Dispatch a faction, keep adventuring, and now your reward when you claim includes experience alongside the gold, reputation and supply caches. The EXP is a share of your own level-to-next, so a patrol is worth a slice of a level whether you’re level 40 or 4,000 — it never falls off, and it never lets an alt leap ahead of where it earned its standing.
It’s a gentle idle trickle (roughly a fifth of a level per hour on the longer runs), layered on top of active play — a reason to check in, reassign, and keep the table working while you’re away, not a replacement for going out and fighting.
Each power now fields five expeditions instead of three, and you can run four at once instead of three — more to juggle, more ways to spend your standing.
| Expedition | Time | Unlocks | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patrol the marches | 1h | Neutral | Small — gold, rep, EXP, cache |
| Wage a campaign | 4h | Friendly | Solid gold, rep & EXP |
| Lead a crusade | 12h | Honored | Large gold, rep & EXP |
| Hold the vanguard New | 24h | Revered | The long war effort — the biggest idle haul |
| ⚔ Raid the rival’s lines Incursion | 6h | Honored | Rep & EXP for you — and a strike on the rival |
The six powers are locked into three sworn rivalries. Every point of reputation you win with a faction now bleeds half of that gain away from its rival. You can no longer sit Exalted with two enemies at once — standing has become a choice. Lean into a favoured power in each pairing, or play the middle and climb everyone slowly.
The new Incursion expedition is the aggressive play. On top of the reputation you earn, it lands an extra hit on the target faction’s rival — stacked with the normal rivalry bleed, an Incursion is the fastest way to tear an enemy power down while lifting your own. Politics with teeth.
At the deep end you now choose what you become. Two opposed oaths — your first is free:
Because the bonus reads your live corruption, your strength shifts with every step toward or away from the deep — a Deepsworn is deadliest exactly where a Warden is weakest. Climb your covenant’s five ranks for a stronger passive, and the Deepsworn walk the deep far longer before it Claims them.
A committed identity, with a cost. Changing sides is the Renounce ritual — 250,000 gold, 100 Dark Crystal shards, your rank reset to nothing, and a 7-day lock. Choose your first oath with care.
The Underworld stops being flat. Beneath it now stack the gated Strata. The first two are open: the Ashen Reach, guarded by Ashek, the First Warden, and the Hollow Vaults, where the Choir-Drowned waits. Each opens only by proving yourself in the one above (reach depth 10, and hold the Covenant rank it demands). Deeper still, the Sunless Heart the blight bleeds from remains sealed — its dark awaits a later descent.
A Descent is a seeded, un-mappable dive with your real character: floor by floor, drawn from the run’s own seed so no guide can lay it out. HP carries with no free healing; death forfeits the unbanked; bank every 3 floors to surface. Every fifth floor the Stratum’s named Guardian bars the way — a wall the well-oathed break and the unprepared do not. Your Covenant flavours the whole dive.
Banking pays gold, Dark Crystal shards, EXP, and is the main way to climb your Covenant — and every descent pushes back the Blight Tide. The deep is not a detour from the war. It is one of its fronts.
The war now has a guild front. Four named Beacons stand in the Underworld — the Sunken Pharos, the Ember Watchtower, the Warden Gate, the Hollow Obelisk — and guilds fight to hold them from the War Map.
A guild claims a Beacon by spending the Supply Points it forges at the War Forge, then must fortify it — because a Beacon’s strength decays, and rival guilds can assault it until it falls and is theirs to take. Claimed, defended, lost, retaken: the map never sits still.
Holding is worth fighting for: every Beacon a guild holds pushes its members’ node-cleanses +10% harder against the Blight Tide, stacking with a Warded stockpile. Committing the guild’s war effort is a Master or Lieutenant call. Gatherers, crafters and fighters all feed the same front.
A long-standing problem: past the early game, enemy attacks grew so large that every hit landed at the same capped fraction of your health no matter how much Defence or Armour you wore — so armour was, in practice, a dead stat. Two changes fix it.
Your defensive investment now lowers the ceiling on incoming hits. The more Defence and Armour you carry, the harder each blow is softened — a lightly-armoured glass build feels no different, but a dedicated tank can roughly halve the damage a hit is allowed to deal, turning ~3 hits-to-die into ~6. Armour is a real defensive choice again.
And every armour piece now carries proper numbers. Armour-slot gear across the whole game was sitting far below its intended curve; its Armour and Defence values have been lifted onto the rail (heaviest on chest and shield, lighter on rings and necklaces) — up-only, so nothing you own got weaker, and the gear in your bags was upgraded in place.
No more racks of identically-statted armour with different names. Each piece is now read by its material: plate and mail favour Strength, leather and hide favour Dexterity, robes and silk favour Intelligence — so a Reinforced Robe and a Steel Plate are finally different suits of armour, not the same numbers wearing two hats.
And armour now belongs to a class. Heavy (Fighter, Gladiator, Lancer, Paladin, Death Knight, Hexblade), Light (Rogue, Archer, Pugilist, Runesmith) and Cloth (Magician, Warlock, Necromancer, Minstrel, Tamer, Mimic) each wear their own material; rings and necklaces stay universal. An item’s card tells you who can wear it. Anything you already had equipped keeps working — the rule only applies when you next change gear or class.
Every shop now carries armour for all three class types in every slot — the long-standing holes (Light headgear almost everywhere, and whole endgame shops that sold Heavy armour and nothing else) are filled with proper pieces. At the same time, piles of near-identical duplicates were trimmed away, so the racks are shorter and every entry earns its place.
Weapon shops carried two and three copies of the same weapon at the same level, and then left brutal gaps — the common weapon types jumped straight from level 1,000 to 2,100 with nothing in between, and several types simply stopped at 1,400. Now there is one weapon per type per level, and the ladder runs smoothly from the first level to the last: the 1,000–2,100 dead zone is filled and every weapon type reaches the endgame.
Purchasing an item used to rebuild the whole shop and snap you back to the top of the list. Now the shop stays exactly where it is — only your gold ticks down — so you can buy down a long list without losing your place.
The armour and weapons you’re actually wearing no longer count against your bag — worn gear isn’t clutter you’re carrying. Every character effectively gets its equipped slots back as free space, and the bag counter now reflects only the loose items you’re hauling around.
The Chaplain of the Lightless was dropping her signature weapon but no armour — her dungeon had shipped without its set registered. The Lightless Chapel now guards a full 4-piece caster set (Cowl, Vestments, Hose, Slippers), dropping from the boss like every other dungeon’s, with its own 3- and 4-piece bonuses.
A run of pricing drift had crept in — the odd higher-level piece selling for less than a lower-level one. Every weapon and armour price across the game has been re-set onto one honest curve (a piece costs more as its level and rarity climb, always), and your owned gear now sells at those same corrected prices.
Rings and necklaces were a wall of near-identical trinkets with almost no stats. They’re rebuilt from scratch: at every level there’s now a Ring and Amulet for each attribute — Might (Strength), Precision (Dexterity), the Mind (Intelligence), Vigor (Spirit), Warding (Defence) and Aim (Accuracy) — each carrying real stats, so whatever you play, there’s jewellery that fits.
A new “My Class” toggle in every shop hides everything your class can’t equip — weapons outside your proficiency and armour of the wrong type — so the racks show only gear you can actually use. It stacks with the search box and the weapon/armour tabs.