Hello everyone!
The base classes just received their first major combat rework.
Most class passives used to be exactly that: passive. A few percent more damage, some dodge, a little regeneration — numbers you chose once and rarely thought about again.
The new versions are designed around something different:
They ask you to play around them.
The New Passives
Warrior — Bulwark. Damage you take is stored, up to 150% of your maximum health. Your next damaging skill releases that stored punishment as bonus damage.
Most importantly, Bulwark carries between fights. Stored damage isn't lost when combat ends. It remains until you choose to spend it.
Mage — Focus. Finish a combat round without taking damage, and your next spell deals 50% more damage.
Rogue — Setup. Using a skill that costs less than 20 Mana leaves you Prepared. Your next skill costing 20 Mana or more deals double damage.
Cheap skills are no longer automatically obsolete just because you unlocked something stronger.
Paladin — Oath. Your role changes with your health. Above half health, you deal 20% more damage. At half health or below, you instead take 20% less damage.
Warlock — Siphon. While one of your damage-over-time effects is active on the enemy, damaging skills heal you for 20% of the damage they deal.
Druid — Attunement. Every different skill you use during a fight grants +8% damage, stacking as long as you keep varying your actions. Repeat a skill you've already used and the stack resets.
Bard — Finale. You deal 50% more damage to stunned enemies, giving your control skills a direct setup-and-payoff relationship with your attacks.
Ranger — Swiftness is now a toggle. Type swiftness to turn it on or off. You can use faster combat rounds when you want them and return to the normal pace whenever you don't, rather than being permanently locked into the faster timing.
Alchemist — Transmute itself is unchanged, but Liquid Gold Blast now accepts a gold amount:
liquid_gold_blast 5000
The more gold you commit, the more damage the attack deals, up to its maximum limit.
Cleric's Blessing remains unchanged for now.
You Can See What Your Passive Is Doing
These mechanics wouldn't be very useful if you had to keep their state in your head.
The Class Passives panel now updates live, showing things like your stored Bulwark damage, your current Attunement stack, whether your Rogue is Prepared, and which side of Paladin's Oath is currently active.
The combat log also announces the moments that actually matter: when Setup is consumed, when Focus triggers, or when an Attunement chain breaks.
It deliberately doesn't announce every tiny update. Combat is becoming more mechanically active, but I don't want the log buried underneath status messages.
Hunter's Mark Now Actually Marks Something
Hunter's Mark previously behaved as a buff on the Ranger, which never fit its name particularly well.
It now marks an enemy instead.
Your damaging skills deal 25% more damage to the marked target until it dies.
Why I'm Doing This Now
Several of you have told me that the classes feel too similar — that once you unlock your strongest damage skill, there's very little reason to keep using the abilities that came before it.
You were right.
For too many classes, unlocking a new skill effectively made an older one obsolete. There wasn't enough interaction between abilities, and there weren't enough reasons to change what you were doing from one round to the next.
These passive changes are the first step toward fixing that.
Rogue's cheap opener now helps set up an expensive finisher. Bard's stun creates a damage window. Druid is rewarded for using the breadth of the class instead of repeating its largest number. Warrior can deliberately carry punishment from one encounter into the next and decide when to cash it in.
I'm also aware of the other half of this problem: right now, combat is still too forgiving for many of these advantages to feel necessary.
Giving you more interesting tools only matters if the game gives you meaningful reasons to use them. Enemies need to create situations where defense matters, control matters, healing matters, timing matters, and simply pressing your highest-damage skill every round isn't always the best answer.
That part is coming too.
Hero Development Is Already Reaching the Base Game
There is another reason you're seeing this work now.
A lot of the architecture I've been building for Hero Classes is making richer combat mechanics possible across Portalborn as a whole.
Rather than keep all of those improvements hidden until the enormous Hero project — the classes, skills, monsters, equipment, encounters, and everything surrounding them — is completely finished, I've decided to start bringing compatible pieces into the base game as they become ready.
Hero Classes are still being built.
But I don't want that to mean players spend months hearing "the big update is still coming" while all of that work remains invisible.
Where the new architecture can make the existing classes, combat, portals, or progression better today, I'm going to use it.
That means this won't stop with passives. Active skills are getting another look, and enemies and combat difficulty will follow. The goal isn't simply to make every class stronger. It's to build a combat system where the choices each class offers actually matter.
The Level 1–100 game isn't disposable content that Hero Classes will eventually replace. It's the foundation every player begins with, and something you'll continue returning to while leveling additional classes and unlocking their Hero forms.
So while the larger Hero project continues, you should also start seeing more of its underlying improvements reaching the game you're already playing.
This passive rework is the first of them.
Thank you all, as always.
— TheHand