Passive Skills

Passive skills give permanent bonuses while you have points invested. No cast, no cost, no condition beyond the one written on the node.

Passives sit in the side columns of your class’s three skill trees, next to the actives, and some trees end in a passive capstone in row 5 — rows unlock at hero level 1 / 5 / 10 / 20 / 30 and a node needs rank 1 in the node straight above it. The nodes and their exact values at rank 1 and rank 20 live on the class pages:

• Berserker Skills
• Duelist Skills
• Sentinel Skills
• Monk Skills

A few passives carry a hand requirement (Shield Wall wants a shield, Ambidexterity two weapons — see Skill Trees) and lie dormant while you hold something else.

Per-step values

Rank 1 is the passive’s base value; every rank after it adds the per-step amount, and later ranks add more. Magnitudes therefore scale with the rank’s accumulated effect steps, not with the raw rank:

value = base + S(rank) × perStep

Ranks past the first are worth 1 step each up to rank 8, 1.5 through rank 16, 2 through rank 24, and 2.5 beyond — so S(1) = 0, S(16) = 19, S(20) = 27 and S(25) = 37.5. The full bracket table lives on Skill Trees. Every value is authored as its rank-1 and rank-20 card numbers; the steps fill in the ranks between.

Counts are the exception: Rampage’s stack cap equals the raw rank and each stack is a flat +1.5%, so it stays linear.

(Wrath, Apex Predator, Rampage and the other damage passives all feed the single outgoing physical multiplier detailed under Class Resources.)

Rank cap. Each passive caps at rank 20 in spent points, with the same level gate every node uses — maximum rank = hero level − node level + 1. That cap is on investment only: “+x to <Class> Skills” on an amulet, and the “+x to All Skills” of a few uniques, raise the effective rank past 20, and those extra ranks sit in the richest brackets. Tempered Soul runs from +0.75% to +20% all resistances; with +2 on top of rank 20 it runs at rank 22, S(22) = 31 steps: 0.75% + 31 × 0.713% ≈ 22.9% instead of the +20% a maxed hardpoint build gets.