Grimlore Games has released update 0.7.0 for Titan Quest 2, adding Spirit as the early access action RPG's sixth Mastery. As in the original Titan Quest, a character's class is a combination of two Masteries, so every addition widens the set of pairings available to players.
The Spirit Mastery is built around summoning, and expands on the basic summons the game added earlier this year. PCGamesN reports that it carries ten active skills and 26 passives, more than any Mastery released so far, with options to manipulate shades, harvest souls, and sacrifice the player character’s own life force for extra energy and power.
What the Spirit Mastery brings
The entry-level summons are the Eidolon Guards, spirits of fallen heroes that are strong but short-lived by default. Players can extend them by spending their own Life total, or by triggering effects when the Guards are summoned or destroyed. A heavier option, the spellcaster Athanekros, can be specialised into a backline damage dealer or a support unit, and its health can be traded away for more power.
Supporting those minions is the Deathward Beam, a damaging skill that can be specialised into a heal and buff usable on summons and on other players in co-op, and Soul Vortex, an area effect that drags nearby enemies toward its centre and can be modified to weaken their resistances or buff allies standing inside it.
Grimlore described the Mastery’s wider passive layout as the "first step towards a larger change when it comes to our passives," and said the approach will be rolled out gradually to the five existing Masteries. The three-feat restriction on each passive has also been lifted, which the studio said should reduce cases where a build direction effectively pre-determined a player’s feats.
Crafting, movement and balance
Update 0.7.0 also introduces basic crafting. Players can replace an affix with a random alternative from an item’s eligible pool, reroll the values on an affix, add affixes to an item carrying fewer than its maximum, or give a favoured epic item a one-time level boost. Each further craft on the same item costs more than the last, so cheap early improvements give way to waiting for drops, with resource farming making perfect rolls a late-game pursuit.
If it becomes too easy to control, the chase for items itself moves into the background, which hurts the core gameplay of hunting for exciting loot. If it is too hard to control outcomes, it becomes a very unsatisfying and grindy experience.
Base movement speed has been increased in response to complaints that the game felt slow, particularly early on, though Grimlore said it wanted to preserve the sense of progression that comes from investing in movement speed through gear and builds.
The rest of the patch notes cover balance work across the other five Masteries. Cooldown reduction affixes are more common on gear, drop rates from non-boss elites have been improved, and the base multiplier on critical and super-critical hits has been reduced slightly. The Doom and Lifesteal mechanics have been rebalanced, and many abilities can now reserve Life instead of Spirit. Build 0.7.0 is live now.
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