In-match Perks arrive: earn XP as you fight and pick spell-specific upgrades three times a round. Around them, a full combat-feedback pass (hit markers, hit sounds, floating damage numbers, kill feed), a spell balance pass across every sage, Play of the Match replays, daily/weekly/monthly Rewards, Quick Match, bot difficulty, equippable titles, and a large batch of new enchantments.

Perks

• New: in-match Perks. Kills, assists, damage, healing and objective plays earn perk XP for your sage. Reach a level and a notifier pulses on the HUD; open the offer (P / D-pad down) and pick one of two cards (Q / E or the shoulder buttons). Three levels per round, and perks reset at the start of every round so each round is a fresh climb.
• Every perk enhances one specific spell or the ultimate: more damage, a wider area, a longer duration, an extra charge, golem, echo or arrow. Each sage has five perks (one per spell plus the ult); the card shows the perk name, the enhanced spell's icon and what it does.
• You always get two cards. Perks you passed over at an earlier level can come back at a later one, so the level-3 offer is never a single card.
• Spell, ultimate and spellbook input is suspended while the offer is open, so the pick keys never fire a spell by accident. Dying with the offer open closes it without spending the level; the same two cards return after you respawn.
• Picking a perk flashes its icon on the HUD. Key hints on the cards and the notifier switch between keyboard and controller art automatically.
• Perk XP balance: XP is linear in damage and healing that actually lands. Overkill no longer counts, healing a full-health ally earns nothing, ally heals now credit the healer (they credited nobody before), self-heals earn at a reduced rate, and bot kills pay a kill bonus like player kills.
• Training teaches perks: a new lesson grants a level and walks you through opening the offer and picking.

Damage Indicators & Feedback

• Crosshair hit markers: every confirmed hit pins a marker over the target. Damage, armor, heal and kill each have their own look; damage markers tilt and shake, whiten as they fade, and kill markers linger at the spot the target died.
• Attacker-only hit sounds: a tick for health damage, a reverbed lower thud for shields, a chime for heals and a slash for kills. Routed through the SFX mixer so the volume slider applies.
• Floating combat text v2: damage and heal numbers are animated, coloured and stack across rapid hits (bots included). They burst to ring points around the target, are smaller and sit closer to the body so they read as belonging to that target.
• Death recap on the killed-by panel lists each spell on one line with its total damage. Melee shows as Wand Smash.
• Kill feed shows players felling bots and bots felling players, with assists credited. The old damage feed no longer duplicates kill entries.
• Drain link VFX: every heal, drain and life-share spell draws a smoky two-layer beam to its target, bots included.
• Every damage-over-time spell now shows a status overlay on its victim (seven new overlay slots), and team bots play the same overlays.
• Sprint-ready HUD icon that hides while sprinting or while dash is on cooldown.

Damage Numbers & Spell Stats

• Spell stats are shown plainly in the spellbook, pulled live from the real spell values, one stat per line, ultimates included.
• Class level stat buffs are removed: levelling a sage no longer changes spell numbers. Balance is driven by the spell values themselves plus in-match perks.
• Mana and ether are no longer gameplay resources; spells are gated by cooldown only. Fizzled casts still never count as casts.

Spell Balance

• Full balance pass over all fifteen sages (60 values). Budgets: spell 1 ≤ 30 burst per 10 s cycle, 15 s spells ≤ 50, 20–25 s spells ≤ 75 or strong utility; zone ultimates standardised to 25 damage per second for 5 s in a 10 m radius; one-shot ults ≤ 60.
• Biggest outliers brought in: Tornado Fury (50 × 5 homing tornadoes → 15 × 3), Death's Whisper (80 dmg / 100 heal per second → 30 / 30), Penny's Perks (80 / 60 → 25 / 20), Dark Bolt (3 × 45 → 3 × 25), Inferno's Rage (60/s → 25/s), Astral Pulse (50 → 35), Recoil Sigil (25 → 15 per pass), Reaper's Volley pop (200 → 120), Hunter's Bulwark (7 → 4 arrows per second).
• Buffs where spells under-delivered: Echoes explosion 10 → 15, Fae's Ultimatum 10 → 15 per second, Fae Nightmare 10 → 12 damage at half the health cost, Hex Bags 5 → 8 per tick.
• Survey bugs fixed: Predator's Snare never armed its +20% damage amp; Quantum Entanglement's entry damage only hit AI; Shopkeeper handed powerups to enemies and to everyone in FFA; Phoenix Rebirth's damage reduction never applied; Water Serpent advertised a stun it no longer had.
• Vortex Slam reworked: leap up, fire the apex arrow ring, slam straight down. Atalia is invisible from the moment the slam starts dropping until she lands and can move again. Landing detection is strict, so no VFX above the floor and no jump lockout after landing.
• Projectile homing rework: homing spells steer like a magnet inside a bubble around the target instead of snapping to the nearest body, and they target and damage team bots (players prioritised).
• Players get a short immunity window after a stun ends; slows, silences and knockbacks have caps and re-apply buffers.
• Speed effects no longer stick: a slow followed by a dash now recomputes from one place, so movement speed always returns to normal.
• Umbral Sage's Shadow Cloak no longer silences the player after death or drains speed on class swap.

Play of the Match

• Every series ends with a Play of the Match replay before the summary: a ghost replay of the best moment, followed by the camera, with an overlay naming the player, spell and victims.
• It scores more than kills: fast multi-kills and clutch kills, plus objective plays in every mode (relic captures, big shard deposits, idol steals, soul revives, surviving a Realm Fall collapse). Works in bot-only lobbies and solo play.

Rewards & Challenges

• New Rewards panel with Daily, Weekly and Monthly chases: each period draws from a pool of challenges (24 daily / 28 weekly / 20 monthly) and pays gold, XP, titles, banners or amulets. Progress shares the LootLocker progression path, and the panel shows time left in each period.
• Equippable titles: unlock titles through rewards and challenges and wear one under your name in the lobby, the HUD and the match summary.
• Lifetime match/win submissions consolidated so wins can never outrun matches.

Matchmaking & Lobby

• Quick Match preset: one button, sensible defaults, into a game. Solo play arms the same rules.
• Selectable bot difficulty. Hard bots hit harder and react faster; Easy bots trade more melee and cast less.
• Assists: damage contributors get assist credit in the feed and the summary.
• Gamepad aim assist (settings toggle) gently pulls the crosshair toward targets in the reticle bubble.
• Lobby player banners no longer rebuild on every sync: entries stay put, the unfold animation plays once per player, and banners never show "New Text". Bots trickle into the lobby, and bot fill resumes after a human joins.
• Rematch keeps the game mode and re-rolls the map, runs the series enchantment vote before the countdown, and clears stale picks.
• Control rebinding for spells, ultimate, melee, dodge, sprint, jump and celebrate, with conflict handling. Level bar shows per-level XP.
• Menu cursor no longer dies after a match; dead-at-round-end camera fixed via a respawn fail-safe at round start.
• Mute, block and report players from the killed-by panel; Discord level-up and rank posts only on a genuine increase.

Enchantments

• Around 70 new enchantments across six batches: team buffs (Second Wind, Rocket Boots, Glass Cannon, Turtle Shell, Blood Pact, Vampiric Melee, Combo Meter, Bulwark Ults, Tenacity, Brawler's Pride, Battle Cry, Head Start…), opponent nerfs (Leaden Boots, Fumbled Pockets, Brittle Armor, Slow Souls, Deadweight, Cursed Relic, Brittle Bones, Pocket Sand, Frost Touch, Backdraft, Short Arms, Wandering Aim, Sore Loser…) and environmentals (Ice Age, Trapdoors, Mirror Match, Doppelgangers, Eye of the Storm, Kill Switch, Echo Chamber, Gravestones, Vampire Night, Glass Realm, Overtime, Shard Shower…). Game-type-specific cards are only offered in their mode, and each team is guaranteed one within the first three rounds.
• All 156 cards audited for targeting and reworded; Vengeance Respawn and Hollow Victory reclassified as buffs; Double XP and Gentleman's Exchange removed; Heavy Hands implemented; Extended Match / Swift End adjust the synced match timer. Environmental cards no longer prefix "Everyone:".
• Between-round cleanup can no longer cancel the round's enchantments; one bad card never takes the rest down. Pools are generated from code with a fallback icon for anything missing art.
• Bombs Away and other crate-spawning cards: explodable crates are fully reset when they respawn each round (they were coming back from the object pool already primed, with the blast radius showing).

Team Bots

• Bots take projectile damage, show stacking damage numbers, play victim overlays, and their melee is named Wand Slam in every feed (no more blank spell names). Bot Death Grip plants static shards toward the target. Training bots use a sparring profile.

Training

• New perk lesson; the 3-2-1 countdown is faster with FIGHT at unlock; Idol Curse has a HUD indicator.

Stability & Under the Hood

• Explodable crates recycled through the Photon prefab pool now reset their state; abilities no longer destroy already-recycled objects.
• Regions auto-detect (the baked 'us' region is un-pinned); resolution defaults to the screen's native size through one apply path; LootLocker max-level null fix.
• Remaining Debug.Log calls in gameplay, spell and manager code are commented out.