Mastery Past the Cap: Ten Grandmaster Ranks, a Hidden Rank, and the Soul Jade

The bosses in dungeons should also drop cores and skill books, or even better: let's add Grandmaster skill levels up to 10. With level 10 it can flip to a level above Grandmaster that is not visible in the skill overview yet. [...] Bosses should have a chance to drop an item that can be studied to eventually level up any one skill (no specific item per skill).

Where the ladder used to end #

A skill in Dekiro has always been a single number, its rank. The first fourteen ranks come from skill points, one per character level. The fifteenth turns the skill into its Mastery version, M1, and from there only skillbooks raise it: Shadows drop them, reading one is a gamble between 70% and 35%, and the tenth successful read makes the skill Grandmaster. That is the ladder of a popular Korean MMO that this game grew out of, and until this week it ended there. A Grandmaster skill was finished.11 The ladder lives in one pure script, scripts/skills/skill_rules.gd. Ranks 1-14 are Lv 1-14, 15-24 are M1-M10, 25-34 are now G1-G10 and 35 is the new top rank.

The request above arrived the evening of the first playtest (post 18), as one message that started small (bosses should drop Shadow Cores and books) and grew a new layer on top of the skill ladder. The coordinator offered names for the two new things; the developer picked Peerless for the hidden rank and Soul Jade for the item, and added two rules before the agent started: "of course the item should not be dropped every time from bosses, but with a chance", and "skill books can also drop".

Ten more rungs #

Grandmaster became ten ranks, G1 to G10. Old characters needed no migration: their Grandmaster was stored as rank 25, which is now simply G1.

The scaling keeps the shape the lower ranks already had. Every rank adds 7% of the skill's base damage and 3% of its heal or buff strength. Heals and buffs grow slower on purpose: after the playtest, a permanently held Iron Skin at the old numbers would have given a Grandmaster 86% damage reduction, and ten more ranks of that would break the game rather than reward it.

So the ten new ranks are worth about as much as the ten Mastery ranks before them: a quarter more damage over many hours, not a doubling. None of the monster numbers from the balance passes (posts 15 and 22) had to move, because no character gets there before the level cap.

One jade for every skill #

The most interesting decision in the request is in its last sentence: "no specific item per skill". The skillbooks are the opposite: a book teaches one skill, and since the drop picks the skill, many books are useless to the player who finds them. The book system needs a whole support structure for that. Drops are weighted three to one toward skills you've already mastered, books of other schools can be traded or sold, and since the playtest your own grandmaster swaps a foreign book for a random one of yours, once an hour.

A Soul Jade has none of that problem. In the item's own words, it is "a sliver of the Sanctuary Stone's jade that drank a fallen master's last insight". The player decides which Grandmaster skill studies it: right-click it in the bag, press Study in the skill window, or drag the jade onto the skill. A small dialog lists every skill of the school with its rank, the chance and where it leads.

Three things come out of that choice:

• Every drop is good news. A jade is never the wrong item. That makes it safe to keep it rare, because rarity only hurts when the rare thing might be useless.
• The player builds the character. Push one skill to the top or spread the jades over five; both are valid, and the dialog shows what each choice costs.
• One stack in the bag, not twenty-four. The study item has one icon, one tooltip, one place in the inventory, and one sell price for the players who'd rather have the gold.

The jade is also tradeable like any material. A friend who has finished their skills can hand theirs over.

The odds, and why a failure still counts #

Studying is a gamble, like reading. The chance falls from 45% at G1 to 18% at G9, and the step from G10 to Peerless is 4%. The jade is used up either way. What softens it is the bad-luck protection the books already had: every failure in a row on the same skill adds 4 points to its next chance (1 point at G10), and a success resets the streak.22 The failure streaks are per skill and saved with the character, together with the study cooldown. A forged save file can't skip either: loading clamps the cooldown to five minutes and drops junk.

The protection matters more than the base numbers suggest. Worked out over the whole ladder:

On the early steps the streak bonus hardly matters: G1 to G2 would take 2.2 jades without it instead of 2.1. On the long shots it decides everything. Without it, Peerless would average 25 jades, and one player in ten would still be trying after 56. With it, the average is about 10, and the chance reaches 100% at the 97th try at the very worst. Nobody will get there, but the ceiling exists. That is what bad-luck protection is for: the lucky and the typical player barely notice it, and the unlucky tail is cut off.

This seems to break a rule from the Fullmoon post (17), "gamble on progress, never on rare rewards". It doesn't, because of what is gambled. The Shard of the Sanctuary Stone drops once at the end of the final raid and can't be gambled away. A Soul Jade is a repeatable drop from every dungeon boss past level 25. Losing one costs you a dungeon run, not the best moment of the game.

Rest for the mind #

Between two studies, the mind needs five minutes of play to rest. The study dialog counts the wait down, and the refusal says what helps: "Your mind needs rest: 4:12 (destroying Shadows clears it faster)". Each Shadow you destroy takes a minute off.

The cooldown exists so that a stack of jades isn't one click session: twenty jades saved over a week of dungeons would otherwise go in twenty seconds, failure on top of failure. Spread over play, each study is its own small moment.

Why Shadows? They are the game's core loop. The Shadow stones are what the hunting grounds are built around, they drop the skillbooks, and reading a book already requires one destroyed Shadow between two reads. The jade's rest follows the same idea: progress on your skills comes from going out and fighting, not from waiting in town. A player who hunts Shadows between dungeon runs will rarely see the cooldown at all; a player who logs in only to study waits five minutes. The timer counts play time, not wall-clock time, so logging out doesn't skip it either.

Bosses drop it, by chance #

Soul Jades come only from dungeon bosses, and never every time. The chance grows with the boss's level, so the late dungeons pay better:

Jades start at boss level 25, because nobody has a Grandmaster skill that early. Chests and Elites in the wild drop neither jades nor books: those entries are marked as boss-only in the loot tables.33 data/items.json, the loot tables dungeon_boss, boss, elite and first_shadow. A material entry can scale with the victim's level (chance_per_level, max_chance), and an item id of @skillbook drops a skillbook picked for whoever made the kill.

The skillbooks from bosses answer the first half of the request. Unlike a Shadow's book, a boss's book can be from any school, with your own school's skills twice as likely (on top of the three-to-one weight toward skills you've already mastered). Books from other schools aren't wasted: they can be traded, sold, or swapped at your grandmaster.

A test rolls a level 80 final boss 400 times and checks the result lands in a window: a jade now and then, never one per kill, and a skillbook more often. It rolls a chest and a wild Elite the same number of times and expects zero of either.

Peerless: the rank nobody tells you about #

The part of the request that needed the most care was "not visible in the skill overview yet". A hidden rank is easy to hide and easy to spoil. Every place in the UI that talks about the next step had to agree.

Up to G9, the tooltip shows the next rank's numbers ("At G6: Damage 485% of your attack"). At G10 it shows only this: "Next: ??? (a Soul Jade may show the way)". The study dialog says "Chance 4% -> ???". The jade's description ends with a rumour, "Some say there is a step beyond the tenth." Nothing else names it. Once one of the character's skills is Peerless, the word appears everywhere at once: the other G10 skills show "-> Peerless" and the real numbers. A test walks through exactly these states and checks every string.44 test_peerless_stays_hidden_until_reached in tests/run_tests.gd, against the skill tooltips (SkillTips) and the study dialog (SoulJadeDialog). A tooltip drawn without a character keeps the secret too.

The name comes from the wuxia vocabulary the game's lore already uses. Peerless translates 无双, "without equal", the word for a martial artist nobody can match. The skill window gives it a line of its own, "Peerless: without equal", in jade.

A clear step, not a bigger number #

A hidden rank that feels like G11 would be a letdown. So Peerless is built to be noticed:

• More damage and support: +25% of the skill's base damage and +15% of its heal or buff strength on top of the rank scaling. Against G10 that is about a tenth more damage (Whirlwind's hit goes from 1,282 to 1,406 in the screenshots).
• A bigger area: every radius, length and width grows by a fifth. Whirlwind reaches 4.6 m instead of 3.8, enough to catch the stragglers at the edge of a pack.
• Its own look. The effect tiers had been normal, Master and Grandmaster, with Grandmaster adding a golden second shockwave, sparks and a pillar of light. Peerless is a fourth tier: the same, a bit bigger, with a jade ring further out, jade sparks and a jade pillar, and a jade crown on buffs.

A skill's data can also replace the Peerless step with something of its own (an extra hit, a longer dash), the same way skills already change shape at M1 and G1.55 A "peerless" block in a skill's entry in data/skills.json, applied after the bigger area (SkillData.params_for_rank). The effect tier is in scripts/skills/skill_fx.gd. None does yet. That's a natural next pass once players have Peerless skills and can say which ones feel flat.

How long it takes #

The balance model from post 15 got a new phase for this. Its characters still play from level 1 to 90 (now in about 21 hours, after the playtest halved the target), and then keep going: 60% of the time re-running the dungeons that still drop jades at level 90, the rest hunting Shadows. They study every jade on the highest Grandmaster skill first, so one skill goes to G10 and Peerless before the next one starts.

The first finding was that nobody reaches G1 before level 90. Skill points spread over several damage skills, and the best skill at the cap is about M5. The four jades a character finds while levelling just wait in the bag. That's deliberate: the jade ladder is the long tail after the story, not a race inside it, and it doesn't move any of the levelling numbers.

After 90, the median of 60 simulated Blade characters looks like this:

The median character's first skill reaches G10 about 53 hours after the cap, about 74 hours into the game in total, and its first Peerless skill arrives about 74 hours after the cap. At 200 hours there are two Peerless skills and about thirty Grandmaster levels: a long way from all six skills at the top. The ladder has no wall at any point. Every hour adds a little, and at no point does the next step need something you can't get.66 tools/balance/progression.py, the endgame() phase, about 0.66 jades per hour of dungeon running. The numbers are in docs/balance/model.json under skills; the design doc keeps the summary.

What we're not sure about #

• The pace is a model. "0.66 jades per dungeon hour" assumes clears as fast as the bots manage. Real runs with puzzles, walking and loot breaks will be slower, and the hours above longer.
• Focus versus spread. The model pushes one skill. A player who spreads jades sees more G levels and later Peerless; whether that feels better or worse is a playtest question.
• The cooldown. Five minutes, a minute per Shadow, is a guess at a rhythm. If jades pile up anyway, it's in the way; if players never see it, it does nothing. Either answer is one number.
• The secret. A hidden rank lasts until the first player posts about it, and this post doesn't help.

Takeaways #

• Extend the ladder you have. Ten more ranks with the same per-rank scaling fit everything that was balanced before; a new system on top would have had to be balanced from scratch.
• Make the rare item useful to everyone. One study item for every skill means no drop is ever wasted, so it can be rare without feeling cruel.
• Cut off the bad-luck tail, keep the gamble. A few points per failure barely touch the easy steps, cut the cost of the long shot by more than half, and make the worst case finite.
• Tie the pacing to the core loop. A cooldown that Shadows shorten rewards playing, not waiting.
• Hide the top consistently. A secret rank only works if every tooltip, dialog and item text agrees on what it doesn't say, so a test checks all of them.

What's next #

The skills now have somewhere to go after level 90. The next question is the same one the Fullmoon weapons raised: whether a hundred hours of dungeons stay interesting, and what to add to them so they do.