Last Epoch Build Guide: Physical Spriggan (Crit Spell Druid)

In this Last Epoch (version 0.9) Guide we’re going to be covering a caster Druid Build that focuses on the use of permeant Spriggan Form and utilizes several Physical skills. Last Epoch has very deep customization options for its passive trees, and Skill perks, that can be difficult to navigate. In this Build Guide, I’ll explain how to get the most from the Physical Spriggan, a great starter build. So if you’ve been struggling to find a good Druid Build, then this Guide is for you.

Last Epoch Build Guide: Physical Spriggan (Crit Spell Druid)

The Physical Spriggan have a set of alternative skills that replace standard skills, with other ways to trigger them. You can proc all of Maelstrom, Thorn Totem, and Entangling Roots, on top of Spriggan Form’s skills. Building all these skills as physical damage spells enable stacking of armor shred, and physical resistance shred. Additionally, it stacks Maelstrom on yourself, and bleed on enemies, adding more layers of damage that help kill bosses much faster.

Last Epoch Build Spriggan Form

Stacking Maelstrom grants both Haste and Frenzy, increasing cast speed and movement speed greatly. At the same time, each cast of Spirit Thorns in Spriggan Form gives back 6 rage and 15 ward. So casting Spirit Thorns rapidly helps sustain your health and mana, without costing mana to cast. Added to the damage reduction you get from Beastmaster tree and Aspect of The Boar, it results in greater defense and tankiness.

This build gets additional defense from the Spriggan companion healing, life leech on crit, capped critical avoidance, and stun avoidance. You can simply stand still in poison pools and keep spamming your Spirit Thorns. While tanking both damage over time and direct damage from the boss, you will barely notice your health drop. But there is also the option of a speedy getaway if things get out of hand.

Last Epoch Build Guide: Physical Spriggan Gameplay

In short, the build starts either with building Maelstrom stacks in human form, and then transforming into Spriggan Form. Or starting with the Spriggan Form straight away. You then proceed to place totems from a safe distance, drawing enemies’ aggro. Totems acts as a meat shield between you and enemies, and debuff enemies with Armour Shred. While totems are active, your Spriggan Form gains a massive cast speed increase, helping you cast Spirit Thorns rapidly, to build Maelstrom stacks faster.

Upon reaching six stacks of Maelstrom, you gain Haste and Frenzy, Increasing Movement Speed by 30%, and 20% Cast speed. Additionally, it increases the Maelstrom DoT itself, which is important. Maelstrom has the same physical and Attunement scaling as our direct spells, so you have good damage.

Last Epoch Build Spriggan Form Gameplay

After casting Spirit thorns five times, you summon a Vale spirit, with up to a maximum of four, in twenty casts. The Vale spirit shoots projectiles at enemies, dealing little extra damage. Summoning all four Vale Spirits causes the next hit to consume them, and proc Entangling Roots. Entangling Roots in return buffs you and your totems with flat physical damage, and flat spell damage for eight seconds. It also applies five stacks of shred to enemies’ physical resistance, increasing damage from all sources.

Meanwhile, your Spriggan companion provides you and your totems with constant healing, and a very significant Base Crit Rate buff. Such a buff is very crucial because it’s not easily accessible from other sources.

You can easily get 20 stacks of Armour Shred (-2000 armour), and five stacks of Physical resistance shred

Physical Spriggan Active Skills

In this section, we’ll take a look at what Skills should be on your Skill bar to make this Druid Build work. All five skills we will use are considered mandatory, but they are easily accessible, and you get the most out of their power by mid-game. We will pick skills from the base Primalist class and the Druid Master Class.

Summon Thorns Totem

 This spell unlocks after a Primalist character gets to level four, and is either the first or second skill we specialize in. It starts summoning one Totem with each cast, until you get the Grove Mind node later. The mana cost of summoning totems is great in the early game, and you can only cast two totems. This will give you a hard time using it as a main leveling skill early on. Therefore, I recommend delaying the specialization in Summon Thorns Totems to level eight, when the second specialization slot opens. You can specialize in Ice Thorns first, then refund it later after unlocking the Spriggan Form.

To reduce mana deficiency with Thorns Totem, we start with 2/5 Totemic Wisdom. We make our way towards Grove Mind by taking 2/4 in Forested Expanse which increases the maximum Totems we can summon. Then proceed with 3/4 Eternal Forest, increasing totem duration and health, and finally 1/1 Grove Mind. That enables you to summon the maximum number of Totems once cast, and position them around the enemy.

If you struggle with mana due to the increased mana cost that comes with Forested Expanse, we can solve it by getting one or two points in Memories of Eterra. In all cases, we need 3/3 in Memories of Eterra by the end of this branch and push Forested Expanse to 3/4. Afterwards, we go through the left side of the tree, making our way towards Armour Shred. Start with 1/4 in Ancient power, and 2/3 Impale, which are filler nodes. Then go all the way into 5/5 Shred Armour, which ensures every hit of Thorns Totems to remove 100 armor from the enemy for four seconds.

Maelstrom

This spell unlocks after a Primalist character gets to level twelve, and is either the second or third skill we specialize in. In some cases, we can level up with Maelstrom in the early game. But again, it has mana issues, and will likely give you a headache to balance it out. So it’s better to stick to leveling Ice Thorns, and delay the Maelstrom specialization until at least level 20.

At first, we need to rush towards the Cyclone node, to convert Maelstrom damage to physical damage. So we take 2/4 Whirlpool, 2/3 Sleet-Footed, and 1/1 Cyclone. Afterwards, we aim to get the Frenzy and Haste buffs, so we take the north path. Get 1/5 Turbulence, 2/4 Calm, 1/1 in Windswept and 1/1 Windfury.

Now increase the duration of Maelstrom by maxing Whirlpool at 4/4, then get more AOE by maxing Turmoil at 5/5. Finally, we get Turbulence to 4/5, so now we are at a total of 20 points. If you get an extra point from affixes on gear, you can max Turbulence to 5/5. It’s a good node, because we build so much Attunement anyway, and it gives a massive damage bonus to Maelstrom.

Spriggan Form

This spell unlocks after allocating 10 passive points into the Druid tree, which is roughly around levels 25~30. This depends on how fast you clear the prerequisite quests for master trees. You should Respec Ice Thorns and specialize in Spriggan Form at once, as Spirit Thorns upgrade your damage three times as much.

Spriggan Form is a caster stance that gives the Druid four new spells and locks him from using all standard skills. It replaces mana with another decaying resource named Rage, which converts you back to human form once depleted. There are ways to reduce the decaying rate of Rage, and there are ways to regain rage, to virtually stay forever in Spriggan form. On top of this, Spriggan Form gains the following bonuses:

• 50% increased Spell Damage.
• +300 Armor.
• Set mana (Rage) Regen to zero.
• –5 Mana (Rage) Drain per sec.

The Alternative skills of Spriggan Form are:

Spirit Thorns

Unleash several homing projectiles in front of the caster, which can spread to hit several enemies or shotgun one enemy. That’s the main damage-dealing spell in our Spriggan build, and the main way to sustain our Rage and health. We need a massive amount of cast speed and stun avoidance to be able to spam Spirit Thorns non-stop.

Summon Healing Totem

It summons a Totem that heals you and your allies, and with proper nodes, it becomes Thorn Totem simultaneously. This Totem benefits from the Thorn Totem skill tree, in addition to healing. You also get a massive Totem duration increase from the Spriggan Form tree, as well as summoning speed. So overall, it smooths out the Totem summoning, and help you get all benefit from two skill trees on one skill.

Summon Vines

Vines are small minions you can summon to deal melee damage to inflict poison on enemies. They are used in DoT and minions builds, and I generally don’t recommend them in Physical Spriggan form.

Thorn Shield

It gives a barrier that adds 30 Armor and reflects some damage to attacks. After the shield expires, it bursts to deal AOE damage. You can use it for a slight damage boost, or ignore it. In all cases, we don’t invest in nodes related to Thorn Shield.

Spriggan Form Skill Tree

To build a Spriggan Form tree, we need to first get Spriggan skills to proc our normal skill. We do so by getting Spirit Vortex node for Maelstrom, Spiked Totem for Summon Thorns Totem, and Valetide for proccing Entangling Roots. To reach them quickly, we shall go to 1/3 Rose Meadow, 1/3 Ancestral Call, and 1/3 Spirit Vortex. Then we go the other way, and put 4/4 Totem Warden, then 1/1 Spiked Totem.

Next, we can rush through 3/3 Spiritwhisperer and 1/3 Valetide to get Entangling Roots as soon as possible. Otherwise, we can delay Valetide, and improve our Spirit Thorns and Maelstrom first. We can get 1/4 Branch Storm, and finish Ancestral Call at 3/3 first, before going for Spiritwhisperer and Valetide.

Regardless of what you prioritize, we will put two extra points in Spirit Vortex to complete 3/3, for faster and more reliable building up Maelstrom stacks. Finally, we are left with three points to put in the tree. We can use it for either, more damage on Spirit Thorns, help proc Entangling Roots faster or to get more AOE. So the choices are:

• 3/3 Cycle of life: it gives a chance to summon Vale Spirit upon the Totem’s death. This effectively enables Entangling Roots to proc faster.
• 4/4 Branch Storm: it gives more AOE by having a higher chance of piercing enemies. Also, gives higher damage through the Penetration stat.
• 3/3 Rose Meadow + 1/1 Wrath of the Glad: Gain a higher damage multiplier, and a chance to cast three extra Spirit Thorns from your Totems.

Summon Spriggan

This is the fourth spell we specialize in, and we unlock it after allocating 15 points in the Druid tree. Use it to summon a companion Spriggan outside of Spriggan Form, and it persists even after you transform your Druid into a Spriggan. We build the Spriggan companion into healing and buffing, so it helps sustain your health and increases your damage.

So we start with 1/5 Arboreal Vitality, and 1/1 Creeping Roots, which enables Spriggan to cast Ensnaring Roots. Take 1/1 in Protective Roots, for the Spriggan to cast the roots towards you, and finish with 4/4 Garden of Nourishment. This enables the Spriggan to heal you, and your totems 800 health every cast of Ensnaring Roots.

For buffs, we put 3/5 into Aura of Life, which is a prerequisite for 2/3 Aura of Kinship, and 4/4 Aura of Retribution. These last two nodes grant all allies in the area a flat spell damage bonus and an 8% base critical chance. The base critical is the most important source of crit buffs in the build and a major source of our damage.

We can spend the last four points however we see fit, for instance, 1/4 in Aura of Loyalty, and 1/1 Aura of evasion. This grant you and your minion a little more survivability. Then push 2/5 Arboreal Vitality and 1/5 Warding Bark.

Entangling Roots

The last spell in our arsenal, which you will unlock after spending a whole 35 passive points into Druid tree. This will be around character level 50~55, so it will be right when you are ready to enter mid-game. The importance of Entangling Roots is Shredding Physical Resistance from Shredding Vines, and getting flat spells and flat physical damage (to minions) from Wild Weapons and Blooming Magic.

Start with 2/5 Shredding Vines, and go through 1/3 Nourshiment Surge, 1/2 Wild Weapons and 1/5 Blooming Magic. This gives a small buff for starters, and then we get the nodes that turn Entangling Roots into circle mode and enables it to cast from Totems. It makes for smoother gameplay and makes sure you always hit all enemies even from afar. Go through 1/4 Entrapped, 1/3 Reclamation, and 3/5 Noxious Grasp, which is a filler node. Now get 1/1 in Overgrown Garden, and 1/1 Rooted System. Then finish the tree by filling all left nodes to 5/5 Shredding Vines, 2/2 Wild Weapons, and 5/5 Blooming Magic.

An alternative is to forgo the flat spell and physical damage to minions. Instead, you shall give your Spriggan companion more defense and cast speed from Frenzying Thorns. So we go with 5/5 Shredding Vines, 2/4 Entrapped, 1/1 Inescapable Thicket, 5/5 Frenzying Thorns, and finally, 1/1 Bramblewood Wardens.

Last Epoch Build Guide: Physical Spriggan Passive Skills

Figuring out how to spend your points in the passive tree is one of the most important parts of making a Build in the Last Epoch, and generally, it takes a respec or two before getting it right. In this section, I want to show you how I’ve set this up for maximum performance.

Primalist Base Tree

You start with the Primalist tree by default, which requires you to spend 20 points in, to unlock the master class trees. So, put 8/8 in Natural Attunement,  as all our stats scale with Attunement. Then add 5/5 in Hunter’s Restoration, for some health and health recovery. Finally, fill 6/6 in Wisdom of the Wild for Spell damage and 1/8 in Tempest Bond. That’s all we need from this tree, so we move on.

Druid Tree

Once you reach The End of Time and get to master the Druid class, you start investing in this tree. We will spend a lot of our points here, and we will find very good stats here, such as generic Damage, more Attunement, Reduce Rage decay, Crit Avoidance per Attunement, Flat Spell damage, Crit Chance, and Leech on Crit. These passives will shape the offensive side of our build.

7/7 Primordial Resonance is where we start, which gives a generic Damage stat. The generic Damage affects every kind of damage, be it direct or DoT, spell or melee, physical or otherwise. So in several cases, it will double dip in many forms of damage. In other words, 35% generic damage is still better than 49% Physical or spell damage from other nodes.

Continue with 7/7 Druidic Prowess, and 5/5 Focused Wrath for Attunement, extra generic damage, and reduce rage decay. These are 19 points, so you want to add one extra point anywhere, to unlock the fifth column of passive. I put it in 1/7 Chitinus Plating, then proceed to put 5/5 in Bush Stalker. It adds Critical chance, and health leech on Crit hits, which help a lot in sustaining Spriggan’s life.

Get 10/10 in Harmonious Wisdom to unlock the Crit Avoidance perk, which ensures you cap your Crit Avoidance. Then get 1/5 Woodland Beings, which is prerequisite to 1/1 Natural Duality. This one gives your companion a lot of health and gives you a lot of Armor and generic Damage. Now we have reached a good breakpoint, we can start investing in other trees. If you take this build over level 80, you can come back later to add 10/10 Rageborn to gain a massive Crit chance increase and 10/10 Eternal Nature for flat spell damage. Or you can max 7/7 Chitinus Plating for massive defense.

Lost Epoch Build Druid Tree

Shaman Tree

This tree gives you more Attunement, Penetration, and much-needed utility as Cast speed. So before the endgame, we need 8/8 Shamanic Infusion, 1/8 Silent Protector, and 5/5 Totemic Fury.

Lost Epoch Build Shaman Tree

Beastmaster Tree

The Beastmaster cover the main defensive side of our build, so we build it by the time we get to the endgame. It gives much-needed tankiness, in form of damage reduction.

We kick it off by 8/8 Ursine Strength, for a multiplicative 16% damage reduction. Then proceed with 5/5 Boar Heart, for granting Aspect of The Boar, which adds 15% damage reduction at base value. Now add 1/1 in Artor’s Loyalty and 1/5 Call of the Pack to unlock the next column. Then finish with 5/5 in Porcine Constitution to add 75% health generation, and an extra 15% damage reduction to the Aspect of the Boar. These passives cut the damage your character takes to almost half, and allow you to do much tougher content.

Physical Spriggan Equipment & Stats

In this section we’ll be covering the type of equipment that you want to aim for, and what stats you need on them.

Weapon

The first thing you’ll want is a good weapon that ideally gives nice stats. The best stat for the Spriggan build is flat-added spell damage, it increases the base spell damage, which gets multiplied by all other modifiers. For this reason, the best weapon to use in our build is the Two-handed Staff. The one-handed weapons have a lot less base Spell compared to the two-handed staves, and using shields or catalysts doesn’t compensate for it. There are several good base weapons to craft:

• Before level 70, use any staff with a high base spell, and good sub-stats.
• Temple Staff: High base spell, up to 100, and reduce mana/rage cost. requires level 70.
• Bladed Staff: Have up to 104 base spell, without any drawback. Requires level 74.
• Gate Staff: Your endgame staff, which has the highest base spell in the game, up to 122. It comes with a massive increase in the mana/rage cost of spells, so use Runes of Shaping to reroll implicits, until you get a low roll in the “Increased mana cost” stat. Gate Staff requires character level 80.

Weapon Sub Stats:

You can settle on any base, and aim to craft the best sub-stats possible. For two-handed staff, there are no great suffixes to roll, so we focus on maximizing the output from the Prefixes. The following Prefixes are in order from highest damage impact to lowest:

1. Increased Cast Speed: It increases the rate at which you cast Spirit Thorns, also the number of Maelstrom stacks.
2. Increased Spell Crit Strike Chance: Due to the high base Crit chance from Spriggan companion buff, the Crit chance stat has more impact than Crit Multiplier. That’s true up to the point of reaching 100% Crit chance in the character sheet, which requires around 665% crit chance increase a stat.
3. Increased Crit Strike Chance: Increased Spell Crit chance has higher values per tier than generic increase to crit chance.
4. Increased Spell Damage: An additive modifier that comes from a lot of sources.
5. Increased Physical Damage: Another additive modifier that comes from a lot of sources.
6. Critical Strike Multiplier: Become much more impactful upon reaching 100% Crit Chance.

You can’t get more than two Prefixes, so we try to get the top two and max them to tier 5. However, if we get an exalted item with exalted tier (T6 ~ T7) Prefix from the lower damage ones, it’s most likely viable to use.

For suffixes, the most useful ones are Increased Stun Chance, Minion Physical Damage, or Minion Spell Damage. But they are not necessary.

Armour & Accessories

For Armour stats, we have these priorities by endgame (around level 70):

Suffixes:

1. 1500 Health
2. 40~60% Endurance
3. Some rolls in Endurance Threshold
4. +60% Resistances
5. Armour Shred Chance (On Amulet, and Gloves)

Prefixes:

1. +60 Attunement
2. Spell Critical Chance (on Amulet, Relic)
3. Crit Strike Multiplier While Transformed (on Body Armour, and Helmet)
4. + Levels to Skills that comes with increased spell damage:
   1. + levels to Maelstrom (on Body Armour).
   2. + levels to Entangling Roots (on Helmet).
   3. + Levels of Spriggan Form (on Relic).
5. Increased Cast Speed (on Gloves, and Relic)
6. Physical Penetration (on Amulet)
7. Increased Critical Strike Chance (on Gloves, Amulet, and Rings)
8. Increased Spell Damage (on Rings)
9. Increased Physical Damage (on Belt, and Rings)

Item bases

That covers most stats you need from a build, leaving only a few ones to pick from other sources. We need Leech for example, and we can only get that from some item bases such as Ancestral Crown in the Helmet slot, or Living Seed in Relic Slot. In the Body Armor slot pick either, Ancestral Garb for defense, or Greatwood Coat for offense. For Belt, pick Plated Belt for extra Armor, if not, then any other random Belt will do.

For Boots, I recommend using ones with resistances, to free up some suffixes for more impactful stats. So I’d pick either Heoborean Boots or Solarium Greaves for boots. While on Gloves you have a wide variety of great bases, as you can get resistance from either Crusader Gauntlets or Outcast Gloves at the cost of less Armor and no offensive stats. Engraved Gauntlets give high Armor and much-desired Endurance. While Noble Gloves give Cast Speed, and Solarum Bracers Crit Chance. So you have to balance your choice with the sub-stats you have.

Accessories have a similar item base variety, as you can pick between several defensive or offensive stats. Feel free to experiment. Note that we don’t use any “Crit Avoidance” stat on our equipment, because we get maximum Crit Avoidance from the passive tree.

Last Epoch Build Guide: Physical Spriggan Idols

Idols are a good way to augment your character, and for this particular build, we have several options to build towards. Either use a set of 2 Grand Heorot Idols(3×1), 2 Ornate Heorot Idols(4×1), and one Large Nomad Idol(1×3). Or a set of 2 Huge Nomad Idols(1×4), 2 Large Nomad Idols(1×3), and one Grand Heorot Idols(3×1). In both scenarios, you are left with a slot for one small Idol(1×1), and either Humble Eterran Idol(2×1), or Stout Lagonian Idol(1×2).

You can get these unique stats from idols, so pick idols that have one prefix and one suffix from the list:

Ornate Heorot Idol:

Prefixes:

• Chance to Bleed on Hit
• Armor
• Cast speed for Totems

Suffixes:

• Physical damage to you and your minions
• Increased Spell damage if you have an active totem

Grand Heorot Idol:

Prefixes:

• Spell damage while transformed
• Chance to gain Haste when you summon a totem

Suffixes:

• Increase Aspect of the Boar effect
• Physical damage to you and your minions
• Increase Spell damage if you have an active totem

Huge Nomad Idol

Prefixes:

• Critical Strike Chance
• Minion cooldown recovery speed (for more frequent healing from Spriggan companion)
• Stun Avoidance

Suffixes:

• Physical and poison damage
• Spell damage to you and your minions

Large Nomad Idol

Prefixes:

•  Chance to Cast Maelstrom every 5 seconds
• % Health

Suffixes:

• Elemental resistance while transformed
• Physical and poison damage
• Spell damage to you and your minions

Finally, for a small idol and 2×1 idol, just pick whatever resistances you are missing, or get an extra crit chance.

Last Epoch Physical Spriggan Build Guide Final Thoughts

This build doesn’t rely on any unique items to function, so it’s viable in all game modes. Whether you play in Multiplayer, single-player, or even solo, you can build Physical Spriggan with minimum effort. It’s a very solid build with strong defense and offense, and can clear most content up to the endgame. I recommend it as a starter build, that helps newer players.

You get high ranged damage, and combined with stun chance, you clear entire waves before they even get close. But the build isn’t lacking when enemies are in close range. Maelstrom’s damage over time is a great bonus to help clear melee content even faster.

However, Physical Spriggan does depend heavily on the Spriggan companion staying alive. This is because it gets a lot of buffs from the Companion, and both damage and survivability drop once the companion dies. In harder content, that has massive AOE, the companion may die. Your situation can become very dangerous quite quickly. So sometimes you need to sacrifice your offensive stats to increase your companion’s defenses.

Finally, Physical Spriggan is very friendly to Controller users. You spam one button to shoot an auto-aimed, piercing projectile. So you don’t have to worry too much when it comes to positioning or manual aiming.

Hopefully, this Last Epoch build gets you ready to take on the masses as a Physical Spriggan! If you enjoyed this build be sure to check out our Last Epoch: 10 Reasons To Be Excited For This Upcoming ARPG.

Be sure to check out our Last Epoch Multiplayer coverage, and keep an eye out for future Builds and Guides.