Performance
A significant pass on the two spawner systems that drive resource nodes and regional creature spawns. Both were doing an entire region's work in a single frame — on a busy region that meant a 35–44ms spike every second, and occasional 62ms spikes, against a 250ms tick.
Mounted Combat
We brought mounted combat back in Eternal, but weapon abilities and prestige abilities still threw you off your horse. That's fixed.
Weapon abilities no longer dismount you. Neither do Martial Prowess or Sorcery abilities. Your mount survives instant abilities, queued hits, and target-selected abilities alike.
Poison no longer dazes or dismounts riders. Poison ticks were being treated like any other big hit — they'd daze you, and daze you off your horse if you were already dazed. Poison still hurts, it just doesn't knock you off any more.
Abilities that dismount your enemy still work exactly as before, and ordinary forced dismounts are unchanged.
Archery
Balance pass on bows and a stack of bugs.
The bow's basic Shoot action is gone.
Shot stamina costs are now consistent, mounted or on foot:
Shortbow / Longbow / Warbow shots — 10 / 15 / 20
Wound / Stun Shot / Explosive Shot — 20 / 25 / 30
Bug fixes:
Centershot works at zero stamina again. Its free shots were being rejected by the stamina check before the free-shot logic ever ran.
Auto-fire stops when you swap or lose your bow. Previously the old bow's stamina cost and firing rate would carry over to whatever you picked up next.
Successful instant abilities now correctly report back to auto-fire.
Invalid targets or a mid-fight weapon change no longer leave you stuck firing, and no longer break weapon lookup.
Fire Arrow checks your target, weapon, and casting state before working out firing speed, and line of sight is only enforced where it actually should be.
Prestige — More Fighter Builds, and Armor Has Weaknesses
Heavy armor builds were too narrow. This opens them up, gives bashing a real job, and makes armor choice an actual trade-off instead of a straight upgrade.
Hamstring and Adrenaline Rush no longer require Light Armor. Skill requirements stay, and Hamstring still won't work with a ranged weapon. A heavy-armored dagger build can now run Hamstring, Charge, and Adrenaline Rush together.
Two new Fighter abilities:
Parry (Rank 1) — Longsword, 40 Slashing, full Light or Heavy armor. A one-second stance that blocks parryable attacks from the front 180° arc and returns 50% of the blocked damage. 25-second cooldown. While parrying you move at half speed and can't attack, cast, use items, or use other abilities. Facing is checked when the damage lands, so exact side and rear hits get through — as do self-inflicted damage, certain hazards, and ongoing poison and burn ticks. Reflected damage can't bounce back and forth.
Shattering Impact (Rank 3) — Qualifying bashing weapon, 80 Bashing, full Light or Heavy armor. Primes for ten seconds, then the next qualifying hit reduces the target's armor by 20% for eight seconds. Refreshes rather than stacking, and respects minimum defense. 45-second cooldown.
Both come with rank-correct books in the loot pool, their own icons, and activation visuals.
Armor now has explicit weaknesses:
Every Heavy head, chest, or leg piece adds +10% Bashing vulnerability.
Every Light head, chest, or leg piece adds +10% Slashing vulnerability.
Cloth adds neither. Mixed sets accumulate each weakness independently, so a mixed build takes a bit of both.
Vulnerability applies after mitigation and doesn't affect reflected damage. Your totals are shown in equipment tooltips.
Boss mechanics ignore Parry. Telegraphed boss hazards bypass both the block and the reflection, so you still have to move out of them. This covers DragonFire's breath, Vazguhn's gas, fire eruptions and landing shockwave, Barkas's creeping roots, closing crown and phase blast, Azura's failed-challenge shockwave and Frozen Judgment, and Wendigo's frost ring and ground blast. Damage, radii, and telegraphs are all unchanged.
Skill Gains — Weapons Train Faster
Weapon progression between 80 and 100 was badly out of step with magic, which can be trained on repeatable casts while weapons need valid combat checks against suitable opponents.
Against an equal-difficulty opponent, roughly:
Skill | 80–90 | Above 90 |
|---|---|---|
Piercing / Slashing / Lancing / Bashing | ~92% faster | ~188% faster |
Vigor | ~54% faster | ~131% faster |
Brawling | ~33% faster | ~100% faster |
Archery | ~25% faster | ~88% faster |
The difficulty curve itself hasn't changed. We deliberately didn't widen it — that would have made easy and trivial targets better training than they should be. Appropriate targets simply pay out more. Content you succeed against 100% of the time still gives nothing.
Power Hour, Combat Mastery, and the skill gain buff all multiply on top as before. A fully buffed melee character above 90 is now training at roughly 11.5x the old unbuffed baseline.
New Characters
Rogues and Craftsmen starting templates can finally use bandages. Neither had any Healing, which meant a Rogue healed 11.5 HP per bandage where a Swordsman healed 33.3 — and a Craftsman had no healing option at all: no Healing skill, no spellbook, but still a dagger and the expectation they'd survive with it. Both now start with a small amount of Healing that doesn't cost them any of their build points or show up in the creation screen. A Rogue and Craftsman now starts with 50 bandages.
Fireball added to the starter spellbook, alongside Heal, Cure, Mana Missile, and Ruin. This only applies to newly created books.
Your free starter gear can no longer be sold to merchants. It's worthless by design, and selling it was never intended. Coin purses are unaffected and still spend normally.
Entering the world for the first time no longer overwrites your login outfit or hands out duplicate starter items.
Merchants and Economy
You can now sell from bags inside your pack. The merchant Sell window looks through your backpack's containers, up to five levels deep. Locked and locked-down bags are skipped, and bags with anything in them are excluded so you can't accidentally sell a container full of your own gear.
Merchants restock every 15 minutes, down from 30. The amount restored per cycle is unchanged.
Reagents and arrows now stock up to 500. Moss, ginseng, mushrooms, and lemon grass all move from a target of 100 to 500, and arrows match. Merchants also buy up to that same 500 before refusing more, and the shop's Maximum column and sell cart now show the real remaining capacity instead of an inflated number.
Inscription vendors sell basic staffs — 20 in stock at 100 gold.
Land deeds now cost 5,000 gold, up from 2,000 gold.
Crafting
The crafting window reopens after a failed craft. Previously, failing a single craft — or the last attempt in a batch — closed the window and left you clicking your way back in. Batches still continue on failure as before.
Bosses
Shrine Guardian, Ruins Wraith, and Enraged Lich Servant can cast Meteor again. They were configured for it but capped at 52 maximum mana against a 60 mana cost, so it never fired. Their Intelligence has been raised to give them the mana they need.
Twelve dynamic bosses have their configured abilities back. Self-buffs and target effects weren't being dispatched at all in the shared boss combat phase. Their movement, spells, and weapon abilities are unchanged — they just do the rest of what they were always meant to do now.
Quests
[Mage I] You're a Wizard is completable again. It asked you to take and finish a mission from the combat Mission Dispatcher, an NPC that no longer exists in the world — so the entire mage profession chain dead-ended at tier one. Step 5 is now "gain 10 magic skill points in any magic skill," matching how the Fighter chain works. If you're currently stuck on either broken step, you'll clear automatically shortly after logging in — no need to abandon and restart.
The tier-one hunting step now correctly requires the 20 kills its instructions ask for, rather than 15. If you're partway through that step, your count restarts from zero.