A duel could be over before it began: one opening blow, correctly calculated, could take a whole health bar. No single turn of a duel can now take more than a quarter of what the other duellist can take — the cap is spent where the blow lands, so nothing slips past it.
Defence is weighed differently in a duel too, and only in a duel. A defender who has actually invested in defence now roughly halves what reaches them, instead of watching it round away. Duels last longer, and what you built decides them.
Spells carried a level all along and nothing ever checked it. A book could hold a spell far above its owner, and casting it worked.
It is checked now — when you buy it, on the shelf, in the school, on the card, in the book, on the hotbar, and at the moment you cast — against the level of the class you are currently playing, not the highest you have ever reached. Fusing two spells checks both.
Said plainly, because it is a loss: if you were casting something above your level, you cannot any more. It is still yours, it still sits in your book, and it will come back the moment that class catches up to it.
A ladder arte does not only cost what it lists. Every point of TP above that cost is turned into extra damage — and spent. The bar said “Costs 1000 TP”, the cast took three thousand, and the only honest line arrived afterwards, in the same breath as the kill.
The hotbar and the Artes menu now read from the same place and say so first: 1000 TP + your 2,000 surplus (×1.10, spends 3,000). Nothing about the cast changed, and you can still use an arte the moment you can afford its listed cost — you simply know what it will take.
A price on a head stayed there for ever. Gold posted in August was still held in escrow a month later, on contracts nobody was ever going to collect, and the panel told you plainly that a purse could not be withdrawn — only claimed.
A contract now stands for seven days. If nobody has collected it by then the whole purse is returned to the poster’s bank, and they are told it has come home. The board shows how long each contract still has, and a bounty that has run out cannot be collected, so nobody can be paid for a kill the realm no longer wants.
Every bounty already on the board keeps a full seven days from today — nothing lapses the moment this lands.
Equipping a two-hander cleared your off-hand. Applying a loadout that contained one did not — the shield stayed on, and its defence was still being counted.
One rule now runs on every path that can change what you hold, and the loadout screen tells you when it has emptied a hand. If you had a two-hander and a shield at the same time, the shield is in your bag now.
The combat clock only moved when you swung your weapon. Cast a spell, chain a fusion, use a weapon arte or an ability, and every cooldown you were waiting on stood exactly where it was. A caster who never took a basic attack could watch the same number sit there all fight.
The clock now advances on every action you take — attacks, spells, fusions, weapon artes and abilities alike. No cooldown got shorter; they simply run while you are playing.
TP drained thirty seconds after your last action, at a hundred a second — so a full 3,000 bar was empty one minute later. A bar that takes twenty-four landed hits to fill was being spent on the walk between two fights, which is exactly what it looked like from the inside: full at the end of one fight, nothing at the start of the next.
Nothing is now lost for ninety seconds, and the bar then drains at fifty a second:
Walking to the next fight, reading a drop and picking your next target now cost you nothing. The decay still does the one job it exists for — you cannot bank a full bar overnight and open tomorrow with a free maximum-overcharge arte. And it is separate from the price tag above: overcharge still spends your surplus at the moment of the cast.
Your stance was kept one to an account, not one to a class. Taking a stance on a second class destroyed the first class’s stance, and coming back to that class the game said you had none. A stance could be there when you logged out and gone when you came back — not because it had expired, but because something else had been written over it.
A stance is now kept per class. Every stance already set has been filed under the class it belongs to, and one waiting on a class you are not currently playing is no longer lost — it is still there when you go back to it.
Anything that raised your maximum mana in the middle of a session — a level, a stat, a Class Mastery or Star Map node earned mid-fight — raised the ceiling and left your mana where it stood. You had every point you had a moment ago, but the bar read lower, and it read lower again each time the pool grew. Over an evening you could watch a full bar drift down toward ninety per cent without casting a thing.
When your pool grows, your mana now grows with it — gain a thousand maximum and you gain a thousand. Nothing takes mana off you for getting stronger.
Partying was advertised as a bonus and worked as a tax. The kill’s reward was split between everyone in range, so the player who landed it walked away with less than they would have alone — the more friends nearby, the worse it got.
That is gone, in EXP and in gold, in every world.
The anti-power-levelling guard now measures the person being paid rather than the person swinging, which is the only way it was ever meant to read.
Every shop drew a shelf — the right level window, the right rarities, the retired lines left off — and then the till sold by catalogue number and asked none of it. In practice any shop could sell you almost anything, from anywhere.
The shelf and the till now read the same rule, and the till also asks whether this counter, on the tile you are actually standing on, stocks the thing. No more buying at a distance — walk to the shop. What each shop offers has not changed; what it will hand over now matches what it shows.
A listing that holds a stack had to be taken whole. Now there is a small box beside the Buy button: leave it blank for the lot, or type how many you want. Beside the price of the whole, the listing shows what one costs — the same figure you will actually be charged.
The seller is not out of pocket for being bought in pieces. However many buyers it takes, the lot pays its full asking price, to the coin, and what is left is re-priced by exactly what was taken. Two buyers reaching for the last of a stack cannot both have it, and the one who misses keeps their gold.
You have been able to post a buy order since 5.0 — name what you want, how many, and what you will pay each; your gold waits while the order stands, anyone can fill part or all of it, and cancelling gives the gold back. Almost nobody knew, because it was one line of text above the listings.
The Auction House now shows the board itself: the best-paying open orders with their quantities and prices, and a button to post one of your own. If nobody is asking for anything, it says so and invites you to be first.
Weapons and armour bought from a shop were built by the till itself, and it built them thinly: no rarity, no element, no critical chance, and a durability pool that did not match the catalogue. Combat reads critical chance off the item, so a bought weapon quietly crit less than the identical dropped one. The Armory never counted a purchase, and your collection never learned the name.
Shop gear is now made by the same door everything else comes through. A bought sword and a looted sword of the same line are the same sword.
The same was true of the seasonal shop, and one thing was worse: an exchange at the Dark Forge could take your item and refund you as though it had failed, because the shop could not tell whether what it had just made had really been made.
Event gear is now assembled once, from the real ladder, and handed over through the same door — and the currency is only taken when the item genuinely exists.
Whether an Old Evil stalked your dungeon was rolled every time you walked in. Stepping out and back was a free re-roll, which is not a hunt.
The answer is now made once and remembered, per player and per dungeon. A yes stands until you kill it. A no lasts an hour and then the realm is willing to be asked again, so nobody is locked out of their own dungeon for a day.
The Realm Boss had no lasting way in — you reached it from a notification, and if you missed that, you could not find it. Worse, an unclaimed share vanished when the next boss rose.
There is a Realm Boss entry in the Adventure menu now, marked while a share is waiting for you, and the panel lists every ended boss you can still claim from, each with its own Claim. A share survives the rotation.
Crystal Cardinals had a tell. Each regular held the same five cards every night, and above the friendliest difficulty they played the identical game: the same board and the same hand always produced the same move, down to the corner they opened in.
Every regular now draws their five from their own slice of the catalogue, and draws their move from everything they rate equal rather than always taking the first. They are no weaker for it — a regular still never gives up a card it could flip, and still keeps to the corners — but you cannot learn one night and replay it.
One consequence worth naming: the hand they hold is now luck, the way yours is. Some nights they are dealt better than others.
The database changed how it shows a row to one player while another is mid-purchase, and the way this game guards gold and stock depended on the old behaviour. Left alone it could refuse trades outright.
Every transaction in the game now opens through one door that asks for the freshest committed view, so a guarded read sees what the other player just did instead of failing.
A housekeeping table had been quietly gaining a duplicate row for every session anyone ever played, and had reached 11,439 of them where 23 were needed. It is 23 now, and the table will not do it again.
Nothing you own was involved, and nothing changed about where you can go.
The Auction House note that tells a seller what their sale earned worked out the tax from the price rather than recording it. That was exact while every sale was a whole lot, and wrong the moment one was not.
The figure is now the one actually taken, written down at the time of sale.