Until this week your race set your starting attributes and nothing you could see: a Dragonborn Paladin and a Human Paladin wore the same sprite. Now each of the thirteen races has its own art for all forty classes, in both genders, with a matching token for the map. The picture follows you everywhere the game draws a character: your own fight screen, the opponent in the arena, the cards in a PvP match, your partymates beside you, the class pickers, and the player profile — which shows the person you are looking at, in their race, not yours.
The race note on the character screen has been corrected to match: your race now sets your look as well as your starting attributes.
A recolour skin was a fixed hue shift laid over your class sprite, and the sprites are not painted in one palette: a Tamer’s coat is warm brown, a Magician’s robe is blue. The same shift that made a Tamer crimson made a Magician teal — Crimson looked like Tidal, and the race art drifted the same way. Every hue skin now names the colour it means, and the game measures each sprite’s own base colour and turns exactly as far as needed to land there, in the fight, the arena, the Wardrobe preview and your profile alike. Skins built on sepia, shadow or inversion were never affected and are unchanged.
A pet’s last evolution came at level 250 and its level bar had read full since 100. Three more milestones now wait on the way to the cap of 1,000 — at 400, 600 and 1,000 — each with a new form for every line: Titan, Tempest, Bastion, Archon and Eternal Beast at 400; Colossus, Stormrider, Adamant, Oracle and Mythic Beast at 600; Dreadnought, Skyshear, Immovable, Astral Sage and Primeval Beast at the top. Every existing form keeps its name; nobody’s pet woke up renamed.
Feeding two stats now produces a hybrid. From level 100, a pet whose growth is shared between two stats — at least three tenths in each — takes a hybrid line instead of a pure one: the Warfang (might and speed), Ironhide (might and fortitude), Runeclaw (might and arcana), Thornback (speed and fortitude), Mistwraith (speed and arcana) and Wardstone (fortitude and arcana), each rising through Elder, Sovereign, Mythic, Eldritch and Primeval with the tiers. A clear majority in one stat still makes a pure form. Six pets in the realm changed form the moment this went live, exactly as their feeding said they should.
Forms do something. A might line adds 3% damage, a speed line +2 to hit and +1 crit, a fortitude line +4 armour pierce, an arcana line 3% damage, and a balanced pet a little of each; a hybrid takes six tenths of both parents. The perk scales with the tier — from once at level 100 to three times at 1,000 — and the pet panel and the pet’s attacks read the same figure, so what the panel shows is what the bite does. The wiki’s Tamers page was rewritten from the same numbers.
All a hundred and two kit techniques now cost 0 TP: their cooldown and their turn rank are the whole price, and the TP bar belongs to the Tier I–X ladder. The Arte menu says “cooldown 2 rounds” or “no TP cost” rather than “(0 TP)”, and a locked technique names the real obstacle — the level or the weapon skill — instead of asking you to build TP for it.
Fixing that exposed something worse. A kit cast was draining the whole bar. The overcharge rule charged an Arte for the TP above its cost; for a kit technique, which takes no bonus from surplus, that meant the entire surplus was spent for nothing — one Low Sweep from a full bar emptied it. That is what “my TP is gone after one Sweep” was. Kit casts spend nothing now. Low Sweep also leaves a foe Stumbling for three rounds, which is a proper two-turn window for the Leap and the Dive that follow it.
The five songs last four rounds on a two-round cooldown. Sonata restarts every song still playing at its full four rounds, for the whole party, on a three-round cooldown — it never stretches a song past four, and never revives one that has ended. Played well, the loop is two songs, a Sonata, two songs, a Sonata, the fifth song, and then a Sonata every third round with two free turns between.
Whenever a Flintlock is equipped, on any class, the stat panel carries a row of pips: as many as the gun holds, sized by its rarity, lit while loaded and hollow when spent, reading EMPTY and FULL at the ends. The count is the fight’s own, so the gun starts each new fight reloaded.
A promotion is priced at the highest skill ceiling the weapon has across all classes — the shared price for a shared promotion — but a weapon skill stopped training at your own class’s cap. A class that ranks a weapon below A could therefore never reach the price: fifty-four weapons across the realm sat on exactly that wall, reading “400 / 500” forever.
The skill itself now trains up to the price. Your class still bounds what the skill does — the damage bonus and the Artes stop at your class cap, and a promotion banks nothing above it — so nothing about class identity moved; the trainer and the skill list say so in as many words.
Pressing an unassigned hotbar slot in a fight did nothing — and then the Tamer’s pet attacked anyway, without a turn passing. Every fight mode now refuses the empty slot outright: no time passes, no pet moves, nothing happens.
On some mobile browsers the enemy’s numbers were there and the red bar was not. The bar’s colour lived only in a gradient some phone engines cannot read, so they drew nothing. Every bar now declares a plain colour first and the gradient on top, so the worst any browser shows is a solid bar.
Gear crit damage has been capped at +25% since August, and combat has honoured that cap on every swing since. Item cards had not: a relic stretched up to a high level carried its crit damage up with it, and a card could read +706% for a weapon that was, and is, paying +25%. The big hits people saw after swapping to such a weapon were its damage and stat lines, not its crit.
Cards now show the crit the fight honours and say (capped) when the stored figure was higher; newly minted and scaled items store the capped figure; and the stored numbers already in the realm — a hundred and twenty-three of them, across inventories, the guild vaults, the seasonal shop and two catalogues — have been brought into line. No weapon hits differently than it did.
Marsh Bugs — food for every Tamer’s pet and a rung on every profession — grew at exactly one spot in the open world. Now there are twenty-five, spread over both bogs. The same floor has been laid under every other gatherable: at least twenty-five nodes per resource, which added around two hundred nodes to the world. Phantom Ash had none at all. Forest Wood went from nine nodes to fifty across the forests and the woodlands, and Woodland tiles yield Forest Wood too, as they always should have.
The Fall Festival’s re-skin of the forests was also hiding more than leaves: a masked forest tile would not let you gather, and it spawned three kinds of enemy where the forest beneath has twenty-nine. Gathering and spawns now see through the season to the ground underneath.
Choosing an element and an Unleash at the forge did nothing: the bench was repainted for the crafting session a moment before it read the dials, so every session was sent with neither. The choices are captured first now and carried into the session.
Assembling a Masterwork from a chain of all-Peerless precursors minted a merely High-Quality result; a chain of Peerless pieces now mints Peerless, at Peerless value. And the Evergrowth Band, made by a Strength crafter, came out shaped for a caster. The band now takes the six-stat shape of the class that forged it, and the bands already in the realm have been re-shaped the same way.
Every jewellery bench above level 10,000 asked for a material called Voidglass Resource — a name nothing in the game yields. The material is Voidglass, and the benches ask for it by name now.
The Codex counted a hundred and fifty achievements, and fifteen of them — the gathering ones — could never be earned: the game measured nothing for them. They can be earned now, and a hundred and twenty-one new ones join them, cut from counters the game already keeps: crafting, quests, treasure, the Old Evils, raids, the Descent and the Ascent, factions, trade, bounties, login streaks, friends, referrals, titles, cosmetics, the Mimic’s codex, runes, fusions, the ladder, echo duels, the Blight Tide, the seasons and pets. Two hundred and seventy-one achievements across twenty-five categories.
Anything you had already done was credited quietly when this went live — thousands of awards, and not one line of chat about them. New ones announce themselves as they always have.
The gold Realm Offering is retired; its final week is honoured until the evening of 16 September and then it is gone. In its place the realm’s EXP blessing comes from the players who help with the server bill: every five pounds given raises everyone’s EXP by one percent, to a cap of +15%, for the calendar month, resetting on the first. The giver gets nothing the rest of the realm does not. The shrine shows a bar from empty to the cap and nothing about money.
A new castaway was being handed thirteen pop-ups in the first seven minutes — three realm tours, a six-step attributes tour, a pools tour and twelve “unlocked” toasts for menus the island does not have — while the gold line above the map was already saying what to do. The island now shows one welcome card that points at that line, and a level-up card when the first point arrives. The realm’s own tours wait until you are in the realm.
Quest boards, quest pins and crystagyns that belong to the Sky, the Underworld or the island were drawn on the overworld map at their coordinates there. Each map draws only its own world’s now.
Every guild work — the hall, the bonus tiers, vault tabs, relics — is paid from the guild bank. The Skyhold was the one exception: founding the island and raising its buildings took the gold out of the acting officer’s own purse. Founding and every building tier now draw their gold from the guild bank, like everything else the guild builds; the sky materials still come from the officer who does the raising. The panel shows the bank’s balance beside every gold cost, and each founding or raising is written to the guild log with what it cost. If the bank is short, deposit from the Guild page first, exactly as the hall already asks.
Every material cost on the Skyhold panel — the next tier of each building, the founding, the Beacon’s stoke — now carries how many of that material you hold, green when it covers the cost and red when it does not, read from the same place the purchase checks. No more trips to the bag to compare.
Sometimes a purchase went through and the game never said so, so you pressed Buy again and paid again. Every request the game makes shared one channel, and any request that started while your purchase was in flight — the party’s status poll, most often — threw the purchase’s reply away. Every money action now travels on its own channel: shop buys and sells, mass sales, the auction house, the seasonal shop, the bank, the essence extractor and the Lab, cosmetics. A second click while the first is still pending is refused rather than charged, and the shop confirms the purchase in the panel itself.
On the mobile shell the chat jumped to the newest message every time it refreshed, so scrolling up to read something older was a race you lost every few seconds. The chat now remembers where you were reading and puts you back there after each refresh; only when you are already at the bottom does it follow the newest message.
Over a day and a half of play the plain Attack was 86% of every action pressed, with five hundred characters carrying Artes on their hotbars they did not use. The arithmetic explained it: a developed character’s swing carried weapon skill, stance, one-shot buffs, rune damage, guild relics and defence rend, and an Arte carried none of them, so a Quick Cut landed below that player’s own swing, on a cooldown, for a menu click.
An Arte is now your swing with a multiplier. Every bonus the basic attack carries rides every hit of an Arte too, and the basic attack itself is dialled from 0.70 to 0.60 of the damage curve. Per click, against the new swing: Quick Cut 1.3×, Slice 2×, Flurry 3.5×, Power Shot 2.2×, Pummel nearly 6×. A kit rotation lands above yesterday’s attack-spam; attack-spam alone lands a little under it. The cooldown is the price.
Above a few thousand MP every spell cost the same flat share of the pool, so a level-20,000 spell cost exactly what a level-1 spell cost and the top spell was free to prefer — thirty casts a pool at every tier. The pool-relative floor is now banded by the spell’s level: 3% at level 1, 5% at 60, 7% at 100, 10% at 500, 13% at 2,000, 16% at 6,000, up to 20% at 20,000. Magicians, Warlocks and Necromancers still pay 65%. A starter spell is cheaper than before; a level-500 spell is fifteen casts a pool for a caster rather than thirty. The Magick page on the wiki carries the table.
At the top of the ladder a stacked build was killing at-level enemies in two blows. Equipment was not the cause — gear adds a fair share and is capped twice already. The cause was the multipliers on top of level allocation and gear: set bonus, essences, mastery and traits each defensible alone, multiplying together to seventeen times the foundation for the most stacked characters, against an enemy rail built for about five.
The product now has a ceiling. Every permanent multiplier may stack to five times your level allocation plus gear at full value; past that the returns diminish but never stop — a further +10% is worth about +3%, so every essence, trait and mastery point you add still counts, and every point of gear or allocation raises the foundation and everything stacked on it. Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence only — Defence and Spirit keep their own caps, so nobody got softer. Potions, party auras and songs still ride on top. The trait and attunement bucket’s own ceiling also comes down from +320% to +260%, with the full-value point at +200% untouched, so nothing at or below it changes. Across a hundred active characters the median fight is one hit longer from the swing dial alone; the six most stacked builds go from two blows to five or six. The Stat Breakdown shows the ceiling as its own line, with your own numbers: what you stacked, what it was held to, and what a point of gear or allocation is worth to you there.
Everything you wear could add at most 75% of your base stat, a line drawn in August when gear was the last guard against runaway stats. Now that the multiplier stack has its own ceiling, that guard is no longer needed: gear counts up to 100% of your base stat, on every stat. About a quarter of active characters were sitting on the old line and gain between 2% and 14% on the sheet; the most stacked builds wear far less than the line and are unchanged. Gear above the new line is still not counted, and the Stat Breakdown’s Equipment row names it wherever it binds.
The deploy gate that every change passes before it reaches you now proves each of its own rules against a deliberate break before it is trusted, so a rule that quietly stopped guarding is noticed rather than assumed. The wiki’s Skyholds, Tamers, Weapon Skills and Forest Wood pages were rewritten where this hotfix changed the facts. And the mobile enemy card, the Skyhold panel and the item card all learned the same lesson in the same week: what the game shows must be what the game does.