Essences were a footnote; now they're the headline. Per-tier stat bonuses were raised across the board, and class-trait stat bonuses were reduced to match — so the way you push a stat to its peak is by hunting and binding Essences, not just levelling.
| Tier | Old | New |
|---|---|---|
| I | +2% | +3% |
| II | +5% | +8% |
| III | +10% | +16% |
| IV | +17% | +28% |
| V | +25% | +45% |
Same-stat bonuses stack across all your gear up to +250% per stat — huge, but bounded so it can't run away.
Stronger Essences should be earned, so they now drop half as often in the field and dungeons, and the highest tiers are scarcer in the mix. Raid bosses remain the reliable source of the good stuff.
Wisdom Essences (the EXP ones) were silently doing nothing — a naming mismatch deep in the stat engine meant the bonus was never applied. They now grant their EXP bonus correctly, including ones you bound long ago.
The utility Essences feed straight into game systems and could break them if stacked hard, so they now have sensible ceilings: Hunter (drop rate), Vampiric & Manasteal capped at 25%, Fortune (gold) and Wisdom (EXP) at +100%. Still powerful — just no longer able to trivialise a mechanic.
Class Traits used to stop at level 200. They no longer do. Every class now earns a new trait every 50 levels from 250 all the way to 1,000 — sixteen more per class, themed to that class's identity (a Fighter's Warlord line, a Rogue's Shadow line, a Hexblade's Eclipse line, and so on). Your build keeps deepening through the whole climb into the Underworld, not just the first 200 levels.
Your existing traits are unchanged — this is all new ground on top of them.
Defeating a dungeon boss now leaves you in the dungeon to read your results, claim your loot, and admire the carnage — then a single ↑ Exit Dungeon button takes you out from wherever you stand. No more trekking back to the entrance, and the tile you land on outside behaves normally again (so a monster waiting there is there to fight).
This also squashes a sneaky bug: clearing the boss used to leave you "still inside" the finished dungeon behind the scenes, so the next time you spent a stat point — anywhere in the world — the game would teleport you back into the cleared dungeon. The cleared dungeon now shows only the Exit button on every screen, so it stays consistent and that teleport can't happen. (Thanks to the sharp-eyed adventurer who reported it — and refined the fix.)
Higher-difficulty dungeons scale their enemies far above the base level, and loot was scaling off that — so a single drop could land hundreds of levels above you and sell for a small fortune, making over-levelled content a quick path to easy gold. Dungeon drops are now capped to your own character level (plus a small margin), so the windfall is closed. On-level runs are completely unaffected.
You can no longer attack a player more than 25 levels below you. High-level players ganking newcomers is over — their Challenge button now shows a 🛡 Protected badge instead. You're still free to challenge up against a stronger foe; that risk is yours to take.
The familiar one-click stat buttons are back — now with a safety net so a fat-fingered point is never final:
When a kill levels you up, your unspent stat points are shown in the panel on the left — on the overworld, in dungeons, and in raids — so a level-up never slips past unnoticed. Spend them whenever it suits you. (Patch 2.3 note: based on player feedback this no longer pauses combat — you can keep fighting and allocate at a convenient moment.)
Your custom keybinds now work inside instances too. Diagonal movement keys (Q/E/Z/C) were being ignored in dungeons and raids despite the compass supporting them — fixed. And the Attack and Cast keys now correctly engage the dungeon/raid enemy in front of you instead of doing nothing.