Heroes,
You have been eagerly waiting for a new Mastery and soon your wishes will come true. Today we unveil what lies beyond the underworld’s shroud and offer you a first glimpse into our new Mastery: Spirit!
Overview
Spirit allows you to wield the powers of the Underworld!
Manipulate the forces of life and death to summon spirits of the dead and cast otherworldly spells to haunt the living. Draw from your own life force to sustain their advance and boost their effectiveness. Displace and debuff your opponents by siphoning their life force, or even executing them altogether.
Spirit makes use of Shades, a new resource exclusive to the Mastery. They can be used to fuel any way to play Spirit: As a full-on Summoner, a pure Spellcaster or hybrid playstyles.
The mastery also allows you to sacrifice life instead of energy and, on the flip side, has a big focus on Vitality Damage and life leech to balance this out.
Spirit Summoner
As the main Summoning Mastery Spirit offers a lot of support for minion based builds. Eidolon Guards will form the core of your Summoner. They are powerful spirits of fallen heroes, but their presence on the overworld is fleeting.
You can choose to sustain them longer by sacrificing your own life or healing them with other abilities. Or you lean into their short-lived nature and build around on-summon and death triggers for them.
The Major Summon of Spirit is the Athanekros. A powerful spellcaster that can make use of its own unique spells but also has access to some of your other Spirit abilities.
It can dish out large amounts of damage from the backline while also buffing your defenses as needed.
Spirit Caster
If you fancy slinging spells and watching your opponents crumble to dust while the life forces are drawn from them, Spirit has got you covered as well.
In this case you can use your Shades to empower your abilities by choosing specific modifiers. "Soul Burn" modifiers allow you to consume Shades on cast for big benefits like much higher damage, a removed cooldown and similar effects, whereas “Soul Harvest” modifiers allow you to increase Shade Regeneration with abilities when killing creatures or damaging bosses.
Additionally Spirit introduces the “Execution” mechanic. This will allow you to instantly execute enemies when they fall beyond a certain threshold. As you would expect, you can manipulate this threshold by speccing into it on actives and passives.
Support
Spirit also offers a lot of support value.
Soul Vortex is a very powerful ability that drags your enemies towards its center. Very useful for hitting a big group with harder to hit AoE abilities. It can also apply a debuff so that whatever you choose to deal damage with hits even harder while in the Vortex.
Dark Pact on the other hand allows you to sacrifice your life directly for energy and other buffs. This can be a great tool to enable more energy hungry builds - if you can deal with the life loss.
Showcasing Some Abilities
Below are some quick clips to show you some Spirit abilities. Please note this content is still work in progress and might change by release.
- Eidolon Guards: The Eidolon guards are strong, but fleeting. In this clip they are equipped with a Charge modifier that allows them to get into combat more quickly.
https://youtu.be/_LEgk0wqRe4 - Deathward Beam: Line up your enemies and hit them with a devastating beam.
https://youtu.be/nZeS1NzqT2U - Athanekros: Summon a menacing ally who can cast powerful spells from the backline.
https://youtu.be/ihXQWbsm_Mw
More Soon
This is just a small first look into what the Spirit Mastery will offer. Stay tuned for future updates!