Generally, MMO players associate increased stats with a commensurate increase in power, so feeling like some new gear or a new level isn’t providing that oomph can be pretty disheartening. It’s a trap that Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is hoping to avoid, and the ways in which it’s going to do so are outlined in its latest dev diary.

The recent Ashbreather update applied some tweaks to itemization that lean on the design of character power primarily coming from gear, with the idea that even uncommon item drops should have an impact on how a character powers up, though obviously more rare drops will have a higher impact.

The future of stats are also discussed, starting with “soft specialization” feature that sees gear improving a specific stat that is tied to certain abilities, allowing players to build around a set of favored skills, albeit with some tradeoffs. Another planned feature is to have all stats improve every five levels; eventually this is planned to happen natively, but for now players are still going to have to purchase class traits from class trainers as they do currently.

Ultimately the goal is for stats to mean far more than they do with some of the contemporaries Pantheon is cribbing off of, but it sounds like all of this will take time to layer on.