Part 1 — Durable core
The bulk of the course. Should stay true across leagues, across 1.0, and largely across the genre.
| # | Topic | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The three questions The proportional reasoning every later topic relies on: relative change, proportion of a whole, and comparison. Practice, not theory. |
Lesson 1 |
| 2 | How a hit is built The six layers of a damage number. Increased against more, and what each is measured against. Why one stat's returns flatten while another's do not. |
Lesson 2 |
| 3 | Where base comes from Layer one in depth. Attack, spell and minion archetypes. Local against global modifiers. Conversion and gain. Which slots can reach your damage at all. |
Lesson 3 |
| 4 | From theme to skeleton Turning "I like this skill" into a plan. Which early decisions are expensive to reverse — weapon type, primary damage type, defence layer, ascendancy — and which are cheap to defer. |
Lesson 4 |
| 5 | Enemy-side scaling The layer outside everything you own. Monster resistance and armour, penetration, exposure, curses and damage-taken effects. The most commonly neglected term and frequently the largest available gain. |
Lesson 5 |
| 6 | The viability checklist What a functioning character must satisfy, treated as gates rather than a score: damage, effective health, resistances, recovery, movement, accuracy, resource sustain, ailment handling. A character fails at its weakest dimension, and surplus in one does not pay for a deficit in another. |
next |
| 7 | Why crit needs both halves Chance and damage bonus multiply each other, so investing in one without the other is close to wasted. When crit is worth pursuing and when it is a trap. |
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| 8 | Defence has the same shape Flat life and energy shield as base, %increased as multiplier, resistances and armour as separate layers. Max hit against biggest realistic incoming hit. Revisits the armour formula from the defensive side. |
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| 9 | The audit loop The repeatable steering procedure, run continuously across a character's life rather than once at the end. Applies when every gate in topic 6 is cleared — below a threshold the answer is always "fix that"; above all of them, optimisation begins. |
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| 10 | Slot-to-bucket mapping Which slots can realistically supply which stat, and how to notice when the thing you need has no remaining home. |
Lesson 10 |
| 11 | Reading an item Good modifier against filler. Tier awareness. Why a rare with three relevant modifiers usually beats a unique with one spectacular one. When a unique's downside disqualifies it. |
Lesson 11 |
| 12 | Crafting fundamentals What each category of currency does. Expected-value thinking. Why crafting on bases you would otherwise vendor is free. Why unspent currency in SSF is worth nothing. When to stop and change slots. |
Lesson 12 |
| 13 | Knowing when a build is done Setting a target power level deliberately instead of chasing an unbounded ceiling, and recognising when the next upgrade is not worth the time. |
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Part 2 — Current patch
Deliberately small and disposable. Regenerated from live sources at the start of a session rather than recalled, and not yet written. Covers only: the current league mechanic and what power it grants, current crafting systems and their accessible entry points, recent changes to how scaling works, and anything that meaningfully changed since the last patch.
The benchmark numbers from topic 6 live here, not in Part 1. The dimensions a character must satisfy are durable — every character needs damage, effective health, capped resistances, recovery, and a way to handle ailments, and that list does not change between patches. The thresholds are not durable: what damage figure suffices for a given tier of content, and what health pool survives it, both move with balance changes and content scaling. Part 1 teaches the checklist and how to reason about each gate; Part 2 supplies the current figures and is expected to go stale.
Reference
Compressed, revisitable, built to print. These outlive the lessons.
- Damage Formula — the six layers and the one division, on one page
- Glossary — every term defined once and used consistently
How the pieces fit
Lessons teach one thing and get read once. Reference cards get read many times. The learning records in the workspace track what's been established, so later sessions don't re-teach what's already landed or repeat a framing that didn't work.
The sequence follows the order a character is actually built. Topics 4 and 6 come early because construction needs a specification before it needs mechanics — knowing what the finished character must satisfy is what makes the later topics legible. Topics 5, 7 and 8 then supply the detail behind each gate in turn.
Order is not sacred. Topics 11 and 12 — reading items and crafting — can be pulled forward if the theory ahead of them starts to feel like a detour.