The Warrior was the second class we designed in full, and it is the one that taught us the most about what a class synergy should feel like.
Its fantasy is narrow on purpose: a fighter who becomes more dangerous by staying in melee. Not a rotation to memorise, not a resource to bank — a state you build by being where the class wants you to be, and lose by leaving.
Sharp and Blunt
The kit splits across two martial disciplines.
Swordsman is Sharp. Shorter cast times, shorter cooldowns, tighter shapes, more decisions per second. Cleave, Lunge, Blade Flurry, Executioner's Cut.
Bruiser is Blunt. Longer windups, broader shapes, more impact, knockback and stagger and pack control. Hammer Slam, Quakebreaker, Skullcrack, Anvil Drop. The signature weapon is a two-handed warhammer and it reads exactly as heavy as that sounds.
Each discipline has its own ramp — Discipline Trance — that builds when you land that discipline's attacks and decays when you stop. Both can be active at once.
The rule that makes it work
Here is the part we got wrong first and had to correct.
In an early draft, casting a Blunt attack reset your Sharp ramp. It was the obvious design: it makes the choice matter, it punishes sloppiness, it rewards commitment. Every instinct says put a cost on switching.
It was miserable.
What it actually produced was a class that quietly forbade half its own kit. You had eight abilities and permission to use four, and the moment you reached for the wrong one the game took something away from you. Players do not experience that as depth. They experience it as a rotation with a tripwire in it.
So the rule now is flat:
Sharp and Blunt are unrelated timers. A wrong-discipline cast does not reset, advance, or refresh the other.
You can focus one. You can maintain both. You can let one fall off deliberately because this fight does not want it. All three are legitimate, none of them is a mistake, and hybrid weaving is intended rather than tolerated.
The depth did not go anywhere. It moved from "do not press the wrong button" to "which of these two engines is worth feeding right now" — which is a question worth asking every fight, instead of a punishment for asking it wrong.
No defensive slots at all
The other thing worth saying about the Warrior: it takes zero defensive abilities. Eight attacks, one mobility, one summon.
That is not an oversight and it is not a nerf. Timefather has no block button, no parry, no dodge-roll — there is no reactive defence anywhere in the game — so survival comes from positioning, from what you built, and from the elemental wards your own casting generates. A class that spends every slot on offence is making a coherent statement rather than leaving a hole.
The contrast is the point. The Mage spends two of its flexible slots on defensive utility and ends up a glass siege engine with a thin protective tail. The Warrior spends all eight on attack across two disciplines. Same budget, completely different animal, and you can read the difference off the ability bar before you cast anything.
What we are still unsure about
Whether two ramps is one too many to track in the middle of a real fight. It reads clean on paper and it reads clean in a controlled test, and neither of those is a dungeon with four other people shouting.
That is a question for the Fathomless Caverns, and we will write about it when we have an answer rather than a hope.