The opening dream
The first character an account creates no longer begins in the village. It begins inside the Forgotten Sanctum, with Eloria sealed and asleep above the altar and the Forgotten One speaking from below it. You are handed a level 40 warrior in full Genesis gear for one fight, and six moments during it teach movement, targeting, the hotbar, cooldowns, potions and finishers — each one stopping the game and lighting up the single thing that matters. When the Forgotten One falls, the dream breaks and you wake as your own level 1 adventurer in Eloria Village.
The Adventurer's Path
A new character's first hour used to contain no items at all — every reward in it was a number going up, which is the thing you are already doing. Every level from 2 to 10 now hands over something you can see:
- Level 2 — the full five-piece leather set, five empty slots filling at once
- Level 4 — an 800 gold purse, which is two or three upgrades on the weapon you are carrying
- Levels 5, 8 and 10 — Lumina, a bag expansion, and the Wings of the Dove at the class change
The early levels are shorter
Levels 3 to 15 cost far less experience than they did. Bands 3 to 8 are halved outright; 9 to 14 ease back up so the curve rejoins exactly where it always was at 15. The road from 3 to 10 has gone from 131,040 experience to 66,006, and the step that used to sit right where you are finally allowed to pick a class is gone. Nothing past 15 has changed.
The interface
- Full screen. Character, Skills, Talents, Pets, Life Skills, Enchanting, Guild, Marketplace, Monsterpedia, Collection, Achievements, Help, the World Map and Options
- A dark theme, in Video options beside the white glass. It changes while you watch, no restart
- The Character screen is built around a six-point stat dial, with your character standing on a live stage beside it and the combat stats given their own weight
- Enchanting and Socketing are one workbench, opening beside your bag rather than on top of it, switched by a rail down the side
- The inventory is a full-height dock, and the wardrobe matches it
- A pet slot in the equipment ring — your summoned pet's icon and level, and a click to open Pets
- Monsterpedia shows the monster: the real model, textured, turning slowly, with what is known about it on the right
- One font and one set of marks — Rajdhani throughout, redrawn menu and HUD glyphs, skill icons on square tiles carrying their tier colour on the frame
- Nothing is drawn under 16 point in a panel any more
- 1440p, ultrawide and 4K in the resolution list
- A full-screen panel stops rendering the world behind it, which is worth a good deal of framerate on a crowded map
- The icon bar is one row of twelve and arrives set up. Menu ▸ Customize HUD still rearranges it
- The DPS meter is retired
Guild Coins
Finishing a daily order moved the guild's contribution pool. Donating tower parts paid nothing at all. The two most guild-minded things you can do were the two with no personal payoff, and coins are that payoff — one purse for your whole account, and it stays with you if you leave the guild. Spend them in the guild store, grouped by what a line is for, with weekly limits shared across your characters.
Coins start from zero with this update. The faucet ran through testing and the store had not opened yet, so nothing was ever bought with them; earning begins properly here, at 300 a day per character.
Guild towers wait for their leader
Handing over the last part used to raise the tower on the spot and spend the guild's contribution pool — thousands of points committed by whoever happened to carry the last brick. Donating now banks the parts and reports the tower ready; the leader builds it when the guild agrees. A tower's Grade also gates how much of its effect reaches you.
Marketplace pre-orders
- Say what you will pay and how many you want, and your Lumina is held up front until someone sells into it. Gear orders can demand a minimum upgrade level and socket count
- A seller who thinks your price is low answers with an asking price, and you approve or reject it. Nothing is held on either side until you do, and an offer nobody answers lapses after 48 hours
- The board is two columns and searchable
Potential pays in its own band
Page II now takes a tempered shard, from deepstone or runestone. Page III takes a resonant shard, from voidglass, blightstone or tideglass. No page costs more than it did — what is gone is farming copper to buy a page whose own band is voidglass. Shards you already hold stay spendable on page I.
Elsewhere
- Creator's Fragments come off the Awakened Forgotten One ten times as often
- Storage holds 450 slots fully expanded, up from 250 — fifty more Storage Expansions to buy. The base 50 are unchanged and nothing you own moves
- Goblin Hills carries a third more to gather — iron, ironbark and bittermoss all go from nine veins to twelve
- Life Skills chat has three switches instead of one: Gathering, Crafting and Refining
- The Refine shortcut is off the stamina row. Next to a "999 / 1000" reading it looked like it would refine your stamina — refining is on the Potential screen, where it always was
Fixed
- Loading into a zone could drop your connection to the world server. The client was giving up on the link while the zone was still loading — which dropped you back to a world with no monsters in it, and sometimes took the game down with it
- A lost race at login could silently zero every Potential stat you had bought
- Refining said "the forge refused it" for an ordinary out-of-ore, and reported spending 0 ore on a refine that had spent plenty
- A life material bought on the marketplace never reached the buyer's ledger
- Cancelling a listing — not selling one — was what burned the ledger entry behind it
- A pre-order refund could be refused outright
- Claiming something with a full bag now gives you what fits and keeps the rest waiting instead of dropping the lot
- Gear you are wearing is no longer offered to the enchanting or socketing workbench, and a locked piece shows its lock with a way to unlock it there
- An empty socket looks empty in all three places that draw one
- A crash on map transitions, from effects holding on to something the map had already freed
- A crash when the panel theme rebuilt over a panel a map change had taken away, and a crash in Guild Orders
- The guild store's daily limit counted per character when it was meant to be per account
- A dead character stays down instead of standing back up
- Terrain lighting in a zone whose ground had only part of its normals — it broke that zone's lighting on every load
- The character sheet and the pet grids fit on screen at Extra Large interface size
- The world-boss countdown sits inside its icon; the hotbar comes to the front while you drag onto it
- Boss ability sounds that had been mapped never played, and the Forgotten One's cues land with the attack now rather than after it
- The Creator's Armor showcase overlapped itself in the shop, and Rose Seraph sat on a white plate
- The Leaderboard follows the panel theme now: lit tabs instead of filled slabs, and the faction names, your own highlighted row and the column titles are all readable on the dark sheet
The interface work is the part I most want to hear about. It is a great deal of change at once, and the theme switch is in Video options if the dark one is not for you.
If something is off, the Options menu has a report button. I read all of them.
— Tipreth