v0.10.7 — Later skill ranks hit harder

A balance release. The skill tree’s ranks used to be perfectly flat — the twentieth point in a skill did exactly as much as the first. That’s changed.

Highlights

Escalating rank steps

Every rank you put into a skill now counts for more than the last one, in brackets: ranks 1–8 are worth one step each, 9–16 one and a half, 17–24 two, and 25+ two and a half. A skill’s power is the sum of the steps behind it, so a maxed rank-20 skill sits at 28 steps instead of 20 — roughly 40 % more effect than before at the cap.

In practice: Strike’s damage multiplier at rank 20 goes from 2.00× to 2.40× your weapon, Hunter’s Mark from +1000 Attack Rating to +1400, Iron Skin’s Defense Rating likewise. Kill speed on-level is around 15 % faster from level 40 onwards; the first 25 levels are almost exactly where they were.

The brackets keep going past the hard cap, which makes +skill-rank gear far more interesting: the ranks it hands you land in the 2.0 and 2.5 step brackets. A rank-25 skill is at 38.5 steps — nearly double a rank-20 one was before this patch.

Utility skills kept where they were

Not everything got 40 % stronger. The utility side — Sunder Armor, Crippling Strike, Blinding Hit, Vampire Grasp, Weakening Touch, War Cry, and the passives Apex Predator, Keen Eye, Iron Resilience, Shield Mastery, Tempered Soul, Wrath, Bloodlust, Retribution and Last Stand — was rescaled so its rank-20 value is unchanged. These skills were already pulling their weight; they now ramp a little slower on the way up and keep growing past rank 20 instead of jumping at the cap.

Heavy Strike’s crushing blow, retuned

Heavy Strike’s crushing-blow chance was 30 % at rank 20 and would have become absurd under the new brackets, so it was rebuilt around a fixed cap value: 20 % at rank 20, climbing to about 27.5 % at rank 25 with gear ranks. Heavy Strike gains the least from this patch by design — it was the strongest boss-killer in the game and now sits closer to the rest of the tree while keeping its niche.

Also in this update

• The Skills tab explains the bracket rule in its hint line, and every skill tooltip preview already showed the new numbers.
• Fixed: Rend’s bleed wasn’t counted in the skill damage shown in your hero stats box, making the skill look weaker than it is. The bleed is a share of the physical damage of every swing, so it now sits in the per-swing total.