Video Game / Torchlight II

The playable classes, clockwise from the top: Embermage, Berserker, Outlander and Engineer.

Torchlight II is a 2012 Action RPG developed by Runic Games. As you might infer, it is the direct sequel to Torchlight, and the predecessor to Torchlight III. It adds Co-Op Multiplayer to the franchise (a lack of which was a near-universal criticism of the original, especially since Diablo II was doing it a decade ago) and is meant to serve as a stepping-stone towards the proposed Torchlight MMO. The playable classes include:

• The Engineers: Genius Bruisers who wear Steampunk Powered Armor and wield giant wrenches (as if they were hammers), various two-hand weapons, cannons or a one-hander and shield.
• The Embermage: Squishy Wizards who have a more traditional mage look and combat style in contrast to the Magitek-styled Alchemist from the original.
• The Outlander: Mysterious vagabonds and nomads who are proficient with both ranged weapons (specially guns) and magic. The stat allocation system is somewhat biased in favour of magic Outlanders, as effective gunslingers are more difficult to build, especially if using shotgonnes.
• The Berserker: Proud Warrior Race Guys (and girls!) specializing in hand-to-hand combat. The Berserker is a offensive/DPS based class, (think of the Fury Warrior from World of Warcraft, but most optimally with claw class weapons; although they can use two handers, just not quite as well) and does not have the defensive/tank oriented skills of the Engineer.

Originally meant to be out in Spring of 2011, it faced some delays, but it finally came out in September 20, 2012. It was so popular that it actually crashed the registration servers on launch day, causing some tongue-in-cheek comparisons with the launch of another big Action-RPG.

A fair share of the original's gameplay-related tropes still apply, but a lot of new features and mechanics make debut here, so be sure to list the new stuff on this page. Also, beware of some unmarked Late Arrival Spoilers.

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This game provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo:
  • Corpsefire skeletons attack you by pulling off their skulls and throwing them.
  • Nether Plaguebearers fire out diseased pustules from their backs that swell up and explode.
• Action Bomb: The spider mines, one of the Engineer's mechanical constructs. There's also enemy versions that look like clockwork beetles, deployed by Ezrohir.
• Alien Blood: Different types of enemies have different blood colors: beasts and humanoids have red blood, insectoids and corporeal undeads have green blood, and the Netherim have bluish-purple blood.
• All-Powerful Bystander: The second act has you asking a powerful Djinni named Fazeer Shah, who is stated to be stronger than the guardians themselves, for help. He agrees to help only if you entertain him with some quests and in the end he only tricks you into fulfilling his end of the bargain yourself, ridding him of his rival in the process. More specifically, the defeat of Ezrek Khan also frees the Guardian - which your character was trying to do in the first place - without Fazeer having to lift a finger.
• An Ice Person: The Embermage's Frost skill tree can make them this. The Berserker's Tundra skills contain plenty of ice related skills in a different form along with two electricity examples.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Each hub area has a "tutor" that can refund up to your last three spent skill points. Also, you first reach the hub world around level 3, so you can undo all of your starting skills to work on a build you want as soon as you reach the first town.
  • You can re-buy any item you have sold at the same price you sold it.
  • Level-Locked Loot is present, with a level and stat requirements, just like in the first game and the Diablo series. However, unlike the original game, where you have to match the level AND the stat requirements in order to equip something, here you can fulfill either of them in order use the gear.
  • Quest items do not take inventory space.
• Apocalyptic Log: There are several diary entries spread around the Abandoned Sawmill, detailing how the inhabitants were offed by werewolves in the span of five days.
• Artifact Title: The eponymous town is destroyed in the opening cutscene and doesn't even appear in the game, aside from a small cameo as a (still burning) landmark in the loading screen's maps.
• Asteroids Monster: Now sometimes Champions and their flunkies will have the "Dividing" trait. What this means is that when they die, they spawn two new bosses of the same mob type. These new ones are at least partially weaker, but the sudden jump in incoming DPS can still prove lethal. However it's also beneficial as both of the newly spawned champions reward a similar lump of experience and fame for killing them. The tar slimes in the Ossean Wastes, the respective Phase Beast challenge area and in Tarroch's Tomb divide into smaller slimes until they reach the tar drops that can be stepped on to defeat but slows you down.
• Automatic Crossbow: Crossbows actually fire faster than regular bows of the same level and have better range, but they deal less DPS.
• Back from the Dead: Some certain Wolfpack Bosses from the original (The Banshee Trio) are back for another round here.
• Bears Are Bad News: The Sturmbeornen, which are bear-like humanoids.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: You free the enslaved and brainwashed Mana Guardian by attacking in a bossfight until its armor breaks and frees it.
• BFG: Cannons. They could well be mounted on the side of a ship and not look out of place, and yet your character lugs them around like nothing. One wonders how the recoil doesn't knock the thing out of their grip. The Engineer's Construction skill tree contains a couple of Cannon-based skills.
• BFS: Greatswords. Like regular swords, they're average in speed, damage and reach.
• Betting Mini-Game: Duros the Blade returns from the previous game and you can rescue him during a sidequest in Act II, after which you can go to him to purchase unidentified items.
• Body Horror/Lovecraftian Superpower: Anyone corrupted by the Nether tends to undergo some rather nasty mutations. Mostly tentacles sprouting out of their faces.
• Bonus Dungeon: There are a handful of extra dungeons and side areas not related to any quest, a few more are added in New Game Plus. Some Phase Beast areas might not have a particular challenge and instead have you running through a gauntlet of enemies Zerg Rushing you.
  • The Mapworks (unlocked after beating the Final Boss) is a whole collection of them as an alternative to New Game Plus. These maps can have random positive and negative effects for the player and monsters as well.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Engineer's healing robot. Not too flashy, doesn't do any damage, but when you forget to have it deployed, it shows.
  • The Engineer's forcefield provides some extra physical damage absorption and knockback resistance. This works in tandem with the abovementioned healing robot to make Engineers the single hardest class to kill.
  • The Embermage's Prismatic Bolts doesn't look too flashy, but each of the Roboteching missiles has a chance of inflicting all four types of elemental damage which, coupled with its high refire rate and low mana cost per cast, means it will usually do some damage to anything. Its damage can also be amplified by the Embermage's three Fire, Ice, Lightning Brand passive skills, turning it into a highly accurate offensive skill that does impressive amounts of damage.
  • The Outlander's Glaive Throw seeks out enemies, rebounds off its first target to hit others, deals a solid chunk of poison damage even when it is left at rank 1, and even adds charge to boot.
  • The Berserker's Shadow Burst heals you when it hits enemies and has an innate chance to break shields, but it can also act as a cheap escape skill if you leave it at rank 1.
  • Escape skills in general, each class has at least one kind of rapid movement skill (Storm Burst and Onslaught for Engineers, Rune Vault and Burning Leap for Outlanders, Frost Phase for Embermages, and Wolf Strike and the aforementioned Shadow Burst for Berserkers) that doesn't hurt to invest at least one point into, these also ignore any slowing effects which can make the difference for dodging nasty attacks like the troll's overhead swing, more so if you can get boosts to your casting speed.
  • Passive skills. Unlike Active Skills, which evolve via the Tier system, investing points in them only increases the percentage bonus they grant to you, which is not too exciting. However, investing skill points in them is still highly recommended, as they generate nice bonuses that scale with your stats and/or equipment and increase the chances of triggering random beneficial effects.
  Northernlion: (...) I feel like I try to be a 'responsible dad', and the kids are like: "Come on dad! Get the skill where you transform into a wolf" and I'm like: "No! You gotta get those percentage bonuses, they're gonna help you in the late game."
• Brutal Bonus Level: Tarroch's Tomb, only available in a New Game Plus. It's an 10-wave arena fight with enemy spawns that start at level 100 (100 being the maximum for characters) and the final wave contains level 200 enemies. There's treasure whose value increases depending on waves beaten, but if the player dies, the treasure disappears- which, considering the enemies' levels, can occur easily, a simple graze from the enemies near the end of the waves and that red orb ceases to exist.
• Chainsaw Good: Three of the unique greatswords in level progression have a chainsaw blade though, like many other Oddly Shaped Swords, it has no effect in terms of gameplay.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Cannons are held in such a way.
• Charged Attack: Of the "collect" type. The Engineer's charge meter has five "pips" that fill as you deal more damage through attacks and certain skills. Many skills benefit from the charge in three ways, consuming a single pip to make it stronger, depleting the entire meter to increase the effects based on how full it was or passively benefiting from the meter without affecting it.
• Collapsing Ceiling Boss: Quite a number of bosses have an ability to drop chunks of objects from the ceiling, such as General Grell and the Manticore's Mate.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In addition to loot enchantments (green for uncommons, blue for rares, orange for unique artifacts), enemies' lifebars now give you a hand. Standard mooks are red; random Boss versions of mooks are purple; and plot-critical bosses are orange.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game has white (common) < green (uncommon) < blue (rare) < orange (unique) < red (legendary), with purple being reserved for quest-related items.
• Confusion Fu: One of the Embermage passives makes regular attacks with a wand have a chance of causing "bizarre, random elemental disturbances", which can be anything from a random bat appearing and then blowing up on your enemies' faces to a giant meteor dropping out of nowhere on their heads. Having high points in this skill makes running out of mana an interesting experience.
  • It also applies to certain spells, including the starting Magma Missiles spell, that quickly escalates into a chain reaction of randomly over the top destruction that has to be seen to be believed (for optimal chaos, try it with the Shock Bolts skill, which pierces enemies and fires several bolts at once, each hit having a chance to trigger an effect. It's a thing of beauty). Their Prismatic Rift passive also has a chance to teleport enemies away randomly when struck and inflict a random elemental effect on them.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Champions and Boss monsters will be resistant if not outright immune to most of the player's Status Effects and You Shall Not Evade Me skills. Though they are not immune to being blinded which makes skills such as Blast Cannon, Glacial Shatter and Shotgonne Mastery + Rapid Fire effective at keeping them from targeting you.
• Coup de Grâce: A passive skill available to the Engineer, dealing damage to a stunned enemy inflicts damage based on the player's modified Strength attribute multiplied by an amount dependent on points invested but there's a hidden cooldown to stop players from, say, throwing Shock Grenades to stun a group of enemies then Coup de Grâce them all.
• Covers Always Lie: The 'box art' shown above (the actual game doesn't have a boxed version yet) and certain loading screens depict the male Engineer as a hefty Space Marine right out of Warhammer 40,000 (epic chin included) but his real character model isn't half as buff and he doesn't get that particular armor in-game. The male Berserker is also a lot wirier than the art indicates but at least he does get claws similar to those in the art (unfortunately they're low tier). On the flipside, the female character models are more modest than their art too.
• Critical Hit: A central combat mechanic in this game. Critical hits automatically breaks enemy shields if they have one; otherwise, they deal maximum damage if that attack has a damage range, then amplifies it by the critical damage bonus stat, which can go all the way up to +500% bonus damage. Berserkers have several passive abilities that are based around dealing critical hits; in particular, their unique charge mechanic makes all of their direct melee attacks critical hits and greatly boosts critical chance for all other attacks. With enough Dexterity and the right equipment it is theoretically possible for any class to have a 100 percent critical hit chance.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Various abilities of skills, ember or weapons can decrease a target's defense. Ranging from being a side effect such as Blast Cannon, Ravage, Rapidfire, Iron Embers, etc. to being a direct debuff casted on them such as Blade Pact.
• Damage Over Time: A debuff that comes in different flavors, be it fire, ice, electric, poison, or physical (bleeding) damage over X seconds, although regular fire damage has an innate chance of inflicting this naturally. They bypass armor and can be amplified with a high Focus stat, making them as viable a means of killing enemies as direct damage.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Many bosses and mechanical enemies will explode harmlessly when killed, including Ezrohir infantry which is odd, considering the dead-before-you-got-there corpses (like the dead Vanquisher Guards of Act I) in the Ossean Wastes can be dead Ezrohir which don't explode.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Pistols, bows, crossbows, wands and many skills will aim up or down if your enemy is above or below but the basic attacks of shotgonnes and cannons don't have this as they attack in a cone in front of you. Even with the other weapons, the game tends to move your character in a spot that would block your shots anyways, leaving you to wait for the enemy to drop down, run up to where the enemy is or use a skill that calls down an attack in that area (Infernal Collapse, Glacial Shatter, etc.)
• Disconnected Side Area: Some of the secret areas, most notably those in the Wellspring and Watchweald Temples, are shown like this. Oftentimes, one needs to break a special urn or activate a switch to gain access to them. Some of these hidden switches will emit sparkles to denote an interactive object and will highlight when you move your mouse over them. You can even tell where these secret areas are just by taking note of the map generation.
  • Secrets in the crypt areas are found by buttons that sparkle and highlight when moused over, you can tell one is nearby when one of the decorative wall facades are unlit.
  • Areas in the Wellspring or Watchweald temples have specific urns with glowing markings and emitting smoke, breaking them creates vine bridges for you to cross.
  • Secrets within the Ezrohir vault areas are found by levers, marked or unmarked, they generally open up hidden walls or raise platforms with a sarcophagus containing more valuables.
  • Dragon dungeons such as the Forgotten Halls and Vyrax's Tower typically open up walls when you search specific rock piles or step on a floor tile that's raised with a unique marking. Sometimes the lever opening the actual secret might be in plain sight but you have to find the hidden pressure plate to get access to it.
• Disney Villain Death: A mook variant occurs when you kill non-flying, walking enemies in areas such as bridges or near cliffs, they'll be tossed off the side and the end result is similar to being shattered or gibbed in that they can't be revived. Oddly, they can be knocked off a cliff toward a lower area that you can get to and they'll disappear entirely, even if they would've landed below.
• Double-Meaning Title: The quest "A Shattered Visage Lies". The "lies" can refer to the Faceless King's power lying dormant, and it also refers to the lie he's telling you in order him to gain back his power.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Ezrek Khan, during the last two times you fight him directly, will spawn two clones of himself. They do not have much health but they can use the same spells as him (excluding the cloning). The Embermage's final skill in the Frost tree allows them to summon an Astral Ally that fights with their beginning spells, essentially creating a second Embermage for you.
• Dracolich: One of the boss you'll face is an undead dragon. And he doesn't fight alone, he'll have some mooks joining the fight.
• Dual Boss: The Manticore is initially fought as a single boss with flunkies, but once it reaches half health, it summons its mate into the fight, who also has a ton of health and fights similarly.
• Dueling Games: With Diablo III.
• Dump Stat: Vitality is only good for one thing only: reaching the % block chance cap for players that use shields, which is easily achieved by equipping the unique shield Parma's Coal Burner, having the Blocking VI skill, and getting about 100 Vit. The other two things it's supposed to do (boosting armor and max health) aren't worth the points because armor becomes worthless once you start hitting the high level dungeons where enemies deal absurd amounts of burst damage, and max health can be more efficiently increased through socketables, especially Skulls of Riechliu.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: For melee characters. Their higher damage output allows them to gib enemy packs before taking too much damage, but against bosses, who can take at least tens of hits and deal out heavy wide-area attacks, they have to play a lot more strategically.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The King in Masks, the boss of a sidequest, looks like a six-armed mummy with three masks floating around his head, got locked up in a vault under the sea, back when there actually was a sea in the salt barrens, and wants to unite Zeraphi and Ezrohir by enslaving both (which is why he got locked up in the first place). Luckily, this Cthulhu isn't that hard to punch out.
  • The Nether is full of these, and they have tried to invade in the past. The Alchemist intends to let them in.
• Eldritch Location: The Nether, and all places tainted by it. Of particular note is the Haunted Quarter, which appears to be a chunk of Zeryphesh floating in a void with purple mist, with hostile lightning storms and tentacles sprouting all over the place, and the Clockwork Core, several gigantic clanking gears floating above a pit of magma which separate the material realm from the nether.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Destroyer and The Alchemist are called by their class names from the original Torchlight while the Vanquisher now goes by 'Commander Vale'. She is the commander of the Vanquishers though.
• Evil Counterpart: The Ezrohir have mooks that are based on each of the four classes- Marksmen attack with guns and spider mines like the Engineer, Snatchers have powerful melee and pull opponents towards him like the Berserker, Assassins can backflip and throw a spread of darts like the Outlander, and the Mages use powerful spells like the Embermage.
• Evolving Attack: Each skill has three tiers met at 5, 10 and 15, respectively, and gain a tier bonus at each one. They might be drastic effects such as the Berserker throwing three Storm Hatchets at once instead of one or the Outlander's Shattering Glaive releasing fiery fissures upon impact. Some are more mundane such as the Embermage's Prismatic Bolt gaining a damage bonus with each tier or the Engineer's Blast Cannon increasing in chance to blind the enemy every tier.
• Evolving Title Screen: The title screen has multiple backgrounds depending on how far in the game you've reached but picked at random, typically consisting of an act's town, first half and second half and sometimes the same background might have subtle changes (such as the background with the Frosted Hills either depicting typical Estherian ruins or showing burning bandit camps).
• Evolving Weapon: Some weapons, particularly uniques have an augment that is acquired when killing a requisite amount of enemies of a certain type. Skill kills will also count, the weapon just simply has to be equipped.
• Expy: The four classes take many traits from the seven classes of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, making these Composite Classes of a sort and, being Runic, this may be deliberate on their part.
  • The Engineer combines the defensive, tank abilities of the Paladin and the support summons of the Druid.
  • The Outlander uses ranged weapons like the Amazon, acrobatic and trap-like skills of the Assassin, and they have an affinity toward poison, enemy debilitating pacts and the ability to amass a Zerg Rush of minions from slain enemies with a singular brute like the Necromancer.
  • The Berserker is a close-up melee class like the Barbarian, uses a heavy wolf motif which resembles the Druid as a werewolf and has an entire tree dedicated to Casting a Shadow and uses Wolverine Claws like the Assassin (although they're not as elegant as she is).
  • The Embermage simply has the Fire, Ice, Lightning options similar to the Sorceress but that's typical of many RPG mages in the first place though the Shock Bolts skill imitates the Charged Bolt skill that both the Sorceress and Sorcerer had and their Astral Ally has passing resemblance to the Assassin's Shadow Warrior or the Amazon's Valkyrie.
• Fake Difficulty: By way of Interface Screw. Many of your important windows, like your Character screen, Skill Tree, inventory and pet inventory are easily accessed via little tabs that hang off the left and right side of your screen... sometimes too easily, if what you're actually trying to do is run somewhere during battle. (Note that the game does not feature Pausable Realtime and you are still able to fight with these menus open; it's just disorienting.)
  • A similar problem can crop up because enemies have "clickboxes" larger than they are. If you click on the empty space near an enemy, the game will assume you're trying to attack it, and respond accordingly. Combine this with very large bosses, who spawn cages around you whose bars are individually destructible, and finding a spot the game considers "unoccupied" can involve a Pixel Hunt. You can use the "move" key (` by default) to move without attacking though.
• Flavor Text: Many rare and unique items have flavor text, with some of them providing some lore or backstory for the item.
• Floating Limbs: More of a result of oversight than anything. Specific breastplates of Engineer-only armor can make their elbows and part of their neck disappear.
• Fallen Hero: Applies to an important character from the original - The Alchemist has become corrupted by Ordrak. It also comes with...
  • Evil Costume Switch: As he ditched his mage robes in favor of a demonic-looking Powered Armor. According to his journals, the armor's purpose is to prevent Ordrak's heart from accelerating his Ember Blight.
  • The Heavy
  • Hero Killer: He kills Syl and heavily wounds the Destroyer in the game's prologue.
  • Towards the end of the game, the Guardian of Mana reveals that Ordrak, Big Bad of the original game, was once a Guardian himself.
• Final Boss Preview: The Netherim that was possessing the Grand Regent at the end of act 1 turns out to be the Netherlord.
• Find the Cure!: With a rather dark twist... The Alchemist's plot revolves around his obsession with curing his Ember Blight.
• Finger Gun: Ezrek Khan uses these to fire beams and fireballs at you during his boss fight. Considering he's a genie, it's not out of character.
• Flunky Boss: Almost every single boss in the game either spawns minions or fights alongside them.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Owing to its cartoony look, all characters have four-fingered hands.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The sheer length of the changelogs for each patch really demonstrates both the difficulties that Runic face due to their determination to keep the team small and their utter dedication to making the game better but there are still some nasty issues to settle:
  • Steam compatibility problems consistently throw wrenches into the community's multiplayer expectations. Desyncs, sudden unexplained deaths and the dreaded save game rollbacks continue to crop up every now and then despite the devs' best efforts.
  • Sudden random deaths have also been occurring in the non-Steam version as well, which has caused no end of pain for several Hardcore players.
• Game Mod: Like its predecessor, it has dozens and dozens of 'em. With the added benefit of Steam Workshop and a menu at the start letting you easily select which ones you want. Playing the game in mod mode even generates separate character saves, leaving those in your vanilla game untouched.
• Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword: One theme of unique greatswords both have names and Flavor Text remarking at how "tiny" they are. Those are the Ogre Dagger, Valgang Toothpick and Dragonfang Skewer. They also appear to be Crafted from Animals, especially in the case of the last one.
• Gimmick Level: Mapworks dungeons can have a variety of positive and/or negative affixes applied to monsters and/or the player and their pets. You can have, for example, a dungeon with a 10% increase to your magic-find and a decrease in Mana cost but the enemies have a chance to cast a delayed explosion upon death. The prices for these maps seem to be based on the affixes as well so dungeons that leave you at a handicap will generally be cheaper than the ones giving you an advantage.
• Godiva Hair: Tinya, the Potions vendor in the first town.
• Goggles Do Nothing: A couple of possible skins for the Engineer include purely cosmetic goggles.
  • The Ferret pet returns from the first game and has the same goggles-clad aviator helmet as before.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Three of the unique claws (the Bugstomper, Jade Goblet and Old Empire Slicer) resemble giant, green fists. De-equipping a character's weapons results in male characters assuming a fists-up combat stance with females having a more martial form... Except attacks do nothing more than fumbled Scratch Damage.
• Guns Akimbo: Not only something you can do, the name of an Outlander skill that makes it more effective.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Gender has no effect on gameplay but most official art depicts Berserkers and Engineers as male with the Outlanders and Embermages being female.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Ranged classes may experience this. Without the risk of running into the middle of an enemy pack and getting shredded they are free to kite the relatively slow and massive bosses around until they drop. Splash Damage skills make things even easier by removing summoned Mooks.
• Having a Blast: The Embermage's "Infernal Collapse" spell causes a localized explosion at an area of choice, dealing heavy damage and knockback to all mooks within the blast.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: There's a dedicated option in both the settings menu and inventory panel to hide your character's helmet if you wish to have this trope in effect.
• Homing Projectile: Several enemy spells in the game will chase you down, forcing the player to either move often to avoid them, or simply just tank them. Of course many player skills and abilities fire homing projectiles of their own.
• Hulk Speak: The Berserker has a downgraded version of this. Either implying their Dumb Muscle status or it's the dialect of the Valgang tribes that are like this.
• Internal Homage: A well-hidden one that requires jumping through a lot of hoops. You can reassemble Trill-Bot 4000 (sans legs) from Torchlight and he sends you on a quest to fight the Three Sisters, a trio of bosses the original Heroes fought. Like Trill-Bot, the destruction of Torchlight has left them in pretty bad shape.
• Jack of All Stats: Swords and greatswords in terms of the weapon lineup, they don't have any particular quirk that the other melee weapons have by default and rest between all of them in terms of damage, reach and speed.
• Joke Item: All of the items Cacklespit can give you for competing her quest are these: The Inferior Boots, Even More Inferior Boots (Both of which have one armor and can only be sold for one gold piece each), and the Sweet-Aide, a literal Lethal Joke Item which drains your health extremely quickly.
• Killer Robot: Several of the Dwarven Constructs are these, most notable The Ancient War Titan who even can drop "The Eye of the Killbot" when beaten, it's respective boss theme in the official soundtracks is called "Killbot" and the achievement for defeating it also refers to it as Killbot. ("Killbot... Killed")
• Knightly Sword and Shield: The Engineer is the most knightly class in the game and their Aegis skill tree is built around this trope as well, though you are free to choose an alternative weapon.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": The Sundered Battlefield has land mines that explode in a very painful explosion. One can prematurely trigger them via long-range attacks.
• Lightning Bruiser: For some reason a number of Giant Mooks have faster run speed than their smaller comrades in defiance of the Square-Cube Law, plus a nasty Dash Attack that reflects projectiles.
• Loot Drama: Invoked and averted. In multiplayer, all drops are instanced, and you won't even see what your allies get, much less be able to nick it. The loading screen hints make it clear that everything that drops is yours, because everyone else gets their own loot that only they can see and only they can loot.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: A lot of the Nether beings use this, but special mention go to the Nether-infected Estherians. Among the attacks they have are spawning nether slugs that grow into Netherlings from corpses, using tentacles to lash out at opponents, and most disgustingly, shooting out a giant pulsating boil from their back that acts as a toxic timed bomb.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: A number of mobs have shields or other types of armor (armadillos, for example) which make them basically immune to damage... at least until you smash their shields with a special attack or a crit. Engineers benefit the best using shields defensively and offensively as well due to their Sword and Board passive converting a portion of a shield's physical defense into physical damage their weapon deals.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Just like its predecessor (except there's chunks this time around), when the death blow is a bit excessive your enemies will be splattered. There's even a few Embermage lightning skills that always do this on a kill and a specific Berserker skill, Rupture, causes an enemy to explode after a short delay, damaging other nearby enemies. Gibbing enemies is actually a good tactic as Mook Medic enemies cannot revive a gibbed enemy. Some unique and legendary items make enemies always explode on death.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Engineer's Fusillade skill lets them fire constant bursts of two missiles from their cannon. They get three missiles per burst at Tier I, the missiles have a large explosion at Tier II then they start firing four per burst at Tier III. The Engineer's Sledgebot also fires a salvo of rockets at Tier III.
• The Magic Goes Away: The Alchemist has the destruction of the world's ember as one of his plans, thinking it might cure him of the Ember Blight. He seems to have overlooked the existence of entire races based on or subsisting on Ember, which would be wiped out if his plan succeeds. Thankfully for all concerned the trope is averted in the end.
• Magikarp Power: Some skills can start off pretty underwhelming at rank one but thanks to the fact they evolve via the tier system and the damage increases by player level, weapon DPS and attributes, they become a lot more powerful later on. For example, the Outlander's Shattering Glaive starts off rather weak for the level it's unlocked at but once it hits Tier 3, it's effectively a One-Hit Kill against many common enemies and shreds the HP of most Champion/Boss monsters.
  • The Embermage's Prismatic Bolt starts off decently strong without any upgrades, but tends to become much stronger when combined with the Brand passives (which add a damage bonus when an enemy with the corresponding elemental status effect is hit) that are unlocked later on.
• Magitek: Lots, all powered by ember, including:
  • The Engineer wears a Powered Armor suit (though lower-tiered ones don't cover his entire body) and can build robots
  • The Embercraft is a vehicle the size of a small house, on tank treads. In-game Flavor Text says the original Embercraft design was a train that rode on rails, but the modern one moves freely. The train reference is actually a Shout-Out to the initial concept of gameworld design which featured railways prominently as a symbol of the expanding influence of technological civilization.
  • The Zeraphi and Ezrohir are immortal spirits encased in Powered Armor, a result of their having achieved The Singularity several centuries prior.
  • The Clockwork Core appears to be some form of Magitek as well, but no explanation is given as to what exactly it is or how it works. It is a Precursor artifact that powers the entire world, which likely implies that the entire planet is artificial.
• The Man Behind the Man: The ending suggests that at least some of the Alchemist's actions may have been due to the Netherlord's manipulations.
• MacGuffin: Several in sidequests. Ordrak's Heart ends up becoming one at the end when it is used restore the Clockwork Core and the barrier it provides against the Nether.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The Zeraphi and the Ezrohir, which are two races not seen on the previous game.
  • However, the death animations of the Ezrohir make them seem more like Animated Armor. This could be due to their Ember-induced degeneration.
• The Medic: One of the Engineer's summons is a tiny robot that periodically heals your party. Further upgrades let it regenerate your mana faster and grant an armor boost to your allies.
• Mercy Kill: You do this to the Estherian Grand Regent at the end of Act 1. The mission where you fight him is even called "A Mission of Mercy".
• Metal Slime: Alongside the Phase Beasts from the original, Bittersprites have been added, who drop keys to the golden chests.
  • Golden Crabs can only be summoned by "Monster Shrines," and will burrow and escape if you somehow fail to kill them quickly enough.
• Monster Closet/Teleporting Keycard Squad: Grabbing the Sanguine Gems in the Rotting Crypt in Act III causes the skeletons to animate and summon a champion skeletal mage. Turning valves to turn off impassible steam in The Broken Mines causes a Dwarven Brute to appear from an alcove hidden by a sliding panel. In other situations, chests or other interactive items, depending on the map generation, can cause enemies to appear. Expect skeletons to become animate when opening chests in crypt areas.
  • Even outside of taking items, so many dungeons and overworld areas have monster ambushes more often than not. Walking near bushes in the Blightbogs of Act III? Werewolves! Walking near the swarmstacks in the Salt Barrens of Act II? Skaras! Walking near stone den entrances? Warbeasts if it's Act I and Jackalbeasts if it's Act II! Walking near tents? Then the sentient enemies of that act will rush out to greet you! The Varkolyn in the second half of Act III takes this up to eleven, especially in the dragon dungeons. Empty fireplace? Varkolyn! Hanging Ember lantern? Varkolyn! Hole in the floor? Varkolyn! Ledges facing away from the camera? Varkolyn Brutes! Stained glass window? Vark--- Okay, you get the idea.
• More Dakka:
  • The Outlander's Rapid Fire skill shoots a constant barrage of initially weaker projectiles from whatever ranged weapon he or she happens to be using. One tier bonus ups the bullet count further by adding errant shots into the mix..
  • The Engineer also has a robot equipped with a machine gun that fires 5 rounds per second. The tier three upgrade lets it fire three bullets at a time, for some added crowd control.
• Mushroom Man: Act III has a forest full of hostile living mushrooms, with the brutes and bosses being gigantic.
• New Game Plus: It is even labeled like so with each + denoting the tier, it eventually goes up to New Game +++++ though the enemy and area levels stop at 120 by the end of +++.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Two NPCs encountered in the game (The Nameless King and Cacklespit the Witch) will give quests in which the players will recover artifacts for them, only to reveal that the things they're looking for are keys to their plots to conquer the world. Fortunately, you can then chase them back to their lairs and put an end to them as well.
• No Fair Cheating: If one enters a cheat into the game, the game will flag the current character as a "cheater" and an "!" will appear on their portrait during multiplayer.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Engineer is actually The Big Guy of the game, but the name has confused many people.
• Obstructive Foreground: Subverted. Enemies gain a red "outline" and a blue outline for players, pets, items, breakables, switches, chests and even mimics to show their position when they're obstructed by the foreground, but not always.
• Oddly Shaped Sword: Many of the unique swords and greatswords have some pretty exotic designs.
• Oh, Crap!: In the movie opening, Syl realizes too late that the Alchemist had brushed off her spell and zaps her with a fatal attack.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Focus, with Strength coming in at a close second due to being able to increase the critical damage bonus.
• One-Winged Angel: The Netherlord starts the fight out as a half-incorporeal Netherim, but after defeating him once, he morphs into a giant Netherim with golden armor and a BFS.
• Our Manticores Are Spinier: Manticore act as bosses. Unlike other protrayal of manticores in various fictions, they are muscular humanoids in this game while still retain their manticore-like features like wings and stinger tails. They can also cast wind devils.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Several werewolves appear in the Blightbogs as well as the abandoned Sawmill. The good news is that they don't turn people (well, they can't players or pets), the bad news is that they're fast, somewhat durable, hit hard, and appear in packs, sometimes even in an ambush.
• Pet the Dog: According to his journals that you find in an Act 1 sidequest, the Alchemist, even after being driven half mad by his Ember Blight, has no intention of actually killing the Guardians, and is in fact siphoning energy from all of them rather than some specifically to avoid doing this. The same journal that reveals this also suggests he fully intends to face judgment for his crimes once he's destroyed the world's Ember. Unfortunately, the Estherians and other magical beings have an obvious problem with that last part...
• Playing with Fire: Used both by the Embermage in their Inferno skills and by the Engineer in their Blitz skills. Some of the Outlander's skills involve fire to some extent such as Flaming Glaives or Burning Leap.
• Poisonous Person: The Outlander utilize Poison in many of their skills such as Cursed Daggers and Venomous Hail. Their Master of the Elements passive increases the damage of all four elements by a percentage but Fire, Ice, Lightning each get half the percentage bonus of Poison.
• Powered Armor: The Engineer is implied to reinforce his armor with a powered exoskeleton the power source of which is located in his backpack. Description of various melee engineer abilities explicitly say they are dependent on the armor's machinery.
  • In addition, many armor sets of Zeraphi or Dwarven design are clearly mechanical in appearance, bearing power sources, vents, and, in one case, a steam furnace.
  • The Ezrohir are the Magitek Animated Armor version of this.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: The player characters of the first game show up as questgivers here. One of them has a rather different role.
• Procedural Generation: Map "chunks" are hand-crafted, but are still assembled using a procedural process. Their exact positions may shift around. There is also a feature known as Mapworks, as an alternative to New Game Plus, which purchases randomly generated maps.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Classes are not gender-locked and NPCs avoid addressing gender by never mentioning the player characters in third person.
• Ragnarök Proofing: All of the dwarves' machinery, be it a trap, a Killer Robot or an entire factory, is still working relatively fine, while the dwarves themselves have been extinct for centuries. Note that being extinct doesn't stop them from getting in your way.
• Random Effect Spell: The "Wand Chaos" Embermage Passive ability, making both regular attacks as well as certain spells that run off Weapon Damage (Magma Spear, Magma Mace, Icy Blast and Shock Bolts) have a chance of causing "bizarre, random elemental disturbances", as long as the player wields a wand. Effects can include a geyser, a bat that attacks enemies, a Meteor that hits a huge area, a purple vortex, etc.
• Recurring Boss: The Manticore first fought in the Stygian Aerie appears again as the boss of the Luminous Arena. Thankfully, it cannot summon mooks or its mate to assist it, so it's actually less dangerous than the first time.
• Red Shirt Army: The Vanquishers are responsible for keep the peace in The Empire. However, they aren't doing a very good job since the player find their dead bodies everywhere he goes. The Vanquishers also happen to be wearing red uniforms.
• Reverse Grip: How many Ezrohir mooks wield their Sinister Scimitar.
• Rogue Protagonist: It turns out the Alchemist was not cured of his Ember Corruption like the Destroyer and Vanquisher were, and has become The Heavy as a result of it.
• Rule of Three:
  • The Djinni Fazeer Shah gives you three tasks to perform before doing a favor for you.
  • The witch, Cacklespit, sends you on errands to retrieve three items for her brew.
  • Grom the Murderer pits you in an arena fight consisting of three rounds. He joins the fight against you on the third round.
• Rush Boss: The Grizzled Alpha. He and his Corpsefire Werewolf mooks aren't that durable and go down quickly, but all of them are fast and have very painful melee attacks.
• Saharan Shipwreck: There is a sub-area in the Salt Barrens literally titled "The Ship Graveyard" where skeletal crewmen wander about and Not Quite Dead desiccated corpses are littered around the area.
• Schmuck Bait: The Sweet-Aide that Cacklespit can give you as a reward for your quest. Drinking it causes you to take a MASSIVE amount of damage over time... for 13 and a half minutes. Naturally, you'll die if you drink it unless your health regen is top-notch. Alternatively, you can have your pet drink it and you get to watch them run around for that time as their health is constantly empty.
• Sequel Escalation: Aside from now featuring multiplayer, Runic Games has increased the game's variety compared to the first Torchlight, including an increased number of dungeons, monsters, bosses and so forth. The developers even released an infographic◊ of how much content there is compared to the first.
• Sequential Boss:
  • Ezrek Khan's fight basically has him summon mooks, and after they're destroyed, he comes in to fight personally. When he's "beaten" the first two times, he retreats and summons mooks again, doing the cycle again. After the third time, he's gone for good.
  • The Alchemist is also fought three times, the first in a normal arena, the second in an arena with flame-trapped floors, and the final time in an arena with even more flame-trapped floors.
  • After The Netherlord is beaten, he goes One-Winged Angel and becomes bigger, faster, and more powerful.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Shotgonnes (and cannons) have a range that's only slightly longer than melee weapons, but can turn multiple enemies into Ludicrous Gibs with a single blast (and, in the cannon's case, may stun them). Even less explicably, cannons have shorter range than shotgonnes in exchange for a wider spread. As per the trope, however, the shotgun has probably the lowest damage output of any weapon class in the game. Its utility in terms of stuns and blinds is the only real reason for using one, but given Torchlight's emphasis on offensive rather than defensive strategy, you'd be a lot better off just using higher power wands or the glaive skills instead.
  • The Engineer can vastly improve the range of his/her cannon by investing a few points in the Blast Cannon skill. It doesn't build up your Charge Meter and costs some mana, but it fires a big fat projectile that drills through Mooks like, well, a cannonball. Upgrading it causes it to temporarily blind enemies and make them take even more damage from fire and physical attacks.
• Shield Bash: The very first skill in the Engineer's Aegis tree which stuns enemies and derives damage based on the shield's armor value which increases with each tier. Segments of the charge meter contribute a damage bonus as well. Fire Bash is a different kind of shield attack that instead releases a blast of fire from your heater and uses charge pips to make the blast larger.
  • Ezrohir Shieldbearers get in on this act, executing a charging bash which becomes rather painful on higher difficulties and/or levels.
• Shock and Awe: The Embermage's Storm skills and the Engineer's Aegis skills are associated with electricity. The Berserker's Tundra skills also contain a couple of electricity based skills.
• Shoot the Mage First: Magic-using enemies are often a greater threat than the other foes around them, particularly because they can use powerful projectile attacks, spawn other mooks until killed, or even revive fallen mooks back to full health. They also subvert Squishy Wizard, often having more health than other mooks of their kind.
• Shoot the Medic First:
  • Several Mage-type enemies have the ability to bolster, heal, or even revive their non-mage counterparts, such as Goblin Healers, Roach Mages, Tu'tara Sandreavers, Troglodyte Cerebrites and Varkolyn Warlocks. Naturally, these should be first priority to take out.
  • The Ancient War Titan can sometimes summon a Shield Turret that will make the Titan invincible if it is alive. Obviously, it needs to go down first.
• Sinister Scimitar: At least, in the hands of the hostile Ezrohir compared to the friendly Zeraphi.
• Splash Damage: Every melee weapon except for claws provide a small arc in which secondary targets take reduced damage and two-handed weapons provide a larger arc, which helps offset the reduced defense or damage output with polearms having the longest reach and arc. Shotguns and cannons also deal damage in a wide cone in front of their user. Some socketable items can boost or even match the weapon's damage being done to secondary targets.
• Spread Shot: The Embermage's Prismatic Bolt ability is a magical variant of this.
• Status Effects: As an Action RPG, there's quite a few of them with the expected elements.
  • Burning: Damage Over Time.
  • Chilled/Frozen: Slowed movements and attacks or no movement, however enemies or player frozen in place can still attack. As expected, attacking an enemy in this state has a chance to inflict Literally Shattered Lives.
  • Shocked: Enemies attacked in that state releases shock bolts that can damage other nearby enemies.
  • Poisoned: Weakens enemies by decreasing their damage output and armor.
  • Bleeding: Not explicitly but Blood Embers or weapon effects that "conveys -X physical damage over Y seconds" implies the targets are bleeding from the effect. Other damage over time debuffs corresponding to the other elements (aside from fire, which already has a naturally occurring one) can be inflicted by certain skills or equipment effects.
  • Charmed: Enemies have a glowing pink orb above them and they fight on your side. Leads to some rather amusing bugs when charmed enemies transform or summon additional mooks and the end products remain permanently charmed.
  • Stunned: Enemies and player summons hit with a stun are generally unable to act (and allows Engineers to inflict a Coup de Grâce if they invest in that skill). Players and pets suffer reduced movement and attack speed and it's generally inflicted by enemies that screech.
  • Silence: Can only be inflicted on enemies via a spell tome or weapon effects, prevents enemies from using most of their special attacks but their regular attacks are unaffected.
  • Blindness: Enemies wander aimlessly and are less likely to attack players, making it cross into confusion as well.
  • Fear: Represented by an icon above an enemy, the enemy runs away from players. Other skills cause enemies to run without the respective icon like Firebombs.
  • Immobilize: Basilisks in the Ossean Wastes can hit players with a paralyzing gaze, making them unable to move but still attack (that is if the enemy has the decency to stand in front of you). Outlanders with the Tangling Shot skill can inflict this on enemies along with constricting them (via Poison damage).
  • Slow: Various effects can be inflicted both on players and enemies such as the Web spell, pets transformed into spiders or vampiric spiders, tar slimes shooting and/or splattering into puddles of tar can slow you down when walking through those areas. Some enemies can cast a mana draining, slowing area at the player's location.
• Starter Villain: General Grell, the Sturmbeorn General. After he's beaten halfway through Act 1, his Sturmbeorn aren't seen after that, and he also isn't allied with the Alchemist, only taking advantage of the chaos the latter caused.
• Stripperiffic: Avoided for the most part. As a related video once stated:
  "Torchlight II: Now with 100% more pants!"
  • Still bafflingly used in some instances. For instance, some pants on female models show up as short shorts, but the default model has full length pants. This can result in situations where putting on pants makes your character show more skin.
  • Also played completely straight with the General Goods vendor in the Estherian Enclave, who is wearing nothing but a pair of pants and Godiva Hair.
• Summon Magic: The Engineer can summon a few attack and support robots to help, the Outlander has some shadowy constructs that can join him/her in battle, the Berserker can call upon a pack of short-lived kamikaze wolven spirits to strike the enemies, and one of the high-end spells of the Embermage allows him/her to create an astral duplicate that attacks with powerful spells.
• Super Mode: Both the Berserker's and Embermage's charge meters work like this when filled. The Embermage enters a state of pure concentration for twelve seconds, skills cost no mana and deal 25% more damage. While the Berserker enters a frenzy state for the next six seconds after striking the next enemy with increased movement speed, attack speed, physical damage and critical hit chance.
• Super Window Jump: The Varkolyn love to do this with the stained glass windows in Vyrax's Tower just to ambush you.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: When approching near a boss arena, you'll get some potions from dead bodies. This is a fair warning that what you about to face shouldn't underestimated.
• Sword and Gun: It's possible, you don't have the ability to execute but the attack becomes context sensitive where you'll swing if the target's close enough and shoot if it's too far for that. The same can be done for a wand and sword, in-fact the Wooden Sword gives you a ranged, wand and staff damage bonus to encourage it.
• Tamer and Chaster: Commander Vale, the Vanquisher from the first game wears a more covered outfit as opposed to her Stripperiffic ones worn in the previous game.
• This Is a Drill: Some of the unique claws are small handheld drills. They even spin when equipped.
• Throwing Your Axe Always Works: The Axe of Throwing, a particularly unusual weapon (though many less weird throwing weapon mods exist) that has a 100 percent chance to "cast" a throwing axe similar to the Berserker's Storm Hatchet skill.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Vale, the Vanquisher from the first game, goes from a "mere" city guard to the Commander of her own private army, and now wields a BFG rather then the pistol she had in the first game.
  • The Varkolyn. In the first game they were cannon fodder early-game mooks, in the sequel they're now late-game enemies with more deadly variants.
• Tragic Monster: The Estherian Grand Regent in Act I.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Two examples: The Faceless King in Act II, and Cacklespit in Act III. You can take revenge on them both.
• Überwald: The third part of the game is set in Grunnheim. The area bears a blatant German-sounding name and mostly consists in a thick swampy rainy forest full of monsters including undeads and werewolves. Its also features a haunted graveyard and a Bonus Dungeon inside a kind of gothic tower.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Ancient dwarven ruins suspended in metallic stilts over an enormous pool of magma, swarming with their undead makers and their mechanical defenders and leading down into the very core of the earth, which keeps the Netherim legions off the material plane? Can't get much more final than that.
• Warm-Up Boss: The Fallen Guardian in the Corrupted Crypt. Although he does do a good amount of damage, his movement and attacks are very slow and easy to see coming. He's also one of the few bosses who doesn't get the things other bosses do (Boss Subtitles, Boss Warning Siren, boss theme and victory theme).
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Alchemist seeks to not only cure his own Ember Blight, but end the threat of Ember forever... but he is more than willing to kill anyone who opposes him, spread an Anti-Magic plague, and unleash hordes of monsters throughout the world to accomplish this.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Unfortunately for everyone, it turns out the Alchemist was right about the Ember's side-effects.
• Wolverine Claws: Claws can't hit multiple enemies in a single attack but they're fast and they deal damage based on half of the enemy's physical armor. Berserkers are well at home with these weapons.

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