The old formula squared your attack before defence took its share. It was quiet about it at low level and ruinous at the top: a player with 3.5× another’s attack dealt 65× the damage, gear stacked on gear until nothing in the realm could threaten anyone, and the monsters — whose own attack sat deepest in that penalty — hit like wet paper at every level.
Doubling your attack now doubles your damage, exactly. A hit against no defence equals your attack stat. Defence equal to C halves it, and no amount of defence ever zeroes a blow. The same law applies to swings, casts, Artes, Abilities, Fusions and to every monster.
Every enemy has been re-stated for it. Under the old law a monster’s attack number had to be enormous to land at all; under this one the same number would kill everybody, so the rail was refit from the ground up — not against an imagined build, but against 86 real characters from level 307 to 16,160, each one’s actual gear, essences, runes and mastery. Health per level rises from 29 to 96; attack per level falls from 0.85 to 0.30; defence per level stays at 19.4 and is now the anchor in the formula above. You will see bigger health bars and softer hits. That is the intent.
What a fight is meant to be, at your level, for a moderately built character:
The Stat Breakdown page explains the new formula in place of the old one, and the wiki’s combat pages have been rewritten to match.
The level gap raised a stronger enemy’s strength, magick and defence — and never its accuracy. A foe a quarter above your level was 3.4× stronger and not one point more likely to land a blow, so an evasion build dodged the same half of everything from a rat to a raid boss. Accuracy now rides the gap in all four places a fight happens: the overworld and Underworld, dungeons, raids and guild raids. The base chance to be hit has not moved for anyone; only the foes above you have learned to aim.
Lifesteal and manasteal have a second limit, and for a built character it is the one that actually binds. A single hit returns at most 2% of your maximum, however much leech you carry. It was 5% until the 6th of September.
This is why a character deep in lifesteal can still watch small numbers go by. Once your damage is larger than your own health pool, the share of it your leech would return is already past that cap, so further lifesteal adds nothing to what a hit gives back. The 25% quoted on Vampiric essences is a share of the damage you deal, never of your health, and the older ceiling — leech stops restoring at 75% of your pool, 90% for Death Knights and Necromancers — still sits on top of both. All three now appear in the Attributes tooltip and on the wiki, where only one of them used to.
A plain swing and a plain cast now deal 70% of what they did. Nothing else does: Artes, Fusions, Abilities and signature spells are untouched, which is the whole point — the button that costs nothing should not be the best button. If you were already pressing your kit, this changes little. If you were not, it is worth pressing now.
Astromancer was on neither list that makes a class a caster, so its spells were halved, its buffs went out at half power, half duration and self-only, and it paid full price for magick. It now casts as the pure casters do: full spell damage, the 35% MP discount (one spell against a 1,000 pool costs 32 MP instead of 50), the higher cast-success floor, buffs at full strength and duration with party reach, and a place in the aligned step-regeneration tier. It does not receive the compensation the three pure casters were given for losing Dual Cast, because it never had Dual Cast. No other class has moved.
Hex Surge is free. It adds to a swing instead of replacing one. Before, spending the turn on it bought no damage that round and the follow-up only recovered what the skipped swing would have dealt — the class’s signature spender was worse than doing nothing. Its numbers have not changed; its cost has.
Dark Pact buffs the stat your weapon actually swings on — Intelligence for a Crystal Blade, Strength for a Sword or Great Sword, Dexterity for a Dagger. It used to hand every Hexblade Strength, which three of every four were not scaling on.
Cooldowns are counted in rounds and fights rather than minutes, and the panel now says so: Hex Surge 1 round, Cursed Blade and Crystal Infusion 3 rounds, Soul Drain 4 rounds and usable between fights, Dark Pact 5 rounds with a 4-round buff, Oblivion Edge 2 fights. Four places used to print “0m CD” for all of them.
For part of the 6th of September a second heal in one fight could restore nothing while still costing its MP and the turn. The rule behind it — each heal in a fight halving the last — is out entirely, not patched. Healing is exactly as it was before that day.
Two rows beneath the six stats. The headline figure is your weapon’s crit chance and crit damage; the tooltip gives the spell figures, which differ by design — a swing draws on the weapon, a cast does not. Crit Damage is now written as a percentage everywhere it appears; Class Mastery said “+5” where it meant crits hit 5% harder.
Fifty-eight effect sheets now play over the target when a spell lands: every element at three tiers by the target’s level, each Fusion pairing with its own, and the signature spells. The hand-drawn bursts remain beneath them as the fallback.
Veilstone, Embercrown, Frostspire, Tidewarden and the Shore fight on their own painted backdrops. Four of them had been fighting in a sunny green meadow.
The duel damage scale doubles. It was set while a duel was one player pressing Attack, and eighteen hits cost the attacker eighteen clicks and the defender nothing. Now that both of you spend a timed turn on every hit, eighteen hits was thirty-six turns and, on a bad day, sixty. A median duel is now about nine hits; the worst-matched defender still gets five, and nobody is one-shot.
TP decays once you have been out of combat for thirty seconds. In a duel, waiting for the other side’s turn routinely passed thirty seconds, so the TP you banked was gone before you could spend it and Artes were unusable in PvP. Both duellists now count as in combat for the whole of the duel. Decay outside a fight is unchanged.
A duel runs at most 25 rounds — fifty turns between you. When the last lapses, whoever holds less health loses. And if both of you vanish, the duel abandons itself after two minutes rather than holding your characters in place until someone returns.
Ore, lumber, hides, herbs, reagents — anything in your Resources pile can be listed. The sell form gains a Resources group beside your bag; choose the material, the quantity and the price. The units leave your pile while the listing stands and return to it if you cancel; a buyer receives them straight into their own resources, with nothing to carry. The same five-listing cap and the same fee apply, and the Auction House filter has a Resources tab. One thing cannot be listed: a Sky Drone is a licence, not a material.
Attaching a stacked item — essences, potions, pet food, consumables, catalysts — used to post the whole pile. Choose a stack in the compose form and a quantity box appears; the rest stays in your bag, and what arrives merges into the recipient’s own pile instead of sitting beside it as a second row.
A map is now “Tattered Treasure Map (Lv 3) · Frostbound Reach” — the named area its cross lies in, from the realm’s own place names. Maps only lead to surface tiles now, in whichever world you earned them, and identical maps stack in the bag as one line with a count.
Two repairs went with it. 221 maps held by players pointed nowhere — at a target the Great Reset had discarded, or at no tile at all — and have been re-buried at a tile that suits their tier. A further 274 lay on perfectly good land where nothing spawns: shop tiles, portals, dungeon mouths, magick schools. A map to a place with no monsters can never be dug, so those too have moved to ground where something walks.
Two new essences for the pools rather than the stats. A Life Essence raises your maximum health and a Mana Essence your maximum magick, by 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 10% across the five tiers. They drop wherever essences drop, the Lab can produce them, and the Crystagyn sockets them like any other.
Each pool has its own ceiling across everything you wear: the first 35% counts in full, and above that each further point counts for less, easing toward a hard 50% that is never quite reached. Spirit remains the stat your spells, your pets and your soak are built on; these essences change the size of the bar, not the power behind it. The Stat Breakdown carries a Pools note showing the arithmetic.
Two limits have governed equipment stats for a long time without ever being written down where a player could read them. Per item, each flat stat counts up to once the item’s level. Across everything you wear, gear can add at most 75% of your base stat; anything above that line is simply not counted. It is why a level-4,500 crafted piece with four times the Intelligence of a level-2,000 set piece moves the total so little: both sides of that comparison are already standing on the cap.
The Stat Breakdown’s Equipment row now says so in words, and when you are on the cap it names the stats that reached it and how much of your gear was counted. The wiki has a Gear Caps section.
An item’s tooltip printed its raw value — tens of millions on a boss drop — while a vendor paid a capped fraction of it. Both lines now read “Sells for N gold”, computed by the same rule the vendor uses.
Gathering Pendants add 10 / 18 / 30% gathering experience by rank, and crafting Chains add 5% rising to 20% across the seventeen tiers. Necklaces only, on purpose: there are two ring slots and one neck, and progression should not double up.
The line was also nearly invisible — plain rings in shop stock among thousands of items, with nothing pointing at them. The gathering, fishing and crafting screens now carry a strip that shows what your artisan gear is doing, or, if you wear none, that the line exists and that shops at your level band and raids carry it. And every artisan accessory’s description now lists all of its bonuses; the farming, hunting and foraging pieces had shipped with theirs missing.
Crafting skill still stops at 100 and gathering and fishing at level 50 — every recipe, every node and every formula assumes it. But the work no longer vanishes at the line. What would have been skill past the cap banks as Renown, per bench and per profession.
A crafting Renown level is roughly fifty on-level crafts and grants +1 CP in the mini-game, to +50. A gathering or fishing Renown level costs what level 50 cost and grants +1% rare finds per ten levels, to +5%. Small, deliberately: Renown is a record of work, not a second progression. It shows beside the bench header and on the gathering and fishing screens, level-ups are announced, and the crafting and gathering wiki pages carry the numbers.
A Professions tab on the leaderboard: the nine crafting disciplines, the five gathering professions and fishing. At the crafting cap ties are common, so the boards rank skill first, then Renown, then the work actually logged — a hundred on a bench you have never used does not outrank a hundred earned.
Both benches went straight to a quick craft whichever button you pressed. The client kept its own list of which benches run the mini-game, and it was two benches short.
Weapon skill and its prestige belong to the weapon and are shared by every class you play; only the ceiling differs by class. The Weapon Trainer measured “ready” against the class you happened to be standing there as. A Great Sword trained as a Gladiator toward its ceiling of 625 could be promoted the moment you visited the board as a class whose ceiling for it was 500 — a cheaper promotion of a prestige that lifts every class at once.
The trainer now promotes a weapon only when its skill has reached the highest ceiling it has across all your classes, and the panel says which class that is and what this one uses it at.
The class panel and the wiki promised Dual Wield from a Rogue or Tamer support at level 25. The equip check read a different list, so it never worked — and a class that never declared the trait could dual-wield regardless. The trait the game shows is now the trait the game reads.
Every title in the picker now carries its origin: the quest, the Bestiary milestone, the achievement, the event. A title that outlived the thing that granted it says when it was earned.
Monster Variants — how a variant is rolled, what the labels mean, and the one in ten that is a Mimic wearing one; every quest board carries a one-line primer with a link to it. Advanced classes — shown once you reach the requirement on a base class, naming every trial and where it stands, and saying the thing that matters before you go: every class keeps its own level, so a new one starts at 1. HP, MP and TP — TP had never been explained: +130 per hit landed, +60 per hit taken, 3,000 cap, Artes at 1,000 / 2,000 / 3,000, and it decays after thirty seconds out of combat. And on the Weapon Skills panel, two doors: What are Artes? and Past Master?
Clearing a dungeon floor is meant to compound. Every lesser enemy you put down banks a stack of Delver’s Edge — +1% damage and +3% boss EXP and gold apiece, to ten — and the boss pays the interest on all of them. It has not been doing any of that. The stack was recorded a moment after the game had stopped saving your session, so it was discarded every single time: the count always read one, the damage bonus never applied at all, and the boss never paid a thing. It has been that way since the day it shipped.
It works now. Ten floor kills are +10% damage for the rest of that run and +30% EXP and gold from the boss, which spends the whole bank when it falls. Stacks still fade ten minutes after your last kill, they belong to you rather than the party, and the combat log counts them up as you go. The wiki’s Dungeons page explains the whole thing for the first time.
The little figure beside “You” under the minimap was still the original hand-drawn artwork, while the token on the map itself had long since moved to the class art. Every class with newer art showed two different figures two inches apart. The legend now draws the same token the map does, on the overworld, in the Sky and in the Underworld.
A world boss’s rising was announced to the whole realm. Its death was announced to nobody, so the marker drew players across the map to bare ground twenty minutes after the fight was over. The killing blow is now broadcast the same way, naming the boss, who finished it and how many fought.
Standing on a world boss in the Sky showed you its health bar and no way to attack it. The card that carries the Engage button is drawn beneath the map, and the Sky never drew one — so from the day bosses first rose above the clouds, one could be tracked down and then simply stared at. Both maps now draw the same card, so a boss you can reach is a boss you can fight.
One rising in five now happens above the clouds, over open sky terrain only, drawn from the four endgame bosses (levels 1,500, 2,500, 12,000 and 18,000). The overworld keeps all nineteen. While a sky boss lives, the ground is not spared its own.
Nothing limited how often one echo could be challenged, and the rival list did not refresh, so one rival could be beaten again and again for rating and wins. A rematch against the same echo now waits ten minutes, and the arena itself enforces it, not the list.
In a raid, two blows landing on a boss in the same instant could each be counted as the kill and each be rewarded. The kill is now claimed under lock and paid once. The anti-spam limit that paces actions is also counted per account rather than per browser session, so two windows on one account no longer double it.
On the 6th of September every account in the realm appeared on the map at once. A maintenance report reading player records was marking each one it read as present, and stamping a day’s attendance on them. Nothing was taken from anyone, and a report can no longer touch a record it only meant to read. The same day, a test character announced a Legendary achievement to the realm; test characters no longer speak in chat.
Combat (the new law), Equipment (Gear Caps), Weapon Skills (promotion from the highest ceiling), Crystagyn & Essences (Life and Mana), Quests (treasure map names), Enemy Variants (a Hunting Variants section), Crafting and Gathering (Renown) and Towns (the Auction House takes resources). Every number on those pages is read from the game’s own code by the fact-checker, so they cannot drift from what the game does.