Skill Trees

Every class has three skill trees of its own, and you only ever see yours. Each tree mixes the three kinds of node: main skills (your attack), actives (casts the hero fires for you) and passives (always on). The nodes themselves, with their exact values at rank 1 and rank 20, live on the class pages:

• Berserker Skills — Slayer, Ravager, Bloodrager
• Duelist Skills — Bladedancer, Rogue, Fencer
• Sentinel Skills — Guardian, Crusader, Juggernaut
• Monk Skills — Elementalist, Mender, Iron Fist

The Skills panel shows one tree per tab; the tab buttons carry the tree names.

Reading a tree

A tree is a 3 × 5 grid. Each row is a level gate — rows unlock at hero level 1 / 5 / 10 / 20 / 30, shown in the column on the left — and arrows run straight down a column from a node to the one it unlocks.

• A node needs rank ≥ 1 in the node straight above it. The top node of a column has no prerequisite and only waits for its level.
• The centre column holds the main skills; the side columns hold the actives and passives, and row 5 holds the tree’s capstone.
• One node, Tempered Soul, is shared: the Sentinel finds it in Juggernaut, the Monk in Mender.
• The shape says the type: main skills are squares in a gold frame, actives rounded squares, passives circles. The number on a node’s corner is its rank, and a + marks every node a skill point can go into right now.

Spend skill points to raise a node’s rank: one point per hero level, plus one for every region reward you claim. Per-node cap is rank 20, with one extra gate: maximum rank = hero level − node level + 1. A node that unlocks at level 20 reaches rank 1 at level 20 and rank 20 at level 39.

Main skills

A main skill is your attack. Pick one with the ○ button on its corner (it shows when you point at the node; on a phone, tap the node and press Set as Active) — its damage multiplier and attack-speed profile become the swing your hero repeats every interval. Only one is active at a time; until you learn one, the hero swings plainly (Strike, 100% weapon damage). The first main skill you learn is picked for you.

Synergy. Every main skill’s card has a Synergy block: one row per other main skill of its tree with the bonus it gives you right now, and the rate in the block’s title — e.g. Berserk: Synergy · 2.5% per rank, Bloodletting +25%. Each rank you hold in those other main skills adds that much to the picked skill’s scaling value — its weapon damage, or the elemental / poison share for the skills that carry one (Ember Strike, Stormbrand, Cataclysm, Venom Strike). Bloodletting at rank 10 lifts Berserk by 10 × 2.5% = +25% weapon damage. Main skills of other trees add nothing, so a tree rewards going deep.

Elemental and poison shares are taken from your weapon’s damage as its item card shows it (its own Enhanced Damage, flat damage and your class bonus included), times your Strength bonus — the same +0.25% per point your physical hits get. Buffs and passives don’t touch them; element % gear and Attunement do.

Actives switch on the moment you learn them, with a sensible default trigger rule — see Active Skills. Passives are always on — see Passive Skills. What actives cost depends on your class’s resource: Rage, Valor or Enlightenment (Class Resources).

Hand requirements

Some nodes only work in the hand configuration they were designed for: Cleave and Executioner want a two-hander; Thousand Cuts and Ambidexterity two weapons; Shield Strike, Aegis, Smite, Judgement, Bastion, Shield Charge and Shield Wall a shield; Cataclysm, Hundred Palms and Guarded Stance a staff.

The lock is soft. Nothing stops you learning the node or wearing whatever you like, but while the requirement is unmet:

• a gated main skill silently falls back to the plain swing (your choice is preserved, and a shield that breaks counts as no shield),
• a gated active or passive contributes nothing.

Gated nodes carry a small badge on their corner in the Skills panel (2H, DW, SH, ST) and say what they need in their tooltip.

Respeccing. Reset Skills (behind the Respec button in the Skills panel) sets every learned skill back to rank 0 and hands every earned point back (hero level − 1, plus the claimed region rewards). It is free up to hero level 12 and costs gold after that:

respecCost = RESPEC_GOLD_BASE + RESPEC_GOLD_PER_LEVEL × heroLevel
           = 5,000 + 500 × heroLevel          (0 while heroLevel ≤ RESPEC_FREE_MAX_LEVEL = 12)

That is 11,500 g at level 13, 20,000 g at level 30, 30,000 g at level 50 and 54,500 g at level 99. The option stays greyed out while you have nothing to reset or can’t afford it. Your setup is remembered: relearning an active skill brings back its lines in the Cast Order (their conditions, on/off state and places), and relearning your old main skill selects it again. Exploration Skills have their own respec at half the price. Changing your class is a separate, free one-off below level 10 — see Classes.

Rank scaling

Rank 1 is the skill’s base value — the number the node starts at, with nothing added yet. Every rank after the first adds the skill’s per-rank amount on top, and later ranks add more than early ones: each rank past the first is worth a number of effect steps.

value = base + S(rank) × perStep

S(rank) is the sum of the step multipliers of ranks 2..rank — rank 1 adds nothing, so S(1) = 0:

Ranks	Steps per rank
1 – 8	×1.0
9 – 16	×1.5
17 – 24	×2.0
25+	×2.5

So S(1) = 0, S(8) = 7, S(16) = 19, S(20) = 27, S(25) = 37.5. A maxed skill is worth noticeably more than 20 flat ranks — the last few points into a skill are the strongest ones you can buy, which is exactly the intent. Every value is authored as its rank-1 and rank-20 card numbers; the steps fill in the ranks between.

Counts and fixed chances climb one flat slice per rank — stack caps, block-charge caps and the like. Buff and debuff durations don’t scale at all (buffs and Taunt 30 s, the other debuffs until the enemy dies). Only magnitudes ride the steps.

Worked example — Crush. At rank 1 the multiplier is its 1.55 base (155% weapon damage). At rank 20 it’s 305%: the 150 points between the two are spread over the 27 steps, 5.56% each. Every class page shows both endpoints for every node it owns.

Effective rank can exceed 20

The per-point cap is rank 20, but “+To Skills” gear stacks on top of it. Amulets roll “+x to <Class> Skills”, which raises every node of that class’s three trees (see Affixes) — on a hero of another class the affix is simply dead. A handful of uniques still carry “+x to All Skills”. The game reads an effective rank of spent rank + gear ranks with no clamp back to 20, and the ranks past 20 sit in the richest brackets: a rank-20 Crush with +3 behaves as rank 23, which is S(23) = 33 steps, i.e. 155% + 33 × 5.56% ≈ 338%.

Only the points you spend are capped; itemisation pushes past it. When gear adds ranks, the skill card shows the effective rank with your spent points beside it, e.g. Rank 23 (20 hardpoints).