Dev Diary - Your Don't Pick Your Skills — You Earn Them

Building Your Mercs: The Skills You Earn, Not the Ones You Pick

In most RPGs you crack open the skill tree at level 1 and map your whole build before the first fight . With Mercenary Brotherhood your mercenaries earn their skills the hard way: by doing the thing, over and over, until the game decides they've earned the right to be offered it. The system is quietly watching how each merc actually fights — and it only ever puts on the table what they've trained for. Here's how skills really work.

Forged in Battle — The Game Remembers What You Do

Every meaningful thing a mercenary does on the field quietly builds hidden proficiency toward a matching skill. Land hits with a dagger and you're building toward Dagger Mastery. Strike from behind and you're building Assassination. Block with a shield and you're building Shield Wall. Cast a spell and you're building the matching school. None of it shows up on a bar — it accumulates in the dark.

Once a merc has done a thing enough — crossed a threshold you never see — that skill starts appearing in their level-up choices. A merc who spends ten battles knifing people from behind doesn't get told "here, have Assassination" and you don't buy skills with points. You qualify for them by living them.

Your Choices Are Yours Alone — Shaped by How You Fight

At every level-up, a merc is handed a small, slightly randomized hand of skill options — three of them (four under the right company boon). But that hand is dealt only from what they've actually earned. Two mercs can level up on the same turn and see completely different skills, because they fought different fights.

And it's gated hard by your gear and your habits. A soldier who always fights behind a shield racks up Shield Wall proficiency — and never a shred of dual-wield, because you only build dual-wield by landing off-hand hits. So the game will never once offer that soldier dual-wielding. Flip it around: a dagger killer who's never strapped on a shield will never be shown Shield Wall. Your build doesn't come from a plan — it grows out of your behavior.

Leveling a Skill — Ten Ranks To Build Your Tree

Having a skill is just the start. Each one levels through its own pool of battle XP, fed by the exact actions it took to earn it. Skills climb to rank 10 and here's also a per-battle cap on how much you gain, so you can't grind a single skill to the moon in one lucky fight; real mastery takes a career.

Every skill has it's own unique tree, and when you level that skill up you spend one of three skill picks: rank up something you already have, or learn something new.

• Passive traits stack stats and behaviors — bonus crit, bleed-on-hit, guaranteed opening crits, extra damage from behind.

• Ability traits grant whole new combat moves — a teleport-behind strike, a finisher, a bleeding flurry.

Each trait has its own ranks on top of that, so even a single skill's tree is a web of choices. No two mercs ever fill the same one the same way — and there's always more tree than there are levels to spend on it.

What Does This Look Like?

Meet Snik — a goblin you drafted as an Assassin. This is the road that turned him from a nervous recruit with a knife into the thing your enemies' archers have nightmares about.

Level 1.

Snik shows up fast, frail, and mean

an iron dagger, leather armor, and three starting skills — Dagger Mastery, Assassination, and Light Armor. He acts before almost anyone and he hits soft spots.

You do the obvious thing

put him on the flank and tell him to stay the hell out of the close up fights.

The early fights. Snik does what assassins do — slips around the line and puts his blade in backs. Every backstab feeds Assassination. Every dagger hit feeds Dagger Mastery. Every swing he ducks feeds a proficiency he doesn't even have a skill for yet. You're not planning any of this. You're just playing him like a goblin with a knife, and the game is taking notes.

The midgame. Now the actions pay off. The game starts offering Snik skills he earned by playing this way — Flanker (he always has an ally pinning the target) and Dodge Master (nothing ever seems to land on him). The options on his level-up screen are a mirror of how you've used him.

His skill tree, near the end. Here's Snik's Dagger Mastery tree as he closes in on mastery:

Knife Work is maxed (faster attacks, more crit). Vital Strike is maxed (more crit, more damage, bonus to-hit from behind). Death from Shadow means his first strikes each battle are guaranteed criticals. And on the ability side he's taken Throat Slash — a finisher that does up to +75% against a wounded target — and Shadow Strike, which teleports him behind a target and opens them up.

The finished article. Here's his sheet at level 10:

Steam post image

Snik opens a battle by vanishing behind the enemy backline, guts their archer with a guaranteed crit before the first turn properly begins, and slips back into the dark before anyone thinks to turn around.

His weakness is the price of all that: he's glass. Catch him in the open and he folds like wet paper. He needs the chaos of a flank to do his work; drop him into a clean shieldwall grind with nowhere to slip and he's just a fast goblin with a knife. So you don't send him to hold a line. You send him to end the fights before there's a line to hold.

And here's the thing — you never built Snik up front. You fought him into existence, one backstab at a time, and the game just kept up.

Skills To Learn

There are currently 45 different hand crafted skills and skill trees. These may change before Early Access release. They include:

• 8 weapons specific
• such as Dagger Mastery or Swordsmanship.
• 5 ranged combat
• such as Skirmisher and Marksmanship
• 10 defense related
• such as Iron Skin, Shield Wall and Endurance
• 10 magic schools
• such as Holy Magic and Blood Magic.
• 2 armor proficiencies
• Light Armor and Heavy armor
• 4 specialist skills

these are more rare but provide more unique gameplays like Tinkerer for gnome gadget specialists and Performance for bards.

Mercenary Brotherhood is coming to Steam as Early Access this Fall 2026.