Gronthar refresh & a new duel system — Venoline stream recap (Mar 2026)

The headline: party duels

The standout idea in this recap is party duels: in Scars of Honor, dueling is not limited to 1v1. It can be your party against another party, or your team against a single player—with full control in your hands (watch the full video on YouTube). That team-versus-team layer is uncommon in MMO RPGs and reads as a deliberate social-PvP experiment rather than a duel lobby bolt-on.

How invites work (from the stream):

• When you are in a party and challenge someone, only the party leader on the other side gets the prompt to accept.
• After acceptance, the duel starts with a visible timer and clearly flagged enemies.

Last standing & stuns

• The rule shown is last fighter standing for the group.
• When a duelist is defeated, they are stunned so they cannot keep moving, DPSing, or healing—which would otherwise distort a group fight. The presenter frames this as necessary so downed players cannot keep influencing the outcome.

Ending conditions

• A 5% HP threshold on a participant appears to end the duel in the example shown.
• There is a duel area (around 20 m): leave it and you begin a forfeit window—you have roughly 10 seconds to get back; staying out forfeits. That mirrors “walk away to cancel” without abusing terrain.

Gronthar / grunt model rework

The stream contrasts old “grunt” character models with a new Gronthar presentation—including female and male variants and a playful “big scary grunt” beat. The goal is a much more modern silhouette and animation read versus older SoH builds shown for comparison.

Dungeon direction: smaller can be better

Separately, the team discusses dungeon scale. An early playtest felt too large—“marathon” pacing—so they iterated toward tighter room sizing. The stated wins: better performance, snappier fights, and more layout combinations because each piece is cheaper to author. The design principle repeated is blunt: if it is not fun, change it until it is.

Housing vs guild strongholds

On housing: the speaker pushes back on a personal housing MMO as a primary pillar, arguing it can fragment the world into solo bubbles. Instead, they favor guild strongholds—shared spaces where many players invest together—with possible cosmetic monetization that supports the guild, not just a private instance.

Class tease: Battle Mage as a tank

A Battle Mage direction appears as a tank that builds a secondary Barrier resource in combat; damage hits barrier first, then health. The fantasy is mage + melee weapon flexibility (e.g. swords), not a glass cannon stereotype.

Scars & skybox (work in progress)

• Scars progression is still debated—e.g. whether level-ups should grant scars or only significant milestones (boss kills, etc.).
• Skybox and clouds are called explicitly WIP with blending experiments and future cloud shadows for grounded scenes.

This article is a fan chronicle summary of an official-style development stream and is not affiliated with the game or its publishers. For the primary source, use the embedded video and the YouTube link above.