Cooldowns are counted in turns now, not seconds, and cooldown reduction had never caught up: it was still shortening a cooldown by a percentage. On a unit this large that is far too sharp — ten percent, the single trait every class is handed at level 75 for nothing, was already taking a whole turn off a six-turn cooldown.
It now buys turns in equal steps, and a turn has to be earned.
This is a reduction if you are lightly invested in it, and we would rather say so here than let you notice it in a fight. Below 25 it buys nothing yet. A cooldown still never falls below two turns, exactly as before, and every place the game shows you the number now says what it actually buys instead of a percentage it stopped honouring.
A Flintlock's magazine is set by the make of the gun: a Common holds two rounds and a Mastercraft holds eight. Every one of them was holding two.
The part of the code that fires and reloads was being handed the gun without being told what kind it was, so it fell back to the smallest magazine there is — whatever you were carrying. A stance that adds three rounds was adding them to two, which is why it seemed to stop at five.
Your gun now holds what its make says, and Reload fills it. A Legendary holds seven.
Every other way you deal damage can critical — a spell, a fused cast, either hand of a weapon swing, a class ability. An echo could not. That was never a decision; it was a roll nobody had written, and it meant a Mimic's critical chance did nothing for the one thing a Mimic does.
Echoes now roll like the abilities they are, at the same chance and the same strength, and every echo uses the same roll — the old catalogue and the newer arts alike.
A siphon announced a number — returns 7,000 HP — and then handed over whatever the leech ceiling allowed, which above three-quarters health is nothing at all. The number was real arithmetic. It was simply not what you received.
The log now names what actually reached you, and when the ceiling has nothing to give it says so rather than going quiet.
The ceiling itself has not moved. Only what you are told about it.
A handful of abilities across six classes lower an enemy's defence. They were refusing to fire outside a party battle — and telling a player who was plainly standing in a battle that the ability “only matters in a battle”.
Lowering a foe's defence needs nobody else, so it no longer pretends it does. Taunts and threat-shifting genuinely do need someone beside you, still refuse, and now say party battle in those words.
Every equipment drop offers a small ⓘ so you can look at it before deciding. It has been opening nothing at all — or, now and then, some entirely unrelated item. It was being handed the wrong number: not the thing you had just found, but a leftover from the line that writes your drop into the log.
It now opens the item you just found. In your bag and on the ground, in the overworld, in dungeons and in raids — seven places in all, which is rather more than anyone thought.
A skill, arte, magick or echo can now hold only one hotbar slot. Putting it somewhere new moves it rather than copying it.
Nothing was ever gained by holding five copies — abilities and artes share a single cooldown however many slots they sit in, and magicks and echoes are held back by MP either way — but a bar that let you do it invited the belief that it helped, and charged you four slots for the privilege.
Slots you have already filled are left exactly as they are until you next touch them. Nothing has been taken off your bar.
They were meant never to. The art for a female dwarf was being drawn from a description that asked for a dwarf and said nothing about who she was, and on several of the classes what came back was a bearded man in her armour.
All twenty have been redrawn, not only the ones that were wrong — a set drawn half one way and half the other would have looked odder than the beards did. She is still a dwarf: short, broad, braided and built for a forge. She simply looks like herself now.
No beards here, but the same root: half of them read as men, because the description they were drawn from spelled “powerful” using a heavy jaw and broad shoulders and left it at that.
Forty more redrawn, twenty of each. They keep everything that makes them what they are — green skin, tusks, and for the Warborn the scarred hide and the ember-orange eyes of an awakened bloodline. They are still the strongest people in the realm. They are also, unmistakably, women.
Every one of the other races was looked at before anything was touched. Elves, High Elves, Halflings, Fateborn, Shades, Umbra, Paragons and Runeguard all came through clean and have not been changed. Dragonborn and Wyrmkin have no human face to soften — a female dragon is told apart by her colour, and always has been.
A new wiki page showing every sprite in the game: fourteen races, twenty classes, male and female — 560 in all, the seven races first and the awakened bloodlines after, each one named beside the race it came from.
Click any sprite to see it full size. The art is drawn at 256 px square and shown small on the page; clicking opens it properly, without leaving the page.
It is also linked from Races and from Evolved Races, which is where you are standing when you want it.
On the Crossroads and Specialisation panels a few talents showed the name the code uses instead of the one you should read — absorb_chance_flat 3 where it meant +3% Echo Absorb Chance.
Eight of them, across five classes. All named properly now, and the game will refuse to ship another one unnamed.
A map's tier is now rolled rarest-first and then capped by the ground it was found on, so the high tiers stay rare while a given spot still answers the same way every time. A good place to hunt is still a good place to hunt.
The Underworld and the Shatterlands will still find you a quest target from a neighbouring biome — that is what makes an off-biome quest finishable — but no longer from another world. A Sky quest's target stays in the Sky.
Gear a quest handed you in order to reach somewhere — boats, boots, skis — can no longer be put into the guild vault, so a place stays behind the content that opens it rather than behind guild membership. Treasure maps and dungeon keys are deliberately still shareable.
When the map refuses a step it gives a reason. Outside the overworld that reason was being assembled and then never shown, so the step simply failed in silence. Every world now prints it, once, where you are looking.
The little token that marks you on the map is built from your sprite. Ten of them had been left behind by an earlier change and were still drawn from art that had since been replaced, so the marker and the character it stood for quietly disagreed. Rebuilt.
A redrawn sprite is no use if your browser keeps showing you the old one. Each sprite on the gallery now carries its own version, so a file that has changed is fetched again and the several hundred that have not are left alone — the page stays quick and still tells the truth.