Adding New Abilities to the Game

Abilities

New AOE Skills:

AOE skill have been added to the game!

These skills are now AOE skills that hit all enemies:

Death Rain, Inferno, Death Wave, Blizzard, Flame Wave, Frozen Burst, Glacial Wave, Solar Wrath, Sunburst, Purifying Flame, Psychic Storm, Force Wave, Acid Nova, Dissolution Wave, Sonic Wave, Cacophony Nova, Avatar of Slaughter, Whirlwind Slash

New Ability Mechanics:

Added new ability mechanics to make some skills more unique:

Execute: instantly kills enemies below an HP threshold (Perfect Blade, God Shot, Executioner's Blow, Assassin's End, Oblivion Strike, Graviton Collapse, Absolute Corrosion, Mind Annihilation, World Ender Strike)

Life-steal: Drain Soul and Withering Touch now return HP equal to a percentage of damage dealt

Armour shred: permanently reduce enemy defense for the duration of the fight

Status effects: abilities across all damage types now apply contextually appropriate statuses (Burn, Frostbite, Shocked, Bleed, Poisoned, etc.)

Stun on hit: Lance Charge now stuns on impact

Skills

Staffwork Chain:

The full staffwork chain now grants Attack bonuses. Descriptions updated to remove references to magic output.

Merge Skill Balance Pass:

All 61 merge skills have been audited and corrected.

Merged skills should always result in a skill that provides bonuses equal to or greater than the sum of all sacrificed skills. This was not the case with some skills and has been corrected.

Weapon merges: proficient bladework, advanced bladework, and expert bladework all had Attack well below the sum of their inputs. Legendary bladeskill had entirely wrong stats. Legendary polearm mastery was at half its input sum.

Weaponskill chain

advanced, expert, master, and legendary weaponskill all had Crit and/or Attack below the sum of their inputs. Following the staffwork correction, these have been recalculated with staffwork now contributing Attack rather than Magic.

Updated values

Advanced 0.75 Atk / 0.11 Crit, Expert 1.15 Atk / 0.15 Crit, Master 1.45 Atk / 0.24 Crit, Grandmaster/Legendary 2.50 Atk / 0.28 Crit.

Legendary skills: warlord's soul, void presence, iron constitution, treasure hunter, life weaver, earth reader, wraith walk, reality weave, shadow marksman, and arcane conductor all had one or more stats below the sum of their inputs.

Magic merges: chromatic and tri-elemental chains had Crit under the sum of their lightning, sound, and frostfire inputs. Plague death magic, toxic corrosion, plaguerot arts, and the decay chain all now correctly carry the loot bonus that flows from poison magic.

UI & Menus

Skill Evolution Merge Options Now Show Correctly:

Fixed a bug where merge options were only displayed when selecting the first skill listed in the merge's requirements. For example: with Basic Axework and Basic Toughness both at level 10, selecting Basic Axework correctly offered the Proficient Berserker Strength merge, but selecting Basic Toughness did not, even though both skills were ready.

Since merge definitions were only listed under one of the required skills (not both), the option was invisible from the other side. The fix replaces this with a global scan of all skills in the skill tree, surfacing any merge where the selected skill is a required component and all other prerequisites are met. This affected all 61 merges in the game.

Skill Evolution Menu: Tooltips Removed:

The "Evolve" submenu previously showed a tooltip next to each skill listing its possible evolution and merge targets (e.g. `evolve→proficient swordsmanship merge→proficient bladework`). These tooltips were misleading because they displayed all possible merge outcomes from the skill's definition regardless of whether the player actually had the other required skills. The tooltips have been removed. The list now shows only the skill names cleanly; available options are revealed after selecting a skill to evolve.