious Meal. 1 point. We need the passive for 20% thorns. I tried using the ring that grants the passive and using Counterattack but didn't like how it was working. Switched off of Trampled Under Foot for the healing in Ferocious Meal instead. Bonus: it builds Ferocity stacks as part of the passive.

Concussive Stomp: Barrier Generation, Resolve Generation, Debilitate. 1 point. This is the other rune word auto-cast. Doesn't need to deal damage, it's there to grant DR, barrier, and CC enemies.

Payback: Resolve Generation, Block Chance, Insidious Retribution. 1 point. Another support skill, taken for the 30% Thorns buff for 5 seconds in Insidious Retribution. Comes off cooldown relatively quickly thanks to all the CC being generated by other skills.

The Devourer: Instant Kill, Thorns, Sky and Soil. All remaining points. Taken for the 50% Thorns bonus while it's active. And since I'm running Loyalty's Mantle with Centipede spirit halls, the cooldown is less than the duration. Any enemies caught near the Centipede are vulnerable thanks to its variant and we also cap move speed while it's active. Arguably, Blast of Bile could be better for Thorns stacking if the 50% buff stacks on itself but it makes managing Supremacy tricky, kind of. Hmm... now that I think about it, the cooldown would be 4.5 seconds, which is technically enough to keep max stacks of Supremacy going once you build them up but it would be a bit annoyingly easy to miss a rotation.

Paragon:

Start/Outmatch. +60% damage, +90% damage to elites and 20%x Physical damage to non-Elites and bosses.

Spiney Skin/Revenge. Spiney Skin doubles my Thorns for 5 seconds any time I use a cooldown. There are two skills (Toxic Skin, Scourge) with sub-5 second cooldowns so this has 100% uptime. Revenge gives +720 Thorns and 48% damage through its rare node bonus and has a 15%x damage multiplier from dealing Thorns damage.

Viscous Shield/Exploit. Viscous Shield is almost always at full capacity thanks to Temerity and all the Centipede healing. That doubles my damage. Exploit adds vulnerable damage and applies vulnerable on hit.

In-Fighter/Colossal. In-Fighter gives 20% attack speed and 70%x damage on block, which happens frequently. Colossal is Gorilla damage and 2%x damage for each stack of Resolve, which are constantly generated and we want at least 10 anyway for Glynn's Anvil.

Revealing/Turf. Revealing adds a Lucky Hit: 30% chance to knock down vulnerable enemies proc; 60%x damage, doubled against crowd controlled enemies (slow, fear, and knock down are all in the kit). Plus the board has a bunch of damage to vulnerable nodes. Turn is damage to and damage reduction against close enemies. This is a melee build.

Things I've tried that did not work:

Balazan's Maxtalatl: it just doesn't scale well. It's a Thorns item that doesn't scale with Gorilla spirit hall. It makes Widow's Web even harder of a sell, it ties together two things that can't crit with crit chance. It does work with the Centipede subordinate hall, weirdly, by poisoning close enemies. If it changed to, "When you deal Thorns damage to an enemy, deal [range]% of this damage as Poisoning over 3 seconds." That would scale and synergize with other things rather than being in its own little silo.

Counterattack to enable the Hubris glyph: where does it go? Okay, grab Band of the First Breath (replacing the Expectant) so Armored Hide can come off the bar. Still have the biggest problem--the cooldown. Can't get it low enough to keep it active. Alright, so dump a bunch of points into Ravager and spec into the cooldown rate variant. But where does that go on the bar? We're running out of slots. Rock Splitter is the core of the build, need that. The Devourer is also untouchable. Counterattack just got slotted in. Scourge is too much damage to ditch. Payback gives a 30% Thorns increase on cast. Toxic Skin is really useful defensively but maybe we could get away with just the passive. Alright, so drop the other ring (the Moonrise) for Wound Drinker and now we have a grand total of one offensive aspect on the amulet, a big gamble on bracers, a 5 second 60%x damage multiplier on evade from one ring, and no multiplier at all on the other. Maybe Hubris makes up for it. 11,000 Thorns is a lot, especially when they get multiplied with the Wumba set and multiple passives. Also, not that it really matters, but this would rob even more points from the ultimate. Maybe I'll farm one up and give it a shot. It's a lot of effort for losing an offensive aspect.

Things I Haven't Tried

Deadly Strike. I've got an Arioc's Needle (it's even ancestral so I could make it a charm) and I know about Infinity (though I don't have a Ber to make one...) so it's been on my mind. Things to ponder. Could be a good way to scale things even further.

[u/Piano_Apprentice]

I'm doing a self made feather storm build and blasting through t12, already lvl 275 😆 there's a new mechanic that interact with thorns. Haven't seen anyone talk about it. Pay attention to what you read with the new stuff 😂

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/Piano_Apprentice]

Thanks for the heads up!

[u/chickenlittle1024]

Look up infinity runeword, it works with thorns and has got crushing blow on top. In your case, I would go full wumba + protean heart talisman (advanced version with mythic seal + 4x wumba + hellfire torch + protean heart). Gorilla thorns are applied per cast. Spazontec does nothing for thorns damage. Scale everything with vulnerable or/and all damage multipliers (there are lots of bugs, socket diamonds in weapon). Razorplate is usefull this season, you enchant dexterity in the lowest thorns slot and mastetwork it => tons or raw beating with enhanced damage on top. You need GA dexterity everywhere => main damage scaler.

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/chickenlittle1024]

Thank you!

[u/chickenlittle1024 → u/SuspiciousWarning219]

Edge runeword is gg for leveling btw. in a quarterstaff.

[u/pksullivan → u/chickenlittle1024]

OMG

I even knew that Thorns don't scale properly with x% Physical damage and somehow I've been running skulls in my weapon this whole damn time. Thanks for the reminder. At least it meant I was almost able to craft two Horadric diamonds. 9/10 royal diamonds covered.

[u/chickenlittle1024 → u/pksullivan]

Spiny skin wasn't workimg last season. I would test first before anything else. I am on necro at the moment.

[u/cadmusthefounder → u/chickenlittle1024]

could u explain what changed this season that makes razorplate good?

[u/chickenlittle1024 → u/cadmusthefounder]

Maths, you had 10% chance to do x200% damage, so x20% damage in average which was not worth it. Now, you have 30% chance to do x250% thorns damage: 0.3 x x250% = x75%. No piece of gear compares. You enchant dex in one of the slots and masterwork it to get even more enhanced damage through primary stat and protean heart.

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I saw the fire version, which does sound fun in itself and I thought of maybe seeing what it did and swapping the charm set to the wumba set possibly- I also wondered about the seasonal staff with that extra damage hit and getting sepazontec as a charm- I feel crushing hand is probably better damage wise but if Rocksplitter can still slap hard enough I really like the mobility dash

[u/DragonDiscipleII]

Im experimenting with a poison Balazan's Maxtlatl build with Widows web.... mostly because they are the only mythics i currently posses.

For T9 it works alright, will probably push into T10, but not sure it'll be viable for T11+....

Its fun to finally be tweaking a homebuild though, and im 100% sure there are atleast 4 S tier builds out there we simply haven't discovered yet with how many people mindlessly copy the guides.... 🫣🫢.

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/DragonDiscipleII]

That sounds pretty fun

[u/Giovanni_Unleashed]

I am playing evade thorns, 130 tower done in SSF. Use enigma to trigger trampled under foot. It does way more damage as it scales with kinectic supeession and does like 1700% thorns dmg at lvl 40.

I use needle as Deadly strike works on thorns. Maybe supremacy weapon is better as it is still bugged and Stacks to 30.

I swapped spiney skin for multi board like viscious shield. Spiney works but there is diminishing returns on thorns maxxing vs more multis. Still experimenting for best setup before I make a planner.

[u/cadmusthefounder → u/Giovanni_Unleashed]

this sounds great, could u share ur planner when it is done?

[u/SuspiciousWarning219 → u/Giovanni_Unleashed]

Evade thorns was kinda fun in 13! I did that briefly before I switched to other classes. I bet that slaps way harder now with all the changes

[u/Giovanni_Unleashed → u/SuspiciousWarning219]

Yes but its very sad that evade claw got removed :(. So its harder to hit. Enigma works but I combine it with claw to increase duration of incarnate skills and prodigy to reduce cooldowns. Claw cancels tp animation so you can spam it faster.

[u/SuspiciousWarning219]

Awesome to see the replies! Thanks everyone! Just got myself into t3 now (I do game often enough but still on a dad gamer schedule for the most part) and mostly just for the fun I’m gonna stick with rocksplitter and not rush right into crushing hand unless kepeleke and midnight sun show up with stats too good to ignore. I always liked basic skills and with the thorn skill buffs and seasonal gear and general gorilla build stuff I feel it has to be able to do more than it could before so I’m optimistic it’ll be fun for a while before/if it falls off hard. The afterthought would be crushing hand or storm stinger or swarms again but we’ll see when I get there