Eight Essence Labs stand next to the Crystagyn sites across the realm. Stand in one and you can press your spare essences together into a higher grade — same stat only, nothing mixed.
The cost compounds on purpose. A Tier V built from the bottom is 4,725 Tier I essences — this is somewhere for a surplus to go, not a shortcut past the work.
Holding a Tier IV of a stat your build has no use for? The Lab will reshape it. Spend Ascension Dust — 100, 300, 800, 2,000 or 5,000 by grade — and the essence comes back as a different stat at the same tier.
It is a gamble, and an honest one. One re-roll in five shatters the essence and it is lost. The Dust is spent either way. You are asked to confirm before anything is taken, and told plainly which way it went.
Every Lab now shows as a green E on your local map, at every zoom, in all three worlds. They were findable only by walking into one before.
Twelve rares wander the overworld, and each carries a weapon and a piece of armour — twenty-four trophies in all. The Armory now tracks every one of them: which you hold, which you are missing, where each rare hunts, and from what level.
This is the first thing the Armory has ever counted that is not a four-piece armour set, and the first time it has tracked a weapon.
Each of a rare’s two trophies rolls separately at 40%, so a kill can hand you both, one, or neither. They return to the world one to five hours after they fall.
Credit for trophies you already owned has been filled in — you are not starting from nothing, and as always, selling one does not erase the record.
The Armory’s search could never return a rare’s trophy — type Crystalspear and it told you the catalogue held nothing by that name, however many of them were out there. It finds them now, and tells you which rare drops it and where that rare hunts.
A rare rises to the ceiling of whatever region it appears in — that is what makes a rare in deep country genuinely dangerous. Its trophy is now guaranteed to match the level it actually spawned at, rather than the level it was first designed for.
The scaling was already doing this, but nothing was checking it. It is now verified at the moment the trophy is made, and corrected on the spot if anything ever disagrees.
Spirit does two jobs. It is your health pool, and together with half your Defence it is what blunts magic. Defence only does one — it mitigates; your mana comes from Intelligence.
Both jobs were being charged the same toll past the soft cap, so every point of Spirit beyond it was taxed twice while the same point of Defence was taxed once. Spirit was quietly the worse defensive investment at depth, which was never the intent.
The two are now capped separately. Your health pool keeps considerably more of what you put into Spirit past the cap; magic mitigation is unchanged. Deep Spirit builds gain real health — around 11% more at the levels of investment we actually see, and more above that.
Nothing changes below the cap, which is most of the realm. The Stat Breakdown page now shows both figures side by side, so you can see exactly what your Spirit is buying in each role.
Essence Labs and Smash Shops are safe ground and always should have been. Both were spawning wandering monsters onto their own tiles.
Fixed, and the ones already standing there have been cleared out — ten loitering in Labs and seventeen in salvage houses.
Most Smash Shops share a tile with an ordinary shop, and both panels were drawing at once. The salvage panel now steps aside where a shop already stands. Salvage still works there — the button on the item card is unchanged.
When 4.6 capped equipment sockets, essences over the new limit were removed and handed straight back. That worked for gear you were wearing or carrying. It did not work for gear sitting in your Vault — those were taken and never returned. That was our mistake, and we are sorry for it.
268 essences have gone back to the 13 players affected, with a letter naming every stack and the number it moved from and to. They went into your existing stacks, so no new entry appears in the list — it is the quantity on lines you already had that went up.
The socket cap was applied to every item that already existed, but the code that stamps the socket count onto a new item was never changed. Legendary boss drops kept arriving with five sockets and Unique set pieces with six, against an intended three.
54 items have been corrected, along with gear sitting in guild vaults. Three had already been melded past the limit; those were cleared and 15 essences returned to their two owners. Drop announcements that promised more sockets than the item carried have been corrected too.
A stance’s bonus showed correctly until you killed something, then dropped out of your stats until the next refresh — a Rogue holding Cutthroat watched 10,800 Accuracy fall to 10,000 and come back on reload.
Your stats are built twice: once when a page loads, and again whenever something changes them — equipping gear, melding an essence, spending a point, levelling. The second pass applied everything except your active buffs and your stance. It showed up on kills because a level-up runs that second pass. Both now finish the same way, so this was never only about stances: equipping a weapon dropped your buffs from the display too.
Take All has always stopped at a full bag and left those letters alone. Taking attachments one at a time did not check at all, so you could claim well past your capacity. Both routes now use the same count, and a full bag declines the whole letter rather than taking the gold and stranding the item.
Gear you crafted yourself holds five essence sockets where everything else holds three. That mark was not carried when an item travelled: mail it to someone, or place it in a guild vault, and it came back an ordinary drop — two sockets poorer. Both routes now carry it.
Ascending an item, assembling a Masterwork and making an Offering all took your gold without redrawing the figure beside your stats, so it sat at the old number until you did something else. All three refresh immediately now.
Gathering spots are stored by map position alone, and two positions happen to carry a node in both the overworld and the Sky. Standing on one could collect — or show you — the other world’s node. Every lookup now asks which world you are actually standing in.
Selling or salvaging gear destroys the essences socketed into it — that is deliberate, and selling one item at a time already tidied up after itself. Mass Sell did not, leaving orphaned records behind. Harmless in play, but it made every essence count read high.
On entering the world, the whole bar above the chat window — the message box, the Send button and the colour swatches — could fail to draw and stay missing for the rest of the session. Restarting was the only way back.
It happened when the world you entered had unequipped a piece of gear your class could no longer use, which is why it seemed to strike at random and never twice in a row. Fixed at the cause.
A fusion or a re-roll updated your essences correctly, but the panel behind it did not refresh — your stock and Dust still showed the old numbers until you walked away. Worse, the message telling you whether a re-roll had held or shattered was wiped within the second.
The panel refreshes properly now, and the result stays up as a notice you can read at your own pace — green if it held, red if it shattered.
The Steam client’s “could not be reached” screen said the same thing whatever had gone wrong, so a connection fault on your own machine looked exactly like the realm being down.
It now names the actual problem — a name-lookup failure, a refused connection, a rejected certificate — and suggests what to check. It also retries on its own a few times before giving up, so a brief blip no longer needs you sitting there clicking.
Arrives with the next client update.