For a long time Dreadmark's combat read better than it looked. A skill did the right thing, but half the kit borrowed the same generic swing, a fire bolt and an ice bolt were the same sphere wearing different paint, and a debuff that landed on the enemy showed up as a light on you. This round was the big juice pass, and its job was to make every spell finally look like the thing it is.
Everything animates now. Sixteen skills that used to reuse the basic swing got their own cast gestures, four unused animation clips were brought to life, and Shield Throw finally, actually, throws the shield. The moment-to-moment of casting reads like intent instead of a placeholder.
One clean palette runs across the whole game now, and colour tells you the element: fire is orange, cold is blue, lightning is white-violet, and poison is green. Every strike takes the colour of the element behind it, so a converted fire slash looks like fire. Element-converted projectiles fly the right bolt instead of a tinted ball, and the eleven conversion runes that recolour a skill now actually recolour it.
Effects also land where they belong. Buffs show on your body. Freeze, shock, and poison finally show on the foe who's suffering them as well as on the caster. The barrier got a proper rework, with an actual rock mesh and a shield-energy shimmer in place of a flat wall, and a new lightning rune ricochets, arcing from target to target down a pack. Poison even reads its own depth now, and afflicted things pop when they die.
The numbers are untouched, so a skill still does exactly what it did before. What changed is whether you can feel it working, which turns out to be most of what makes a fight satisfying. Dreadmark plays the same this round, and it finally looks like it means it.