Until tonight, the Penitent knew five tricks: a basic combo, a whirlwind, a big cleave, a lunge, and a healing circle. The talent trees promised more — nine more actives were designed into them — but pressing those buttons did nothing, because the skills existed only as tooltip math. This round was a forge session: build them ALL, then keep going.
The nine promised skills are real now. Warfare got its execute — a slow, murderous overhead for finishing what the combo started — and its capstone, a single colossal blow with the hardest hit-feel in the game. Sanctity became a genuine caster kit: hurl a burning censer that bursts in embers where it lands, throw a lance of light that flies until it finds a skull, raise a moonlit ward that slows and sears whatever crosses it, and detonate everything around you in rings of gold. Mortification now trades in its true currency — your own blood: open a vein for a surge of resource, wreathe yourself in pain that makes every strike heavier the more you have bled, and, when everything is going wrong at once, immolate a third of your remaining life in a crimson blast that spares nothing nearby.
Then the forge kept going and invented three more. A branding strike that leaves its mark smoldering — the damage arrives over the seconds after the blow, not in it. A toggled stance where your censer swings lit at your belt and the smoke itself burns anything that walks in it — you keep moving, it keeps burning, and it drinks your resource until you snuff it. And a leap: genuinely airborne, over the heads of whatever is between you and the landing circle, ending in a slam that staggers everything it reaches.
That last group needed real machinery, and the machinery is the story: projectiles, thrown arcs, self-detonations, timed buffs, toggles, damage-over-time and an aerial arc are all engine shapes now, not one-off scripts. The next skill of any of those types is a dozen lines of data.
Under the hood, the round also built its own safety net. A new dev bench in the test arena assigns any skill to any hotbar slot in one click, and the automated combat test grew from 25 checks to 63 — every new skill gets cast, verified, and screenshotted by a bot before it's allowed to exist. The bot earned its keep immediately: it caught a burn effect whose ticks silently rounded to zero on starter weapons, and a stance you couldn't switch off because its own cooldown blocked the off-press. Both fixed before a human ever felt them.
Seventeen skills, twelve distinct ways of casting them, three new talent-tree nodes — all landed as a baseline awaiting a proper feel pass. The trees finally cash the checks they wrote.