MMO Skill Tree Mastery Pack

Seven new mastery tracks built on damage schools rather than weapons, a Mastery Trainer who talks, hands out an errand and keeps a daily worth walking back for, and a full rewrite of how every mastery file is written. This is the first release since 1.1.1, so it also carries the Piercing Shot, Magic and Artillery fixes that were sitting unreleased behind it. Nothing you have already bought changes: every node id, price, gate and bonus in the older tracks carries across untouched, so purchased nodes, respec state and stat sacrifices are exactly where you left them.

### Seven damage-school mastery tracks

- **New: a mastery track per damage school.** Fire, Ice, Lightning, Water, Arcane, Void and Poison each get their own ten-node track. A school node follows the damage and not the weapon, so buying Fire pays out on a fireball, on a meteor, and on a molten hammer swing alike, whichever skill threw it. Each school also sells resistance to itself, which stacks into the same 90% cap as every other reduction.

- **New: combat-level gating.** The school tracks read your combat level (your highest COMBAT skill) rather than one named skill, opening at 16 and then stepping at 40, 55, 70, 76, 80, 88 and 92 as you climb. A mage and a rogue reach the same nodes by the same route.

- **New: the Ascendant tier.** Past the capstone, each school offers a choice between a cooldown cut across every ability of that school and a second slab of flat school damage.

- **New: three flavor nodes a school, tucked behind the spine.** Off the main line of damage and resistance, each school hides three nodes that sharpen one of its own spells: a wider Fireball blast, a longer Flame Stream, a cheaper Ice Bolt, a further-reaching Soul Drain, a broader Thorn Patch, and so on across the seven schools. None of them sits on the opening screen, and the last one opens only through the one above it.

- **New: an Eternal node per school.** +1% school damage a purchase, no limit, each buy 10% dearer than the last.

- Every new track title, tier name and capstone name ships in all nine languages.

### The Mastery Trainer

- **The Mastery Trainer talks, and this pack owns them outright.** Pressing F on the trainer at the Forgotten Temple opens a short conversation - see the quests they offer, open the mastery menu, or say farewell - in all nine languages. Their model, their role, their nameplate, their place in the temple and their dialogue all ship here now rather than in the mod itself, so a server without this pack simply has no trainer standing and reaches the Mastery screen from the hub menu instead. If you already run the pack, nothing changes in play.

- **The mastery quests are the trainer's.** First Milestone, Essence Collector, Essence Devotee and Path of Mastery are offered on the trainer's quest list instead of landing in your log by themselves, and each one is handed in back at the trainer. Rewards wait in your quest log until you collect them rather than being paid out the moment you finish.

- **New quest: A Word with the Trainer.** Once the meeting down in the Forgotten Temple is done, the Adventurer's Guide asks you to cross the landing and speak to the keeper standing on it. You take it from the Guide and finish it at the trainer, so it reads as being sent somewhere rather than as a quest appearing on its own. The trainer answers with a line written for a first meeting, then drops into their usual menu, and it pays one mastery point, enough to spend on the screen it just introduced. It needs mastery switched on and the temple meeting finished, so it never appears on a server where the trainer is not standing.

- **New daily: The Trainer's Due.** A calendar daily at the trainer that refreshes at the day boundary rather than on a rolling timer. Pay a tribute of 75 life essence, 3 linen scrap and ten kills of anything at all, in any order, and take the trainer's offering: four independent rolls, so a good day pays several at once.

  - The essence roll always pays, and pays more the further along you are. It reads your combat level and your luck together, so a veteran's offering is answered in kind while somebody who has only just met the trainer still walks away with something.

  - A mastery point, about two days in five. This is the roll to watch if you retune the table; everything else is pocket change beside it.

  - A 30-minute 1.5x experience boost across every skill, about one day in ten.

  - About one day in thirty-three, the **Adept's Staff**: a copy of the trainer's own bo that cannot be crafted, carrying +20 staff damage, +20 Mana and +5 Health while held.

- **The rare pulls announce themselves.** When the boost or the staff actually lands you get the gold toast and legendary-chest chime the mod ships under the `Rare_Find` name, and never over an empty hand.

### A new way to write mastery files

- **New: structured mastery files.** A track is one PascalCase file the plugin's own codec reads (`Target`, `Requires`, and a `Nodes` map) with the same `Cost` grammar every priced thing on the server uses and the same `Requires` grammar quests and achievements gate on. What you could author before, you author more plainly now, and the in-game validator (`/mmoconfig validate`) checks every ability id, skill id and modifier key a track names.

- **New: shared bases via `Parent`.** Two `Abstract` base files (`Mastery_Base`, `Mastery_School_Base`) carry what every track shares; a track names one as its `Parent` and retunes only what differs, down to a single leaf of a single node. Your own packs can reuse them the same way.

- **New: mastery generators.** The per-skill families (nine combat tracks, the gathering trio, the utility trio) are each written ONCE as a `MasteryGenerators/` file that stamps the family out per skill. Making one member special is just authoring a file of its id: an authored file always wins over the generated member.

- **Modifier entries author the canonical PascalCase grammar**: `ParamKey` (the older `Key` spelling still parses), the `SET` shape where a value is replaced outright, and a `Condition` carried directly on the modifier it gates instead of a wrapper entry.

- **The pack's quests and achievements speak the shared progression shape.** An achievement's criteria are a map keyed by criterion id, and every payout goes through one `Rewards` group where `Auto` pays on the spot and `Claim` waits to be collected. Behavior-preserving; nobody's progress is re-pointed.

### Fixes

- **Fixed: the Piercing Shot pierce node grants its extra targets.** The node shipped as an "add if missing" modifier, which only injects a pierce value when the ability has none; Piercing Shot always had a base pierce of 3, so the node granted nothing. It adds flatly now, taking Piercing Shot from 3 targets to 5 with the node purchased.

- **Fixed: Piercing Shot's damage nodes no longer double-apply.** The damage tier nodes and the Eternal upgrade were both folded into the ability's own cast-time damage AND separately summed again at the general combat-damage layer, so purchasing them granted roughly double the intended bonus. They apply once now, at cast time only.

- **Fixed: Magic and Artillery mastery bonuses apply to your weapon swings.** Both tracks' damage, lifesteal, and combo bonuses were authored without their combat target, so an owned node (Sharpened's +8% Magic damage, Vampiric's lifesteal, and their Artillery counterparts) silently did nothing on a wand, spellbook, bomb, or gun swing. Both tracks name their skill now, matching every other combat mastery; the other eight tracks were audited and were already correct. (Reported on the community Discord.)

- **Fixed: the Fireball pierce node stacks.** Burning Pierce grants one extra pierced target on top of Fireball's own base, its card reads as that +1, and it stacks with any other pierce bonus you hold (a pierce charm included) instead of overwriting the ability's pierce total outright.

### Upgrading

- **Update the pack and the plugin together.** This release requires MMO Skill Tree 1.6.0+ and ZiggfreedCommon 2.0.0+. A pre-2.0.0 copy of this pack has no readable tracks on those plugin versions.

- **Nothing to do for your players.** Track content is unchanged in play, so purchased nodes, respec state and stat sacrifices carry across as they are.

- **If you wrote your own mastery files against this pack, re-author them.** The old `extends`/`params` template files are retired; a single track is one `Server/MMOSkillTree/Masteries/<Id>.json` (reuse via a `Parent` pointing at an `Abstract` base) and a whole per-skill family is one `Server/MMOSkillTree/MasteryGenerators/<Id>.json`. The mod's `CONTENT_PACKS.md` has the shapes, and the web Migration Converter will rewrite a `mastery.json` for you.