Every class has two stances, and each one is an honest trade: it moves the damage you deal and the damage you take by the same amount. Shield Wall gives up exactly as much as it protects. Breakthrough takes exactly as much as it lands. Open Guard drops the guard entirely and plays to the crowd.
There is no cooldown and no duration. Choose one, change it whenever the fight changes, and it simply stays. 36 stances across the eighteen classes, and no two classes hold the same pair.
An Instinct fires by itself when its condition holds — the opening blow, the killing one, fighting wounded, fighting something far above your weight. Nothing to press and nothing to time. It is the reward for being in the right fight rather than for spending a cooldown.
One per class, eighteen in all, and every one of them is different. Your class notices things the others do not.
When a blow would kill you, your Last Resort fires instead — once per fight, no button, no cost. And every class does something different with the moment: a Rogue slips the blow entirely, an Astromancer is bathed back to full, a Death Knight takes it and hands it straight back.
Eighteen of them, all distinct. Living at one hit point was never a character.
The honest reading of the ability list was that most of it had stopped mattering: a shelf of small percentage buffs that essences and gear had comprehensively outgrown, sitting behind cooldowns long enough that pressing them was a chore rather than a choice. Those are gone, replaced by everything above.
What stays is what a class actually is. The Mimic keeps all ten Echo slots. The Runesmith keeps Detonate, the Hexblade keeps Hex Surge, the Astromancer keeps the Constellation and the Grand Conjunction, and every caster keeps their signature spells. Skyleap, Falcon Dive, Shadowstrike, Storm of Fists, Storm of Arrows, Wide Cleave, Momentum Breaker and Divine Judgment all remain exactly as they were.
Any hotbar slot that held a retired ability has been emptied rather than left to fail silently, and your bar layout is untouched otherwise.
All fourteen Songs now live in the spell list and are bought at any shop, from the Ballad of Might at level 1 to Maestro Eternity in the deep sky. Their strength is unchanged — the same percentages, the same durations — and with the cooldowns gone the set plays as a set.
Songs remain Minstrel magic and nothing else: no other class can buy them, learn them or sing them.
Your class resource sits alongside the rest of the kit — built with your basic actions, spent on your signature swing. And five verbs cover the small useful things: look around, take stock, read the ground. They cost nothing and break nothing. They are there for the moment between fights when you want to know something rather than hit something.
Above the Empyrean the gold frays and the starless dark shows through. The Voidfront is a new reach covering levels 6,000 to 10,000 — a band that until now had no ground at all, sitting between the Empyrean's ceiling and the Null Shallows' floor.
Eight things live there that nobody had ever met: the Voidmaw, the Entropy Weaver, the Hollow Seraph, the Starless Colossus, the Umbral Corsair, the Worldless Wanderer, The Unravelling Choir and the Absolute Fragment. Its four delves and two raids — The First Hollow, the Vault of the Starless, the Entropy Spiral, the Gate of the Absolute, The Hollow Between and The Throne of Nothing — now open on the Voidfront rather than off the islands below it. It has its own market, its own anchor, and Sun-Metal and Voidglass to gather.
The deepest shop in the realm sold to level 6,000, while the sky itself runs to 20,000. The Null Shallows, Heartsea and Voidheart had no market at all — which meant sixteen spells, some priced at sixty million gold, that literally nobody could buy. Not rare. Not gated. Simply unreachable.
All three reaches now have a market of their own, priced to their own band. Every spell in the game has a vendor, and so does every piece of gear between levels 6,000 and 10,000.
The shallow reaches each carried a Skyforge and a Skyrest; the three deepest carried neither, so the endgame was the only stretch of sky where you could not rest or craft. All ten reaches now have the full trio — forge, anchor and Skyrest — laid out identically, so every island reads the same way.
The fishing panel has always invited you to "travel to a River, Ocean, or Shore tile". There were no Shore tiles. There never had been — so five fish had never been caught by anybody, in the entire history of the realm.
Every stretch of water that meets land is now coastline. The Shore Perch, Saltfish, Rock Mullet, Pearl Grouper and Jade Koi can be caught at last; the three Alchemy recipes that wanted them — Shore Perch Stew, Rock Mullet Roast and Jade Koi Broth — can finally be brewed; Shore Shell has a real gathering source instead of a promise; and the Corsair, Harpy Queen and Sea Serpent have somewhere to stand.
Mining, Logging and Fishing are three whole disciplines that fed nothing a smith could use — thirty-seven of their yields appeared in no recipe of any kind. From Tier II onward, every equipment bench now also wants one gathered material, and each bench draws on its own discipline so two crafters are never queueing at the same node:
Quantities fall as rarity climbs — six of a common ore, two of a legendary one — because rarity is decided by the node and not by your skill. Every requirement sits on ground your level can already reach, and Tier I asks for nothing: your first ten levels forge from tile resources alone.
A crafted piece has always been the equal of the catalogue item it copies, with High Quality worth +20% on top. Above item level 5,000 that rises to +25%, so a flawless craft at depth is meaningfully better than the thing you would otherwise be wearing. Mastercraft assembly inherits the same bonus.
At the deepest recipe band the crafting panel quoted one material cost and the bench charged another. Both now read from a single table, so what you are shown is what you pay — and the panel shows your stock of that bench's gathered materials above the recipe list.
Every piece of gear now holds three essences — two natural and one overmeld — except gear you crafted yourself, which holds five. Crafting your own equipment is now the reason to craft your own equipment.
Nobody lost anything. Every essence above the new ceiling was removed and returned in full — 696 essences back to 34 players — ready to re-meld wherever you want them.
The Halls no longer pay experience or gold. Banking a floor now pays every member who contributed to it in the materials your Skyhold is built from, scaled by depth and difficulty — and each contributor is paid in full rather than handed a divided share. Grinding a floor without finishing it earns nothing: a climb is how a guild builds its hold.
Drinking a lesser potion while a stronger one was running replaced the good effect with the weak one and reset its timer. A stronger or equal potion now overwrites for its own duration as you would expect, and a weaker one is politely refused — and, importantly, not consumed.
A fault in how health was recalculated let a character's maximum drift upward over repeated actions instead of holding at the value their Spirit sets. It has been closed, and health now settles exactly where the stat says it should.
Stances, Instincts, Last Resorts, your class resource and the verbs all arrive with one-time guides that appear the first time you open the Battle panel, in the same style as the rest of the realm's tips. As ever, they can be replayed or muted from Game → Settings.