Titan Quest II News

Introducing the Rogue Mastery

As we are approaching the Titan Quest II Early Access launch, we have been extremely busy polishing the initial content, while also building what comes next. We do have a neat surprise today that we think you will appreciate. Remember how we previously talked about launching with the Warfare, Earth and Storm masteries? Do you know what’s better than three masteries? That’s right. We have decided to include the Rogue mastery as well in the initial launch. We hope you agree this is worth a little bit of an extra wait!

About the Rogue Mastery

We designed the mastery around 3 main pillars.

Precision:
Rogue abilities are precise and accurate, hitting precisely where they mean to.
Preparation:
The Rogue mastery allows you to apply coatings to your weapons, preparing enemies with various ailments to set up for powerful combos.
Evasion:
It's not brute force that brings you success, but moving through the battlefield as if you were your enemies' shadows. Your enemies will be none the wiser until they have your blade at their throat.

Some Key Rogue Skills

Below we will highlight a handful of skills from the mastery that work together very neatly, combining the pillars above. There are other skills of course, and depending on your second mastery, you will be able to build different synergies. As you can imagine, the Rogue mastery has a limited offering in terms of defensive capabilities, so this might be one of the cross-mastery opportunities to pursue.

Lethal Strike:

A classic-style staple of the Rogue mastery. Deals a large multiple of your weapon’s damage to a single target. When heavily invested into and timed right, it will remove large chunks from the health of even the toughest enemies. What’s more, if you manage to kill your target with this skill, the cooldown is refreshed, allowing you to rapidly finish off weaker or low-health enemies.
When you obtain the “Flow” status via other abilities, you will be dealing additional bonus damage, consuming the Flow stack.
You are able to further boost it with modifiers, such as by adding a “Rupture” chance that deals a raw HP percentage damage to the target, a poison explosion, or a bonus damage reward against “marked” targets.

Mark For Death:

Marking your target will enable a variety of interactions and powerful debuffs via its modifiers, but by itself simply deals a portion of your damage as vitality damage. You can only mark one target.
Whether you look to build interaction with Lethal Strike, or release exploding poison into your marked enemy, or summon shadow daggers to strike the target, this is a a cheap and effective way to make your job easier.

Flicker:

A teleport skill that will deal some pierce damage to your target. A critical part of the Rogue kit when working with a glass cannon build, allowing you to get out of nasty situations.
Gain flow when used, recover cooldown and/or deal more damage when hitting your mark, gain cooldown charges, or transform it into an offensive ability via modifiers.

Preparation:

An aura skill increasing poison and physical damage, but reserving a part of your energy. This directly boosts most aspects of the Rogue mastery.
Via modifiers, increase your ailment and critical hit chances, convert your weapon damage type to either poison or pierce, or summon shadow daggers upon critical hits to hit your target.

With all these together, especially if further backed by the right items and passive skills, it should be possible to hugely commit to poison damage, marking an important enemy, applying Flow via Flicker, and using Lethal Strike on this target to release a massively boosted poison damage, as well as a secondary explosion to hit other nearby enemies.

Not everything about Rogue is about direct reliance on your physical weapon damage however. Most abilities have a modifier to summon shadow daggers, helping you scale your character with spellcasting capabilities, which comes in particularly useful in conjunction with the Earth and Storm masteries, where the Knowledge attribute’s scaling of fire, cold, lightning and poison damages synergizes some more.

Putting It Together

Here is a demonstration of much of the above in action:

The character is dual wielding and deals massive poison weapon damage, with all weapon damage converted to poison via the Preparation aura.
Applying Mark to the toughest target will release poison damage once we deliver enough damage to it while marked. It will also deliver a poison explosion to nearby enemies, which there are plenty of.
Tossing a grenade, modified to deal poison damage into the crowd, we soften the whole group a bit.
Hitting the marked target with Flicker, we gain the Flow status.
With damage having built up already, we deliver a Lethal Strike to the Brute, taking it out of the equation.
Eliminating the lighter enemies by using Lethal Strike repeatedly refreshes the cooldown, allowing us to spam it until we run out of energy.

https://youtu.be/IffZtDRyZgg

Coming Next

Going forward, we are going to resume regular blog posts, starting with more gameplay footage as promised.

Steam Store Page Update

Hello,

Today we updated the steam store page of Titan Quest II. We mainly removed references to certain features and languages which are going to be in the full release version, but not for the Early Access launch of Titan Quest II. Long awaited features like multiplayer or additional languages (German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese) will come throughout the Early Access progress or with the 1.0 full launch at the latest.

We do not want to cause confusion here, hence we will make sure that the store page reflects the currently available content of the game.

We recommend to keep an eye on the Early Access roadmap we are going to publish soon.

Upcoming Diablo rival Titan Quest 2 promises no loot boxes or P2W mechanics

Between Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred, Last Epoch, and the upcoming launch of Path of Exile 2 - it's a brilliant time for ARPGs. The genre is so diverse right now that we're spoiled for choice, with each entry trying something new and setting itself apart from the rest. Having so much choice does mean that new releases need to give us ample reason to try them out, though, and this is exactly what the upcoming Greek mythology ARPG Titan Quest 2 is doing. Developer Grimlore Games has promised TQ2 will never have loot boxes or pay-to-win elements, and hopes that being open with prospective players earns their trust.

Read the rest of the story...

Titan Quest 2's masteries make the Diablo rival's best aspect even better

With Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred in the rear-view mirror and Path of Exile 2 imminent, my mind is always on the next great ARPG, and Titan Quest 2 is high up my most-anticipated list. The 2006 original remains a classic of the genre, and one of the reasons it still stands out today is its distinctive class system, as you fuse two 'masteries' to create a huge number of potential combinations. Grimlore Games is building on this system for the sequel, and in a new blog post it explains exactly what to expect from Titan Quest 2 masteries when the early access launch arrives.

Read the rest of the story...

Combining two masteries to form a class

In this update, we want to share a little information about our masteries. In Titan Quest II, just like in the first Titan Quest, you will be combining two masteries to form your own class.

In the initial Early Access release, you will have access to the Earth, Storm and Warfare masteries, with many more coming as we drop our updates. You’ll be picking these early in the campaign, as we want you to experience the possible synergies between them without much of a gap between the two unlocks.

Our overarching goal is to make you feel like you’re a hero blessed by the gods themselves, possessing superhuman powers. Improving and growing your powers will be a perilous journey, but this will be necessary in order to survive against Nemesis.

As for the actual mechanics, you will be able to equip a maximum of 10 skills in your ability bar. This will allow for a wide range of playstyles, such as ones where you focus on a primary damage skill and a handful of support skills, to builds where you utilize several alternate primary damage skills with several support skills. Titan Quest II will greatly reward you when you work out skill synergies, but will also cater to those who heavily invest into a more limited toolkit.

In past blog posts we already mentioned that we will be offering separate active and passive points within skill trees, and that your active abilities can be customized via modifiers. So this time, let’s talk a bit more about what’s in the masteries instead, and we’ll also show some modifier examples.

[h2]Earth[/h2]
Combine fire and earth magic to leave the battlefield in ruins.

Many of your abilities and modifiers revolve around setting the battlefield ablaze and engulfing your enemies in flames.
Utilize fire in a controlled manner, or completely let go of any regard for safety and sacrifice your own health in favor of maximum destruction.
Cause enemies to burn over time.
Trying to not get burned, but still tempted by this mastery? Take control over earth and rock to shake things up a little, such as with earthquakes

Fissure is a line AoE skill where you break the ground open in front of you, dealing strike damage. With the Lava Fissure modifier, the fissure gets filled with lava, now dealing fire damage as well, at the cost of extra energy.

Adding in the Additional Fissures modifier will reduce your damage, but spawn extra fissures, helping you cover a much larger area.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Storm[/h2]
Take control over the battlefield with the powers of ice and lightning.

From area of effect abilities that regularly deal damage, to modifying abilities to also electrocute enemies on hit, fighting with the power of Storm will result in a battlefield full of thunder and lightning!
Use ice abilities to chill or even freeze your enemies, giving you total control over what happens in the next few moments.
Utilize lightning to shock and electrocute your enemies, locking them in place.

Cyclone is a static circular AoE skill where you create a whirling storm, dealing cold damage. With the Blizzard modifier, more damage gets dealt, and Chill/Freeze has a chance to be applied to enemies.

The Personal Storm modifier puts a smaller version of Cyclone around your character, following you around, allowing you to either stack the cyclones, or to hit more enemies at once.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Warfare[/h2]
Display your expertise in combat, becoming the ultimate warrior.

Warfare features attacks for all weapon types, giving you significant freedom to design your build.
This even includes abilities specially designed for ranged weapons other than magic staves. A warrior can be a juggernaut wading into the fray or one who specializes in attacking from afar.
Support abilities help with getting into and staying in close combat, such as via leaping into battle, or stunning enemies nearby with a powerful stomp.

Leap is a versatile mobility skill, allowing you to jump into combat, or out of trouble, while dealing some strike damage. The Cooldown Charge mod allows you to cast Leap twice in a row, at the cost of a longer cooldown.

Seismic Leap will increase your damage on landing, while also dealing damage at your launch position.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Bringing It All Together[/h2]

When picking your abilities, we want you to think about how to form interconnections between your two masteries. We are ensuring this via global mechanics that all masteries will feature in some form - sometimes via base abilities, other times via modifiers. For example, you could build up status stacks with a Warfare ability, and then consume the stacks with a Storm ability for a more powerful effect there.

Different masteries will be offering different global mechanics, allowing for unique interactions between specific mastery pairs that not all others can cover.

We will soon be sharing some more gameplay footage, so stay tuned--you will get to see all of this in action!