The Weight of the Blow

Bludgeon is the school of maces, hammers, and clubs: the crowd-control melee tree, the strength scaler, the one weapon line whose special attacks cannot be parried and cannot be reduced to a glancing hit. Almost nobody knows that last part, because it is written nowhere a player can read it. The forums called this the worst melee school in the game in 2018, and its most persistent advocate stopped filing bug reports in 2019 with none of them answered. Then a build the community calls the earth bruiser quietly happened, and today Bludgeon is the most cast melee school on the live server: 471,616 casts in thirty days, ahead of Blades, from four hundred fewer players. The most committed minority in the game is playing a school whose masterwork switch is dead, whose dispel formula carries a one-character typo, whose capstone riders roll a literal zero percent chance for anyone unspecialized, and whose greatest strength appears in no tooltip. This page measures the school against every game that kept a blunt weapon worth swinging, and proposes twenty-nine changes. They do not rescue a dead school. They pay a debt to a living one.

Executive summary

In 1997 Ultima Online gave the mace two jobs: every hit chewed the target's armor, and every hit drained the stamina that governed their swings. The armor-chewing half bred so much resentment, losing a fight to a macer meant paying for it twice, that no serious game ever shipped durability damage again. But every blunt school that survived the next thirty years kept exactly one of three replacement finishes: armor penetration (World of Warcraft's 2008 Mace Specialization, Elder Scrolls Online's maul passive, Warhammer's Weapon Skill), a break-bar economy (Guild Wars 2 defiance, Diablo 4 stagger, Path of Exile 2 stun buildup), or resource attrition (Monster Hunter's Exhaust, the direct heir of UO's stamina drain). Shroud's Bludgeon school has none of the three. What it has instead is remarkable and completely unadvertised: every bludgeon special is coded so that it cannot be parried and cannot be downgraded to a partial hit, the in-engine version of the oldest truth in armored fighting, that you cannot shield yourself from momentum.

Thirty days of live telemetry, a census of every character ever made, the school's complete formula set, and seven years of forum record put the school's condition in three clusters:

1. The trust gap. Two shipped masterwork bonuses raise a stat no formula reads: crafting them does nothing. Break Armor's buff-strip chance carries a one-character typo, a plus where its twin has a multiply, pinning it near 11 percent forever. Ground Pound's three crowd-control riders roll a chance of 50 times your specialization: a literal zero for the unspecialized majority, with zero-second durations behind it, and the tooltip advertises all three anyway. The school doc and the knowledge base claim Break Weapon destroys equipment; it has never destroyed anything. And the school's genuine identity, the unparryable special, is printed nowhere.
2. The identity gap. The genre gave every surviving blunt school a finish: pierce armor, break bosses, or starve stamina. Bludgeon got none, while Blades got armor-ignore on Rend. Its steroid, Berserk, charges beginners 50 damage avoidance and refunds the penalty only as you specialize, the exact inversion of how a mastery should work, and only 46 of the school's hundred-plus active casters ever press it. Its two cross-school combos are a controlled experiment in discoverability: Splintering Strike outcasts two of the school's own runes, Titan Smash has seven users, and the only difference is that nothing in any interface hints either exists.
3. The fairness gap. The school's crowd control lives in a paradox of the game's own making. Stuns were once made fully binding on live and reverted within a week when PvP demanded its jump-escape back; meanwhile a chained-knockdown build could hold Lich bosses on the ground indefinitely. Every later system, undead resisting 70 percent of crowd control, hover immunity, shield's Bolster Balance, was a patch on that original sin, and each one quietly taxed this school hardest. Knockdown silently does nothing to players, the two stuns share one hidden immunity timer, and no rule of the whole arrangement is published anywhere.

The deal that runs through all twenty-nine proposals: Tier 1 makes the school honest, dead switches wired, typos fixed, riders real at mastery zero, tooltips that print the school's true strengths and true zeros. Tier 2 deepens the kit it already has: a steroid without the hazing ritual, a knockback with a job, combos you can discover, Break stacks that open crit windows. Tier 3 imports the genre's verdicts: armor penetration, bonus damage to controlled targets, focus attrition, crush damage against the brittle dead, deterministic concussion. Tier 4 is itemization and the owner's two open decisions, stated with numbers and no promises. First the hammer tells the truth; then the hammer gets its finish.

Twenty-seven of the twenty-nine need no server work at all: this school's combat runs entirely on client-side formula data. The two flagged rows are owner decisions, not deployments.

The school we have

Twelve skills on the Combat tab: seven castable runes and five innates in a tree rooted at Bludgeon Combat. The innates raise stun effectiveness, weapon damage, and raw Strength while a bludgeon is in hand; the specialization feeds a mastery multiplier that touches twelve different formulas. The seven runes are the kit: a stunning strike, two debuff stackers that can also strip a buff, a push, a floor, a steroid, and a 360-degree slam. On paper it is the completest crowd-control kit any weapon school owns. In the data, half of it runs on formulas that quietly do less than they say.

[ Bludgeon Combat ] ................... (1)
├─ Crushing Blow .................... (2)
│  ├─ Knockback ..................... (3)
│  └─ Knockdown ..................... (4)
├─ Break Weapon ..................... (5)
│  └─ Break Armor ................... (5)
├─ Stunner
│  ├─ Crusher
│  └─ Breaker
│     └─ Bludgeon Specialization .... (6)
└─ (Break Armor 40 + Knockdown 40)
   └─ Berserk ....................... (7)
      └─ Ground Pound ............... (8)

combos, shown in no interface ......... (9)
  Splintering Strike = Crushing Blow + Stone Fist
  Titan Smash        = Knockback + Body Slam

Damage: 14-31 crushing
Slows attack speed .... 0% chance
Slows movement 10% .... 0% chance
Stuns for 0 seconds ... 0% chance

no line: cannot be parried
no line: cannot be glanced
no line: undead resist 70% of
the slam's crowd control

• 1The hard-coded gate. Bludgeon Combat is the only school gate special-cased in engine code rather than data: its level feeds the school's attack bonus through a hand-written switch. Harmless today, a trap for every future edit. Card S7 documents it.
• 2The workhorse. Crushing Blow, 102,885 casts in thirty days, the school's most pressed button. It carries a meaningless stack count on its damage effect, and its stun shares one hidden immunity window with Ground Pound's. Cards S6, S16.
• 3The push without a job. Knockback is the school's least cast damage rune, because launching a target four meters away from your own melee party is usually a favor to the enemy. Card S11.
• 4The floor, for some. Knockdown: 98,882 casts, a cooldown that specialization cuts nearly in half, and a flag that makes it silently do nothing to players in PvP. Two masterwork bonuses for it shipped years ago; no formula has ever read the stat they raise. Cards S1, S22, S27.
• 5The twins with different math. Break Weapon's buff-strip chance is 10 times (1 + mastery): it doubles as you specialize. Break Armor's is 10 plus (1 + mastery): a typo pins it near 11 percent forever. Both apply stacking debuffs that no target can dismiss, and both pierce the undead crowd-control wall because they are debuffs, not control. Cards S2, S13, S15.
• 6The multiplier that gates. Bludgeon Specialization's mastery stat appears in twelve formulas in three different shapes: honest multipliers, penalty divisors, and dead-at-zero gates. The school converts 55 percent of its learners into specialists, mid-pack, and the spec is quietly load-bearing for half the kit. Card S14.
• 7The hazing ritual. Berserk at mastery zero: minus 50 damage avoidance for a modest damage buff. The penalty shrinks as you specialize, punishing exactly the players still building. 46 of the school's hundred-plus tracked casters ever press it. Cards S9, S10.
• 8The capstone that rolls zero. Ground Pound's slow, attack-speed, and stun riders all roll a chance of 50 times mastery, with durations that also multiply by mastery: zero chance, for zero seconds, for every unspecialized caster. Reported with video in April 2019; never answered. Cards S5, S23.
• 9The invisible combos. Splintering Strike, the Earth pairing, is cast 39,791 times a month and outcasts two of the school's own runes. Titan Smash, the Heavy Armor pairing, is cast 739 times by seven players. Identical mechanic, identical interface presence: none. Card S12.

Who actually plays it

Two instruments, read together: the live cast log answers what people press, the character census answers what people committed to. First, the melee weapon schools side by side, thirty days of live server:

Live server, 30 days ending August 14, 2026, out of 8,868,630 total skill casts. Blades has four hundred more players who ever learned it; Bludgeon out-casts it anyway. Fewer players, swinging more.

Same window. Caster counts are lower bounds from a 10,000-event random sample, except Berserk and Titan Smash, which are exact because their full month fit inside the sample. The school's union is at least 97 distinct casters in 30 days, at least 65 in the last 7.

The census agrees with the commitment story: 517 players ever learned the school, 286 of them hold specialization 80 or higher, a 55 percent conversion that sits mid-pack among all adventuring trees, and 119 of those specialists were active in the last year. The canonical pairings are Earth magic (83 players, the earth bruiser, backed mechanically by Splintering Strike), Heavy Armor (62, the Titan Smash pairing nobody knows exists), Taming (48), and Tactics (44).

How a swing becomes an effect

Every proposal on this page plugs into one pipeline. A rune declares its equipment requirement and its effects as formula strings; the equipment gate checks your right hand; the formula engine resolves tokens like mastery and skill level; the effect dispatcher applies damage typed with capability bits and stat changes routed into per-target channels; and the tooltip renders what the formulas claim. The cards below are interventions at every stage:

flowchart LR
  A["Rune data files
S2 S5 S6 S11 S13 S23"] --> B["Equipment gate
right hand only
preview quirk: S8"]
  B --> C["Formula engine
mastery in 12 formulas: S14
new tokens: S18 S19"]
  C --> D["Effect dispatch
damage type bits: S4 S15 S17 S20
zero-chance lines: S8"]
  D --> E["Stat channels
shared stun timer: S16
new channels: S21 S26"]
  E --> F["What the player sees
tooltips: S3 S4 S12
target plate and bars: S21 S22 S26"]

Lessons: Ultima Online to Path of Exile 2

The blunt weapon is the oldest solved problem in the genre. Every design that survived kept a different piece of the same historical truth, that mass defeats armor where edges fail, and every failure teaches something a proposal here uses.

Ultima Online: the ancestor with the two jobs

Mace Fighting hits always damaged the target's armor and always drained a slice of their stamina, and stamina governed swing speed and movement, so the macer was the attrition fighter: every exchange left the opponent poorer and slower. The armor half was strategic warfare, breaking an expensive suit taxed the loser's wallet, and it bred exactly the resentment you would expect; the design world took the lesson and never shipped durability damage again. Shroud's Break verbs are that identity correctly translated into temporary stacking debuffs. But the stamina half, the drain, was the ancestor's second pillar, and it never made the trip. The Age of Shadows special-move era then handed every mace a menu this school still echoes: a special named Crushing Blow, and Whirlwind Attack, the literal parent of Ground Pound. Mace Fighting's stated tradeoff, no poison on a mace, survives here too, in the R60 strength bonus that compensates for the axe's poison. Cards S13 and S19 are this history's two halves: deepen the translation that worked, restore the pillar that was lost.

World of Warcraft: the cautionary arc in three acts

Classic WoW's Mace Specialization was a chance-on-hit stun, and it was hated with the special intensity reserved for losing control of your character to dice. In 2008 Blizzard replaced the proc with a flat 15 percent armor ignore, and that version was accepted without complaint: penetration is the mace identity that survives contact with players. In 2010 the studio deleted weapon-type talents entirely, partly because passives that lock your loot choices are a tax on drops. Three verdicts SotA inherits whole: deterministic beats dice for control (card S21), armor penetration is the accepted form of the crush fantasy (card S17), and WoW's published one-category stun diminishing returns remains the canonical fairness rule every CC school eventually needs (card S26).

Elder Scrolls Online: identity as one printed number

ESO's Heavy Weapons passive gives a maul roughly 16 percent worth of armor penetration and prints the number in the tooltip. That is the whole design, and it is the cleanest statement of blunt identity in the modern genre: a sentence a player can read, a number a build calculator can use. Its known weakness instructs too: penetration is wasted against unarmored targets, which is why card S17 caps its interaction with Break Armor stacks instead of letting the two double-dip.

Guild Wars 2 and the break bar: how CC got a boss job

GW2 made bosses immune to raw crowd control and gave every CC skill a printed defiance-bar number instead: control deposits into a visible bar, a full bar pays out a real stun and a damage window, and the whole raid economy budgets for it. One trait completes the loop: Merciless Hammer pays hammer and mace users bonus damage against disabled foes, the school rewarding itself for doing its own job. New World ran the same thesis as a whole weapon, the War Hammer's crowd-control tree with a passive that rides a slow on every control effect, and proved a CC weapon stays wanted, then proved the second half: once CC gets good, mass PvP needs immunity windows the same week. Cards S18, S11, and S26 import the loop, the rider, and the honesty rule in that order.

Monster Hunter and Path of Exile 2: the deterministic verdict

Monster Hunter's hammer is the purest blunt identity in games: head hits build a KO gauge toward a real knockdown, body hits build Exhaust that drains the monster's stamina, and armored parts break faster under blunt. That is Ultima's two pillars rebuilt as a positional skill game, with one flaw the community never stopped naming: the gauges are invisible. Path of Exile 2 shipped the correction: armour break and stun buildup as first-class mechanics with on-screen bars. Souls games ran the same experiment from the other side, hammers topping the hidden poise chart, players datamining the meter for a decade and asking for what Diablo 4's stagger bar and PoE2 finally drew on screen. The genre's convergent answer: weight, accumulated visibly, paying out a guaranteed window. Cards S19, S21, and S26 are that answer, sized for this game.

The tabletop inheritance

Dungeons and Dragons spent fifty years teaching every future MMO player two things about blunt weapons: skeletons fear them, half damage from edges in the old editions, outright bludgeoning vulnerability in the fifth, and clerics carry them, a rule built on the historians' myth that Bishop Odo swung a mace at Hastings to avoid shedding blood. The myth was false and the archetype outlived the debunking, from the plate cleric to the paladin. The third lesson is a warning: the 3.5 edition's Sunder feat let you attack a foe's weapon and armor directly, and players almost universally refused to use it, because destroying loot is destroying your own reward. Shroud's translation of Break into temporary debuffs is the correct answer to a fifty-year-old design argument, and card S20 pays out the skeleton expectation the same tabletop history created.

The real history, one paragraph of it

Maces rose with armor: mail turned cuts, so knights carried mass. Flanged maces concentrated force enough to matter through plate, and a blow that never broke the surface still broke the arm under it, because the energy has to go somewhere. You can turn an edge with a shield or a parry; you cannot parry momentum, you can only get out from under it. Shroud's engine already agrees: every bludgeon special carries the no-parry and no-glancing-hit flags, and no other melee school's do. The most historically grounded fact in the school's design is also its best kept secret, which is card S4's entire argument.

The capability matrix

● full · ◔ partial · ○ none. SotA's anti-armor reads partial on the strength of Break Armor's resistance debuff, a real mechanism that is not penetration; the steroid reads partial because Berserk exists and punishes mastery zero; masterwork reads partial because two of twelve stats are dead; combos read partial because two exist with zero interface presence.

One honest finding closes the section. Across thirty years, every game that kept a blunt weapon school gave it exactly one of three finishes: armor penetration, a break-bar economy, or resource attrition. Shroud built the crowd-control kit, translated the Break verbs correctly, and then stopped one step short of all three finishes at once. The genre's advice is not subtle: pick the finish, print the numbers, and let the mastery amplify a school that already works bare-handed.

The twenty-nine proposals

Tier 1 makes the school honest: the dead switches wired, the typo fixed, the zero-percent riders made real, and the tooltips finally printing both the school's true strengths and its true zeros. Tier 2 deepens the kit that already exists, the steroid, the push, the stacks, the combos, under one grammar for the mastery. Tier 3 imports the genre's three finishes and the deterministic-control verdict. Tier 4 is itemization, one measurement, and the owner's two open decisions, stated plainly. Every tuning number is an illustrative starting point: final values ship through the balance program's test-shard changesets and measurement windows.

The deal, stated once. Nothing in this catalog requires the specialization to function: every mastery formula amplifies a working baseline, and the two skills that currently break that law are fixed here. No card grants raw stun uptime without an honesty mechanism behind it. And the Break verbs stay debuffs forever: the genre litigated destruction for fifty years and the verdict is in.

Tier 1 · Fix first: dead switches and lying text

S1 · Wire the dead Knockdown masterwork stat

Tier 1Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Knockdown 98,882 casts by at least 77 players; two shipped masterwork assets with zero effect

The crafting system ships two masterwork bonuses that raise a stat called Knockdown Chance, and crafting either does exactly nothing: no formula in the game reads the stat, and Knockdown's apply chance is a flat 100 percent anyway. The switch has sat dead since it shipped. Wire it to the thing a knockdown masterwork should actually improve, the time the target spends on the ground, and rename the bonus so it says duration. Every already-crafted weapon carrying the bonus starts working retroactively, which is the best kind of patch note.

Seen in: the ten Bludgeon masterwork stats that do work, wired the standard way. A knockdown duration masterwork is Lorddread's 2024 ask, and the dead switch answers it nearly for free.

Implementation notes

One duration formula on the knockdown's chained effect gains the stat as a multiplier, with the baseline unchanged at stat zero, and the bonus display string changes to say duration. The two shipped item-effect assets are untouched. An automated test pins the duration at stat zero to today's value.

client M (formula + string)server noneimpact a dead purchase starts workingtests duration at stat 0 and 100

S2 · Fix the Break Armor dispel typo

Tier 1Size SServer: none

30 days live: Break Armor 99,412 casts, second most cast rune in the school

Break Weapon and Break Armor each carry a chance to strip one beneficial effect from the target. Break Weapon's chance is 10 times (1 plus mastery): it doubles as you specialize. Break Armor's is 10 plus (1 plus mastery): an addition where its twin has a multiplication, which pins the chance near 11 percent no matter how far you take the school. Two skills written as mirrors, one character apart. Restore the multiply. This is the cheapest real buff on the page: one character and its parsed tokens, in one data file.

Seen in: the school's own Break Weapon, four lines away. The asymmetry was flagged as unexplained in a June 2026 documentation audit; this page rules it a defect.

Implementation notes

One formula edit, value and token stream both, in the Break Armor rune data. A paired test asserts both Break verbs share the same dispel-chance shape at mastery zero, half, and full.

client S (one formula)server noneimpact the twins finally matchtests shape parity across mastery

S3 · Kill the false destruction claim

Tier 1Size SServer: noneplayer report

audit record: the destroy claim marked FALSE in the July 2026 knowledge-base fact check, and still live in three places

Break Weapon does not break weapons and Break Armor does not break armor. Neither has ever damaged a point of durability: the third effect on each is a dispel that removes one beneficial buff from the target. The destruction claim survives in the school reference, the knowledge base, and this proposal series' own index tile, and it wrongs the school in both directions, promising grief the game rightly refuses to deliver while underselling the real effect, which is a stacking damage debuff plus a buff strip that no target can shrug off. One words pass across all three surfaces, and while the tooltips are open, the multi-target counts get corrected against what the runes actually do.

Seen in: the tooltip-honesty canon every modern game follows. The count mismatches were Gyzarus's 2018 report.

Implementation notes

Localization strings, the school reference, and one index-tile description. No behavior changes anywhere; the words stop claiming behavior that never existed.

client S (strings)server noneimpact the words stop lyingtests none (editorial)

S4 · Print the hidden identity

Tier 1Size SServer: none

census: 517 players ever learned Bludgeon against Blades' 857; the school's strongest differentiator appears in no tooltip

Every bludgeon special attack carries two properties no other melee school has: it cannot be parried, and it cannot be reduced to a glancing hit by the target's avoidance. This is the engine agreeing with a thousand years of armored fighting, you cannot shield yourself from momentum, and it has been true in the data for years while appearing in no tooltip, no school description, and no loading screen. Print it: one plain line on every special, the same line in the school reference. It costs a string pass and it hands the school's recruiters their best sentence.

Seen in: Elder Scrolls Online, which prints its maul penetration in the passive tooltip, and Guild Wars 2, which prints a defiance number on every control skill. Identity you can read is identity you can build around.

Implementation notes

Localization only: one sentence added to the special-attack descriptions and the school reference. The flags themselves change on no rune. An automated test pins the flag set on all five attack runes so the sentence can never silently go stale.

client S (strings)server noneimpact the best fact finally advertisedtests flag-set pin on all five runes

S5 · Ground Pound riders, real at mastery zero

Tier 1Size MServer: noneplayer report

30 days live: Ground Pound 66,449 casts by at least 48 players; rider chance = 50 × mastery = 0% for every unspecialized caster

Ground Pound advertises three riders: an attack-speed slow, a movement slow, and a stun. All three roll a chance of 50 times your mastery, and their durations multiply by mastery too. For anyone without the specialization that is a zero percent chance of a zero-second effect, advertised at full strength in the tooltip. In April 2019 a player reported the movement slow showing minus zero percent and never applying, attached video, and got no answer. Seven years later, this card is the answer: it was never a display bug, the riders are mathematically dead without specialization. Give them a working baseline, roughly a 20 percent chance for a couple of seconds, and let mastery amplify chance, duration, and strength from there. The slam should slam for everyone who trained it.

Seen in: the amplify-never-gate law this proposal series applies to every school it audits. Reported by Antrax Artek, April 2019.

Implementation notes

Three chance formulas and three duration formulas reshaped in the rune data, value and tokens both, plus removal of one vestigial display amount. The stun rider stays inside the shared immunity window (S16) and inherits whatever fairness rule S26 lands. A table test asserts every rider has nonzero chance and duration at mastery zero and grows at mastery one.

client M (six formulas)server noneimpact the capstone works for everyonetests nonzero-at-zero table pin

S6 · Crushing Blow cleanup

Tier 1Size SServer: none

30 days live: Crushing Blow 102,885 casts, the school's most pressed button

The school's workhorse carries a stack count of two on its damage effect, which is meaningless on instantaneous damage and a small trap for the next person who edits the file. Zero it, and record in the school reference that the stun's immunity window is shared with Ground Pound on purpose, pending the S16 decision. Deliberately boring, batched with S2, and the kind of card that keeps the next defect from being written.

Seen in: the vestigial-field cleanups every prior school page shipped alongside its formula fixes.

Implementation notes

One field zeroed in the rune data; one sentence in the school reference. Rides the S2 commit.

client S (data hygiene)server noneimpact fewer traps in the filetests rides the S2 batch

S7 · Correct the school doc

Tier 1Size SServer: none

audit record: two material errors flagged across the June 2026 audits, plus five masterwork stats missing from the reference

The internal school reference, which feeds the public knowledge base, is wrong twice and incomplete once: it calls the Break verbs' third effect destruction, it labels Ground Pound's damage as part earth when the damage carries no earth component, and its masterwork table lists nine of the school's fourteen bonus stats. Fix all three, add the S4 identity line and the S15 undead positioning, and note the one engine quirk future editors need, that the school's gate skill is special-cased in code rather than data. The reference becomes the source of truth the rest of this catalog assumes.

Seen in: the doc-corrections-with-page pattern from every prior school dive.

Implementation notes

School reference edits only, shipped with this page. The knowledge base regenerates from the corrected reference.

client S (docs)server noneimpact the reference stops seeding errorstests none (editorial)

S8 · Say the zero

Tier 1Size SServer: none

every unspecialized Ground Pound caster has read three rider lines that were never once true for them

A tooltip will happily advertise an effect the reader has a zero percent chance to produce; exactly one skill in the game was ever special-cased to hide such lines. Generalize the honesty rule: an effect line whose evaluated chance is zero for this character either hides or reads zero percent, requires Bludgeon Specialization. And close the preview quirk while in the neighborhood: unarmed players reading Berserk's tooltip see the values as if a bludgeon were equipped, so the tooltip gains one qualifier, values shown while wielding a bludgeon weapon. Trust is the cheapest stat this school can train.

Seen in: the existing zero-chance suppression on one ranged skill, generalized instead of copied.

Implementation notes

The tooltip renderer already evaluates each effect's chance; the change routes zero results into the honest string instead of the advertised one, preferring the stated requirement over hiding so players comparing builds still see what specialization unlocks. One localization line for Berserk.

client S (tooltip logic + string)server noneimpact no more advertised zerostests zero renders honest, nonzero renders percent

Tier 2 · The kit, deepened

S9 · Berserk without the trap

Tier 2Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Berserk 8,362 casts by exactly 46 players, out of at least 97 school casters; the school's least adopted active

Berserk at mastery zero costs a flat 50 damage avoidance for a modest damage buff, and the penalty shrinks only as you specialize. That is the amplify rule inverted: the school's one steroid punishes hardest the players still building toward the specialization, and the adoption number says they noticed, less than half the school's active casters ever press it. Reshape the trade: a modest flat penalty from day one, mastery reducing it further and stretching the duration, with the awkward dead gap between windows narrowed so the buff can actually be maintained by a player who wants to live in it. The upside scales, the hazing does not.

Seen in: every modern steroid design, which scales the payoff with investment and not the punishment. The structural complaints are Black FjP's and Badassery's from the 2018 threads; the old activation hitch is Merv DeGriff's 2017 report, verified stays dead.

Implementation notes

Penalty, buff, and duration formulas reshaped in the rune data. The weapon-in-hand gate and the flat focus cost stay: they are identity. A four-corner test pins the trade at mastery zero and full, level one and grandmaster.

client M (three formulas)server noneimpact the steroid stops hazingtests four-corner pin

S10 · Overpower: Berserk pays into the specials

Tier 2Size MServer: none

51 of the school's tracked casters skip Berserk today; the steroid needs a reason beyond a stat swap

While Berserk runs, the bludgeon specials hit harder, a bonus sized to the defense the player gave up to be here. This welds the steroid to the school's identity instead of leaving it a generic buff: the choice reads as leaning into the swing, trading the guard for weight, and it gives the school a pure damage lever for the fights where crowd control is refused, the structural gap a five-year forum skeptic kept naming. Formula work only: the specials already read the caster's state.

Seen in: Diablo 4's Overpower and Monster Hunter's mode-coupled damage. The when-CC-fails fallback is Lazlo's ask from the 2018 thread.

Implementation notes

A conditional term on the five special-damage formulas keyed to Berserk's buff being present. Competes with S17 and S18 for the school's damage budget: the balance program picks at most two of the three before any ships.

client M (five formulas)server noneimpact the steroid becomes the identitytests bonus present iff buff present

S11 · Knockback with a job

Tier 2Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Knockback 44,126 casts, last among the school's damage runes

Pushing a target four meters away is usually a favor to the enemy: your own melee party now has to chase what you punted. The push gets a job: targets knocked back are also slowed for a few seconds, so they walk back to the fight slowly, which is the tactical point of a knockback in the first place. Mastery raises the slow's strength rather than the push distance. The one implementation rule matters more than the numbers: the slow rides as a plain debuff, not a crowd-control-typed effect, so the undead wall that eats 70 percent of the school's control cannot eat this.

Seen in: New World's Aftershock passive, which rides a slow on every control effect. A unique school slow is Antrax Artek's February 2019 ask, delivered on the rune where it makes tactical sense.

Implementation notes

One new stat-debuff block on the knockback's effect list, typed as bludgeon damage like the Break debuffs, sharing a stack channel with S5's slow so the two never pyramid. Chance and strength formulas follow the S14 grammar.

client M (one effect block)server noneimpact the push earns its slottests debuff typed non-CC, stack channel shared

S12 · Combos you can discover

BuiltTier 2Size MServer: none

Built August 15 as the system-wide version on the combos page (its S9). Every glyph in a pairing now lists its combos and the partner needed in its tooltip, in the skill tree, the deck builder, and the hand, so Titan Smash's pairing is printed in the same places Splintering Strike's is. Not on the test shard yet.

30 days live: Splintering Strike 39,791 casts by at least 24 players; Titan Smash 739 casts by exactly 7

The game runs a controlled experiment in discoverability and nobody meant to. Two cross-school combos include a bludgeon rune: Splintering Strike, Crushing Blow plus Earth's Stone Fist, and Titan Smash, Knockback plus Heavy Armor's Body Slam. The first is cast forty thousand times a month and outcasts two of the school's own runes, because the earth-bruiser build community teaches it. The second is cast by seven people. Identical mechanic, identical interface presence: none. Print the pairings where players already look, one line on each participating rune's tooltip, combines with Stone Fist to form Splintering Strike, and a small pairing marker in the deck builder. The data for both lines already exists on the combo definitions; this is a read-and-display card.

Seen in: every card game ever printed, which puts the combo on the card. Splintering Strike was called devastating and overlooked in the community's own 2024 rotation thread, by Adam Crow.

Implementation notes

The combo requirements are data on the combo runes; the tooltip and deck builder read them backward to the participating runes. Localization for two pairing lines. No combat behavior changes.

client M (UI read + strings)server noneimpact seven players become manytests pair resolution both directions

S13 · Break stacks open the target to crits

Tier 2Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Break Weapon reaches more casters (67+) than Break Armor (57+); the support players are already here

The Break verbs' one praised role in the school's history is the group gift: stacked debuffs that made a party's finishers land harder. Deepen exactly that. Each Break stack also makes the target slightly easier to critically hit for the debuff's duration, scaled by mastery, and typed like its parent debuff so the undead wall cannot resist it. Cracked armor showing the gaps is the fantasy; the party's assassin cashing your setup is the play pattern; and the school's support identity gets a number of its own instead of borrowing everyone else's.

Seen in: Path of Exile 2's armour break and Guild Wars 2's Exposed. A crit component on the Break debuffs is Daxxe Diggler's November 2018 ask, delivered as written.

Implementation notes

One additional stat block per Break rune using existing crit-defense stats, no new enumerations, following the same stacking rules as the parent debuff. Ships after S2 so the dispel math is sane first. PvP coefficient tuned separately.

client M (two effect blocks)server noneimpact the setup school pays outtests stack parity with parent debuff

S14 · One mastery grammar

Tier 2Size MServer: none

census: 286 of 517 learners hold specialization 80, a 55% conversion; mastery appears in 12 formulas in 3 different shapes

Bludgeon reads its mastery in more formulas than any other weapon school, twelve expressions in three shapes: honest multipliers that amplify, divisors that shrink penalties, and gates that multiply a baseline of zero. The gates are the anti-pattern, S5 and S9 fix the two worst, and this card is the sweep that audits all twelve against one written rule: mastery amplifies a working baseline, never gates it, never punishes its absence. The rule goes in the school reference so every future formula inherits it, and a table test holds the line forever. A specialization that visibly upgrades everything converts better than one that secretly enables half the kit.

Seen in: the same consistency pass the Focus and Tactics pages ran on their schools' mastery terms.

Implementation notes

An audit table of all twelve expressions with before and after shapes, batched through the balance program. The enforcement is a table-driven test asserting every chance and duration term evaluates above zero at mastery zero.

client M (audit + formulas)server noneimpact the spec upgrades, never unlockstests amplify-never-gate invariant, table-driven

S15 · The undead answer

Tier 2Size SServer: noneplayer ask

every base undead resists crowd control, knockback, stun, and knockdown at 70%; the Break verbs are typed as damage and pierce it untouched

The game's most farmed enemies shrug off seventy percent of this school's control kit, which reads like a death sentence for a crowd-control school. Except the school's other half was accidentally built for exactly this: the Break debuffs are typed as bludgeon damage, not control, so they land on the dead at full strength, every time. That is a real, current, unadvertised niche: against the living, put them on the ground; against the dead, break what they carry. Put the sentence in the tooltips, the school reference, and the knowledge base, and the school's worst matchup becomes its recruiting poster. No formula changes; this card exists so the positioning ships even if every mechanical card waits.

Seen in: fifty years of crush-beats-bones expectation, pointed at the mechanic that already works. The damage-type question is karamonde's from 2018, answered honestly at last.

Implementation notes

Strings only, riding the S3 words pass. A flag test protects the claim: the Break debuffs stay typed as damage, never control, so the sentence stays true.

client S (strings)server noneimpact the worst matchup becomes the pitchtests Break typing pin

S16 · Untangle the shared stun timer

Tier 2Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Crushing Blow 102,885 + Ground Pound 66,449 casts, both stuns rolling into one hidden immunity window

The school's two stuns share a single immunity window: landing one starts the clock against the other, so the kit competes with itself and no tooltip says so. Shared resistance timers are the exact mechanism a 2018 critic named when he said the school lacks identity. The fix is not necessarily to split them; it is to decide. Either the shared window is the school's internal diminishing returns, in which case both durations get tuned around it and the rule gets printed, or Ground Pound's stun moves to its own window with a shorter lockout, which is one stat append away. Deliberate and documented beats accidental and hidden, whichever way the owner rules, and the S26 decision sets the frame.

Seen in: World of Warcraft's single published stun category, chosen on purpose and printed. Named by Black FjP, November 2018.

Implementation notes

Decision first, then either a documentation-and-tuning pass on the shared window or a new immunity stat for the slam's rider, appended through the standard mirrored-enumeration recipe and batched with the other approved appends.

client M (decision + tuning or append)server noneimpact the kit stops fighting itself in secrettests immunity window behavior pin

Tier 3 · The genre imports

S17 · Armor penetration: the missing finish

Tier 3Size LServer: noneplayer ask

genre survey verdict: every surviving blunt school got armor pen, a break bar, or attrition; SotA's got none, while Blades got armor-ignore on Rend

The mace exists because armor exists: history's answer to plate was mass, and every modern game that kept a blunt school eventually said so in numbers, most cleanly as armor penetration. In this game the mechanic exists and belongs to the wrong school: Blades' Rend ignores armor, Bludgeon touches nothing of the kind. Give the school its historically correct finish: bludgeon specials ignore a percentage of the target's damage resistance, a working baseline amplified by mastery, printed in the tooltip as one number. In November 2018 a player proposed the exact role triangle this completes, polearms beat blocks, blades beat dodges, bludgeons beat armor. The forum era that asked for it is gone; the mechanic is still the right one.

Seen in: Elder Scrolls Online's maul passive, World of Warcraft's 2008 Mace Specialization, Warhammer Online's Weapon Skill. The role triangle is Antrax Artek's, November 2018; the fallback need is Lazlo's.

Implementation notes

Either the existing armor-ignore capability bit applied fractionally through the special formulas, or a new penetration stat on the standard append recipe; either way the interaction with Break Armor stacks is capped so the two mechanisms complete each other instead of double-dipping. One of three finishers competing for two damage-budget slots (with S10 and S18).

client L (formulas or one append)server noneimpact the missing finish, deliveredtests pen + Break cap interaction

S18 · Heavy hands

Tier 3Size MServer: none

30 days live: roughly 268,000 casts a month carry stun or knockdown potential, with zero damage payoff for landing any of it

The school lands more control than any other weapon line and is paid nothing for it: a stunned target takes exactly the damage a standing one does. Close the loop: bludgeon attacks deal bonus damage to stunned and knocked-down targets, baseline modest, mastery amplified. The kit starts feeding itself, Crushing Blow's stun sets up Knockdown's payout, and it works in groups, anyone's stun feeds your hammer. In return the school's control stops being a tax paid for the party's benefit and becomes the setup half of its own damage.

Seen in: Guild Wars 2's Merciless Hammer trait, New World's control-tree passives, Diablo 4's Overpower family.

Implementation notes

One new formula token reading the target's stun and knockdown state, built on the same pattern as the existing weapon-check token, then a conditional term on the special formulas. Competes with S10 and S17 for the two finisher slots; PvP coefficient tuned lower so stun windows stay windows, not executions.

client M (one token + formulas)server noneimpact control becomes the setup halftests bonus iff target controlled

S19 · The lost pillar: focus attrition

Tier 3Size MServer: none

genre record: UO mace hits drained stamina; Monster Hunter body hits build Exhaust; the pillar has no SotA equivalent

Ultima's mace had two jobs and Shroud translated one. The armor job became the Break verbs; the stamina drain, the half that made the macer the attrition fighter, never made the trip. Restore it as focus attrition: the two heavyweight swings, Crushing Blow and Ground Pound, drain a modest amount of the target's focus on hit, mastery amplified, printed in the tooltip and the combat log. Against casters it is the school's answer to being kited, every landed hit taxing the spells that keep them away; against monsters it starves special attacks. The effect machinery for focus changes already exists; the card is two effect blocks and the honesty line.

Seen in: Ultima Online's Mace Fighting, Monster Hunter's Exhaust, Guild Wars 2's Weakness family.

Implementation notes

Two focus-drain effect blocks on the existing effect machinery, typed as bludgeon damage so the undead wall does not apply, with the drained amount printed where the purchase happens. Ships only with its visibility line: an invisible drain is a placebo.

client M (two effect blocks + strings)server noneimpact the ancestor's second pillar, restoredtests drain amount at mastery corners

S20 · Crush the brittle

Tier 3Size MServer: noneplayer ask

forum record: players asked in 2018 whether blunt beats skeletons and were told physical damage is physical damage; some believed they observed it anyway

Fifty years of tabletop and a shelf of action games taught every player that hammers hurt skeletons, and this game quietly taught them otherwise: the damage types exist in the data, and no rule ever read them. The belief is so strong players reported observing the bonus that never existed. Make it true: a modest bludgeon damage bonus against skeletal and undead creature types, printed in the tooltip, stacked on the S15 positioning so the school's undead story becomes complete, break what they carry, then crush what they are. The demand was proven a decade before the feature; that is the cheapest kind of feature there is.

Seen in: Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition's bludgeoning vulnerability, Diablo 2's mace implicit, Elden Ring's strike damage against the brittle. Asked by karamonde, 2018.

Implementation notes

A creature-type check in the damage path or an innate granting the existing versus-undead multiplier while a bludgeon is wielded, plus the tooltip line. Kept modest, ten to fifteen percent, so bone country prefers the hammer without demanding it.

client M (damage path + string)server noneimpact the oldest expectation, honoredtests type-mask check, bonus corners

S21 · Concussion: deterministic and visible

Tier 3Size LServer: none

genre verdict: WoW deleted its proc stun; PoE, Monster Hunter, and the Souls games all converged on accumulate-and-payout

The genre ran the experiment both ways and the verdict is unanimous: control by dice enrages, control by accumulation satisfies. Give the school the deterministic version: bludgeon specials apply a visible Concussed stack to the target, stacks decay on their own, and at the threshold the target takes a brief daze, slower casts and swings, not a stun, and the stacks clear. No dice anywhere. It is the Break-stack grammar the school already speaks, extended from the target's gear to the target's head, it gives the weight-of-blows fantasy a running meter, and if the owner green-lights S26 it becomes the deposit currency the break bar reads.

Seen in: Monster Hunter's KO gauge, Path of Exile's stun thresholds, the Souls games' poise, printed instead of hidden.

Implementation notes

One new stack stat on the standard append recipe, effect blocks on the specials, a threshold check in the effect dispatcher, and a target-plate icon. The largest build in the tier; the payout shape, daze now or bar deposit later, follows the S26 ruling. PvP stack decay runs faster.

client L (stat + dispatch + UI)server noneimpact weight you can watch accumulatetests threshold, decay, clear-on-payout

S22 · Knockdown that does something to everyone

Tier 3Size MServer: flagplayer ask

30 days live: 98,882 Knockdown casts land on a skill that silently does nothing to enemy players

Knockdown is flagged to work on grounded NPCs only. Against a player it does its damage and nothing else, no floor, no message, a dead zone the caster discovers mid-duel. Convert instead of no-op: against players the floor becomes a short, visible Staggered state, slowed, no sprinting, no parrying, announced with floating text so both sides see the honest downgrade. An ability that always does something, with the conversion printed, replaces an ability that sometimes silently does nothing. Whether it ships at all, and in which rulesets, is explicitly the owner's call, card S27; this card builds the mechanism behind that flag.

Seen in: Warhammer Online's return servers, which converted knockbacks into knockdowns against mobs for years, the same honesty pattern pointed the other way. The PvP dead zone is the 2018 threads' recurring exhibit, Badassery foremost.

Implementation notes

A conditional branch on the knockdown's chained effect: NPC path unchanged, player path applies the stagger debuff bundle and the floating text. Built and tested behind the S27 release flag; the conversion is deliberately weaker than the NPC floor and the text says what happened.

client M (branch + debuff + text)server flag onlyimpact the asterisk becomes a mechanictests NPC path unchanged, player path announced

S23 · Ground Pound as an event

Tier 3Size MServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: 66,449 casts of the school's fantasy centerpiece, currently reading as a gray circle of numbers

The 360-degree slam is the school's Grond moment, the hammer that splits the ground, and today it reads as a damage tick in a radius. Half the event is data: a mastery ladder where radius, rider strength, and the screen's response scale visibly with investment, every step printed, built on S5's now-working riders. The full charge-and-release version, hold the swing to grow the circle, belongs to the same future as the break bar and waits for it. Ship the ladder now; the slam should feel like the reason the school exists, at every tier of investment.

Seen in: Diablo 4's Hammer of the Ancients, and the fiction shelf's entire hammer canon. The make-it-move ask is Feeyo's from 2018; the weight-not-speed version is this card.

Implementation notes

Radius and rider formulas extended on the existing shapes, plus effect dressing on the landing. The charge mechanic is explicitly out of scope until the S26 direction lands; nothing here blocks on it.

client M (formulas + dressing)server noneimpact the capstone feels like onetests ladder values at mastery corners

Tier 4 · Itemization and the owner's desk

S24 · Masterwork parity: finish the filed work

Tier 4Size SServer: noneplayer ask

24 masterwork assets exist for the school across 12 stats; until S1 lands, two of them are placebo

The weapons page already measured the masterwork economy and filed the two tracker items this school has a stake in: the pool-depth gap between weapon families, and two ranged-flavored stats misassigned onto one-handed bludgeons. This card refiles nothing. It records the school's acceptance test: when S1 lands and the filed work completes, Bludgeon has a full masterwork sheet with zero dead stats, and the school reference's masterwork table, corrected by S7, is the checklist a crafter can read. The old forum point stands behind it: maces traded away poison for raw stats, so the raw stats have to actually work.

Seen in: the weapons systems page, cards and tracker items #2550 and #2544. The poison trade is The Thunderwolf's 2018 point, half granted that year.

Implementation notes

Links and an acceptance test only; the mechanical halves live in S1 and the two filed tracker items.

client S (links + test)server noneimpact a full sheet, verifiedtests no masterwork stat unread by any formula

S25 · The experience-cost question

Tier 4Size SServer: noneplayer ask

30 days live: Bludgeon 471,616 casts vs Blades 463,920 vs Polearms 115,468; cost per delivered power unmeasured

The community's wishlist names the suspicion directly: some skills' experience cost does not match the power they deliver, and this school appears in the example. The live data gives Bludgeon a strong opening argument, first among melee schools by casts on a mid-pack conversion rate, but volume is not efficiency. Commission the measurement: experience cost curves against delivered damage and control across the three melee schools, run by the balance program with its test-shard instruments, results published the way this series publishes everything. If the curve says the school overpays, the balance program moves the numbers; if it says otherwise, the suspicion retires with data instead of by decree.

Seen in: the wishlist sweep's balance-pass entry, which paired this school's name with the question.

Implementation notes

Analysis over the skill sheet's experience columns and the live telemetry; no game data changes. Output is a measurement memo to the balance program.

client S (analysis)server noneimpact a suspicion becomes a numbertests none (measurement)

S26 · Stun fairness and the break bar

Tier 4Size XLServer: flagowner call

history: stuns made fully binding on live, reverted within a week; meanwhile a chained-knockdown build held bosses down indefinitely

The school's control lives inside a paradox the game built for itself. Stuns were once made fully binding and the change survived a week before PvP demanded its jump-escape back; in the same era a six-card knockdown chain could hold a Lich boss on the floor for as long as the cards kept coming. Too weak and degenerate at once. Every system since, the undead resistance wall, hover immunity, the shield's balance innate, patched a symptom and taxed this school hardest. The genre's modern answer is deposit and payout: bosses immune to raw control expose a visible bar, every control attempt deposits into it, a full bar pays a real knockdown and a damage window for everyone, and the heaviest weapons deposit the most. Beside it, one published diminishing-returns rule for stuns, the simple single-category shape, which is the license every stun improvement above waits on. This is the page's one genuinely expensive card, engine and interface both, and it touches three other schools' control as well. Decision requested: direction yes or no, and scope, bar on bosses only or diminishing returns everywhere. Every stun-adjacent card in this catalog is tuned conservatively until this lands.

Seen in: Guild Wars 2's defiance bar, Diablo 4's stagger, Path of Exile 2's stun buildup, World of Warcraft's published diminishing returns. The revert history is Chrystoph Reis's record; the boss chain is Alphaine's build.

Implementation notes

A bar stat and deposit hooks in the control-application path, an interface meter, per-boss participation, and the published diminishing-returns rule, all behind a release flag. Scoped and costed only after the direction call; nothing else on this page blocks on it, by design.

client XL (engine + UI)server flag + designimpact boss CC becomes real, PvP CC becomes fairtests deposit accounting, DR window

S27 · Knockdown in PvP: scope call

Tier 4Size SServer: flagowner call

30 days live: 98,882 casts a month on the school's one rune with a silent PvP dead zone

S22 builds the honest conversion, a visible stagger instead of a silent nothing. Whether it ships at all, and where, open PvP zones only or everywhere, is a scope decision that belongs to the owner, not to a proposal page. The jump-escape history says fully binding control is off the table; the conversion is designed as the honest middle. Decision requested, with S26's fairness framework as the context it should be judged inside.

Seen in: Guild Wars 2's split-by-mode precedent, where the same skill honestly does different things in different arenas.

Implementation notes

A release flag on S22's player-facing branch, per ruleset scope. No work beyond S22's until decided.

client S (flag)server flagimpact a decision, stated as onetests flag gating

S28 · A named hammer at the top

Tier 4Size MServer: noneplayer ask

census: 286 specialization-80 holders, and zero mastery-gated chase items in the school's history

Every hammer that mattered had a name. The school's artifact shelf is thin, its one storied two-hander long since renamed into a generic elemental stick, and the trade forums still remember players shopping for maces with a story. Commission one named two-handed hammer on the existing artifact plumbing, gated on Bludgeon Specialization: a proc that wears one of the school's new mechanics as flavor, thunder on a crushing blow, or bane against giants and the dead, the S4 identity line printed proudly on the item card, and a name worth saying in trade chat. A reward, not a fix, which is why it sits last before the capstone.

Seen in: the entire fiction shelf, from the worthiness hammer to the gate breaker to the dwarven artifact that stuns with thunder. The demand signal is the old WTB threads, Bandilazino's foremost.

Implementation notes

One artifact archetype on existing item plumbing, proc borrowed from S17 or S20's mechanic rather than invented new, drop placement with the content team.

client M (item + proc)server noneimpact a chase item with a storytests proc reuses a tested mechanic

S29 · Capstone: the unstoppable weight

Tier 4Size SServer: none

30 days live: 471,616 casts, the most played melee school in the game, carried there by players it never once thanked with a tuning pass

The composed picture, when the catalog lands: a school whose tooltips say what has always been true, cannot be parried, cannot be glanced; whose dead switches work and whose typo is fixed; whose specialization amplifies everything and gates nothing; and which finally owns a complete role, break their gear, pierce their armor, get paid for every body you put on the ground, with the game's most farmed wall, the undead, as its signature mark instead of its embarrassment. Bludgeon is already the most played melee school on live. These cards make it the best written one. The first phase is the votes below plus the Tier 1 batch; the owner's desk holds exactly two forks, S26 and S27, and neither blocks the rest.

Seen in: the capstone convention of this series. Dedicated to Antrax Artek, the school's one-man quality department from 2017 to 2019, whose reports this page finally answers.

Implementation notes

No mechanism of its own; the card exists so nobody mistakes the floor for the ceiling. Shipping Tier 1 alone is already a win.

client the sum aboveserver two flagsimpact a living school, paid its debttests the pinned suites hold the line

Considered and rejected

• Durability damage on the Break verbs. Ultima ran the experiment at scale: armor destruction taxed the loser twice and bred a resentment the genre never forgot, and tabletop's Sunder proved players will not even destroy their own prospective loot. The debuff translation is correct and settled; S13 deepens it instead.
• Fully binding stuns. Tried on this game's own live servers, reverted within one week under jump-escape demand. Politically dead. Every stun improvement in this catalog rides an honesty mechanism, diminishing returns, conversion, or a bar, never raw respect.
• A chance-on-hit stun proc. Classic World of Warcraft's mace identity, deleted by its own designers as unbalanceable. Deterministic accumulate-and-payout, S21, is the only accepted modern form.
• A hidden armor-type damage matrix. Camelot's resist tables made weapon choice situational and then hid the table, turning choice into datamined homework. Any type bonus here ships printed in the tooltip, S20, or not at all.
• Refiling the masterwork pool gap or the misassigned arrow stats. Already filed from the weapons page as #2550 and #2544. S24 links; refiling makes trackers worse.
• A leap or ambush gap-closer. The one fantasy this school does not own is speed. Mobility belongs elsewhere; the fun half of the ask, the slam as an event, ships as S23.
• A bludgeon damage-over-time bleed. That is Rend, and it is Blades' identity. The school's when-control-fails fallback is armor penetration, S17, which fills the slot without cloning the neighbor.
• De-mechanizing weapon types entirely. The Final Fantasy XIV road: perfect balance, zero fantasy, weapons as job badges. This game chose weapon schools on purpose; this page takes the choice seriously.

┌─ CRUSHING BLOW ────────────────────────────┐
│ Deals 24-38 crushing damage to up to 2 targets.    │
│ Cannot be parried. Cannot be reduced to a          │  S4
│ glancing hit.                                      │
│ Ignores 14% of target damage resistance.           │  S17
│ 38% chance to stun for 3.1 seconds.                │
│ Drains 6 focus from the target on hit.             │  S19
│ Deals 12% more damage to stunned targets.          │  S18
│ Deals 12% more damage to skeletons and undead.     │  S20
│ Combines with Stone Fist: Splintering Strike.      │  S12
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─ BUFF BAR ────────────────────────────────┐
│ Berserk 41s: weapon damage +18%, avoidance -15.    │  S9
│ Your specials hit harder while Berserk runs.       │  S10
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─ TARGET: SKELETAL WARRIOR ─────────────────┐
│ [Break Armor x2] [Break Weapon x1] [Slowed 4s]   │  S11
│   broken armor: 4% easier to critically hit        │  S13
│ [Concussed ●●●○○] 3 of 5, decaying               │  S21
│ boss only, flag-gated:                             │
│ [break bar ██████░░░░] control fills the bar;  │  S26
│ a full bar knocks the boss down                    │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─ UNSPECIALIZED READER, SAME TOOLTIP ──────────┐
│ Slows movement 10% for 3.5s, 32% chance.           │  S5
│ Stun: 0% chance (requires Bludgeon                 │  S8
│ Specialization).                                   │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

flowchart TD
  P1["Phase 1: Trust
S1-S8, S15"] --> P2["Phase 2: The kit
S14 S9 S11 S12 S13"]
  P2 --> P3["Phase 3: The finish
two of S10 S17 S18, plus S19"]
  P3 --> P4["Phase 4: Fairness
S16 S21 S22 S23"]
  P4 --> P5["Phase 5: Reward
S24 S25 S28 S29"]
  S2x["S2 dispel fix"] -.-> S13x["S13 crit window"]
  S5x["S5 riders real"] -.-> S23x["S23 the event"]
  S9x["S9 Berserk reshape"] -.-> S10x["S10 Overpower"]
  S1x["S1 dead stat wired"] -.-> S24x["S24 parity test"]
  OD{{"Owner's desk: S26 fairness direction, S27 PvP scope"}} -.->|"decisions, not code"| P4