Thorns is the new damage stat introduced with Patch 1.1. It can be found on gear or rolled for at the blacksmith.

Initially, it works as a reflect damage where you must be attacked. Later in Bounties you can scale thorns much higher. In Agony the damage archetype fully comes online.

Thorns isn't physical or elemental damage so enemies can only mitigate the damage with reduced damage taken. Conversely, we can only scale thorns so high on the character sheet since there are limited ways to scale thorns damage. The rest is using your team to buff damage.

These are the ways to scale thorns damage:

• Thorns attribute on gear
  
• Thorns passive from class and ascendancy
  
• Thorns specific items
  
• Recoil enchant (scale defenses)
  
• Reprisal enchant (scale hits/sec including damaging ailment applications)
  
• Debuffing the enemy to take more damage
  
• Debuffing the enemy's attack speed (according to code digging done by a discord user)

Once you have the Recoil enchant, you can mouse over your character sheet to see how close to the conversion cap you are. The closer you are to 1200%, the better. If you are close, using flasks in a fight can get you there.



Here is a sample character sheet with up to Agony gear and no divines. There are better options for scaling once you can get higher tier gear. I am scaling attack speed to make use of the Reprisal enchant. The defensive attributes are to scale conversion through the Recoil enchant.



This is a sample DPS chart from a thorns character at endgame.

I didn't give you all the answers here, so experiment by yourselves and see how far you can take it if you like the play style.

My thorns-based team has cleared all content so it is possible to do all endgame content with this. A thorns team is also fantastic for farming content since it is hit based and doesn't rely on DoTs.

Is it the best DPS? Possibly? We have reached some absurd team DPS numbers on the Discord while testing. Think upwards of 50T+ in team DPS.