Titan Quest II opens the Spirit Mastery and finally lets you craft

Titan Quest II just got its biggest early access update so far. Build 0.7.0 ships two full systems at once: the Spirit Mastery, which summons shades from the Underworld and pays for its spells with your own life, and a crafting system that finally lets you touch item affixes instead of praying to the loot table. In between there's a long run of balance changes, loot tweaks and fixes for things that had been grating for months.

Masters of Spirit call on the forces of the Underworld to summon shades of the dead and cast otherworldly spells, burning their own life force to keep going. In numbers: 10 new active skills and 26 passives, noticeably more than any previous mastery shipped with.

The deeper change, though, is a design one. Until now each passive could hold at most 3 Feats, and that cap meant your picks were basically pre-determined by your build direction. In Spirit the restriction is gone: more passives, closer to each other, and the choice becomes which specific area you want to shore up. The studio frames it as a first step —if the community likes it, the same approach will roll out to the older masteries— and admits the cost: with that many options, getting an overview of your passives is harder to read at a glance.

Spirit also debuts the Execution mechanic, which for now only otherwise appears on Rogue's Trickshot, and it comes with a lifesteal rework: stronger early, but falling off harder if you don't invest in it later. On top of that, many abilities can now reserve life instead of energy, the foundation the new low-life playstyle rests on.

The system allows four actions on an item: replace an affix with a random different one following the item's rules, reroll an affix's values, add affixes if the item is below its maximum, and level the whole item up to your current level.

The underlying debate is an old one in the genre, and the studio lays it out plainly: control the outcome too well and the item hunt stops mattering; control nothing and it's pure frustrating grind. The answer here runs through escalating costs and which materials enter at which stage. Early and midgame, the idea is that you buy cheap instant upgrades and quickly hit a point where waiting for the next natural drop is smarter. Lategame, farming materials efficiently does let you chase perfect rolls, though sometimes hunting a new base is still the better move.

Two of early access's most repeated complaints get an answer in this patch. Base movement speed is up —the game felt slow, especially early— though the studio says it aimed for a balance so investing in speed through gear still feels like progression. And drop rates improved, mostly for Epics and Relics: Relic chance from non-boss Elites is doubled, boss and rare chest loot got better, and there are more cooldown reduction affixes available so cooldown skills can actually work.

General balance brings some cuts you'll feel: the base critical hit multiplier drops from 2 to 1.5 and super crits from 3 to 2.5, while the Enhanced Area modifier goes from 50/100/150/200/250% down to 30/60/90/120/150%. On the other side, the Doom mechanic no longer resets its duration when you add a stack, which makes it far more comfortable to actually land.

Among the bugfixes there's one worth reading twice before you jump back in: a longstanding error in the monster damage scaling formula that ignored expected player resistances for non-physical damage has been fixed. With the fix, at level 21 enemies deal 50% more non-physical damage than before, and from level 37 onward, 100% more. If you'd been neglecting resistances, this is the patch to fix that.

The rest of the list is long and mostly hygiene: two memory leaks fixed, a possible crash on returning to the main menu, freezes during dialogue, several quest blockers, and in co-op fixes for invisible transformations on clients, dialogue that refused to advance, and a crash when a conversation started with someone still loading in. World rendering is also suspended while you sit in a fullscreen menu, to give your GPU a break.

The update is live now, and the full notes —including the long per-mastery change list— are in the official announcement. With Spirit, crafting and the new passive philosophy all on the table, the studio explicitly asked for feedback on all three: this is the kind of patch that decides where the game is heading, not just what it ships today.