Pantheon postpones its Combat & Progression wipe as Mastery hits testing

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has postponed the character wipe that was to accompany its Combat & Progression update, with chief executive Chris Rowan saying the update is not ready and the studio does not want to risk shipping something that could force another wipe soon afterwards.

Rowan said players should expect eleven classes with Mastery on the Public Test Realm by July 17, with Monk and Necromancer arriving a little later, and production servers following soon after. He asked players to log into the test realm, try the classes and mastery and give feedback, and said to expect several weeks of updating, testing and tuning before the studio wipes the production servers and releases the updated Combat & Progression there. New target dates for the wipe, the update and the Badia de Cara zone would be published as soon as possible.

Mastery reaches the test realm

The same patch shipped the first iteration of the Mastery UI along with mastery options for Warrior, Paladin and Dire Lord, with more classes to follow in subsequent weeks. The team said the week’s testing was aimed at whether the system functions — whether the UI elements behave, whether nodes and upgrades work properly, and what breaks when players interact with it — rather than at how good the trees are, since those remain under heavy development. The interface and node layouts are explicitly a work in progress, with some branches visually busy with connection lines the team expects to refine.

How Mastery works

Mastery unlocks at level 5. Players reach it by opening any ability in their Codex and clicking the Mastery button, which the team noted is currently a full-screen experience, advising players to be somewhere safe before opening it. Characters earn one Mastery Point per level and each node costs one point, meaning a character has five points to spend when the system first unlocks.

Nodes in the center of the array empower core class abilities and allow their effects to scale as points are spent in the class branches, though the team said that scaling was still being worked on and might not function in the early build. The two class branches on either side are divided into rings: the first opens at level 5, further rings unlock at higher levels, and each ring requires a minimum number of points already spent in that branch. Individual nodes can carry their own prerequisites.

For testing, players can reset their mastery and re-spend points at any time for free. Once the system is finalized, resets will require visiting a specific type of NPC found in most cities, and the team said their services will not be cheap. Looking further ahead, the studio listed refinements to the Mastery UI and the Codex, mastery for the remaining classes with healers next in line, and General Mastery coming online once Class Mastery is finalized, along with ways to earn additional points to spend on it.