New

• THE GAME NOW EXPLAINS ITSELF, RIGHT WHEN YOU NEED IT. Fourteen guides appear as each system starts to matter to you: first steps in the city, surviving the arena, abilities, card picks, your first equipment, a new talent, your first purchase, the forge, the mail, the market, rituals, playing in a group, and the path between tiers.
• THEY FOLLOW WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO. The guide waits for you to walk, open the collection, reach the portal or equip the piece, instead of asking you to read and click "ok". The buying and forging steps explain the decision without ever performing it for you: you press the button.
• THE GUIDE POINTS TO WHERE YOU NEED TO GO. When a step mentions a place in the city, the camera shows the destination instead of only describing it. It hands control back as soon as you move, close the guide or enter a match, and never touches your character. Finishing a suggested tutorial also closes the screen: you have learned it, back to the game.
• AND THEY STAY WITHIN REACH. Any guide can be reopened from the Esc menu whenever you want to review something. Fully translated into all 30 languages.
• ABILITIES AND CARDS NOW STATE WHAT THEY DO, WITH NUMBERS. Descriptions were rewritten from the game's own tuning values: instead of "protect an ally", Oath Guard now states the damage share it takes, the range and the cap it absorbs. This covers the twelve new abilities, the weapons and the cards, and because the text comes from the tuning data, it can no longer disagree with what the game does.
• THE SHOP AND THE TABLE EXPLAIN WHAT YOU ARE BUYING. Each upgrade states the next tier's benefit with its number, and the table's four actions (ban, pin, reroll and raise the tier) say what they do before you spend.
• THE ANCESTRAL WORM FIGHTS WITH WHAT IS ITS OWN. The Crypt guardian no longer reuses the King's attacks: it has its own, and it opens shelters on the ground, one per person, which are the only thing that holds back the wave it releases. The wave also stopped passing through anyone who was protected.
• THE WORM GREW A CARAPACE. Its effects were rebuilt from the boss's own anatomy (mandible, ribs and nodules), in the same slate blue and cold violet as its body, instead of the generic flash it had before. Danger outlines still come from the server's shapes: what changed is the drawing, never the area that hurts.
• THE ORACLE SOUNDS WHILE IT EXISTS. It gained a continuous sound of its own, one for standing still and one for moving, switching at the same instant the body switches animation.
• THE ARENA FLOOR CAN BE HEARD. Every footstep now carries the surface of the place beneath your character's step: grass in the Plain, dirt in the Desert, stone in the Crypt, the Depths and the Volcano.
• THE FORGE OPENS WITH SOUND, as the book, the market and the collection already did. And Revive is no longer always the same recording: there are now three, picked at random.

Balance

• LEVELING UP IS FASTER AT THE TOP END. Each level's cost grew too fast late in a run: past level 14, every step cost close to a full minute, and ten minutes of play ended at level 18. The early game keeps the same brake as always; what gave way was the top end. Level 15 went from 5.7 to 4.3 minutes, and a run now ends around level 21.
• THE NEW ABILITIES HAD THEIR DAMAGE CALIBRATED against the reference for each key, and the grimoire previews show the number the ability actually delivers.

Fixed

• FOOTSTEPS WENT SILENT ON MONITORS ABOVE 60 Hz. The footstep sound was measured on the video frame, but the character only moves on the physics step: on 120 or 144 Hz displays there were frames with no movement at all, the game read that as "standing still", and the stride never completed. Players at 60 Hz heard everything; anyone above that walked in silence.
• ABILITY EFFECTS DID NOT FOLLOW THE CHARACTER. They were drawn from the last position the network had sent, which arrives 20 times per second, while the body is drawn every frame: on a 144 Hz display, seven frames per position. The chain of Oath Guard swayed and its shield lagged behind the ally; Colossus March and Wandering Sanctuary slid relative to you as you moved. The effect is now drawn from the body, and what the server decides about damage and range is exactly the same.
• THE METEOR EXPLODED AFTER IT LANDED. The sound told the whole fall from the start, so the impact came almost two seconds after the rock had already smashed into the ground. It now bursts on the frame of impact, and what you hear before it is the rock coming down.
• THE MAGE WALKED IN SILENCE. His footsteps existed in the folder, but the game was looking in the old location after the files were moved.
• THE TUTORIAL LEFT AN ERROR IN THE CONSOLE when building its entry screen, if the screen was closed or rebuilt at the very moment focus moved to the first control. Nothing showed for players, but it was a real error.