v0.27.0 ·
The Twelve
Starcalling: a new skill, and twelve gods to learn it from
The night sky is a real place now. Twelve constellations turn overhead with the calendar, each one a god with a name, a doctrine and a history, and you can travel to any of them and study it. Communing with a constellation is an action like any other: it pays experience in Starcalling and Inspiration to that god alone. Inspiration is not a shared currency. What you earn under Kesra can only be spent on Kesra, so the sky is a set of separate commitments rather than one pool.
Fifty-three blessings and ten capstones, and every one of them does something
Each constellation carries a tree you spend its Inspiration on. Blessings raise damage, defence, accuracy, healing, crafting speed, ammunition, drop rates, the offline cap and your vault. Capstones are larger: some are abilities you press, some change how a stance works, three reach into guild fights and help your whole party. Every rank in every tree is wired to real behaviour, and a guard in the build fails if one is ever added that only pretends to.
One constellation costs one profession
Blessings are priced identically across every tree, and rank ten costs ten times rank one, so no god is a cheaper route to the same power. Fully committing to a single constellation is roughly the same investment as levelling a profession. Choosing where your Inspiration goes is the decision, not finding the efficient tree.
Offline progress is the same length whatever you left running
The away cap used to be a fixed number of completed actions, so how long it actually protected you depended entirely on what you were doing. A fast action gave you half an hour and a slow one gave you five, off the same allowance, and because fast actions are early cheap content, new players were getting the least protection. It is a duration now: two, four, six or eight hours by Field Journal tier, flat, identical across every activity in the game. Be aware this cuts both ways. If you have been parking on the slowest actions with no Field Journal, your window is shorter than it was, and the Journal is now the only thing that lengthens it.
Every weapon swings at its own authored speed
Weapon speed was derived rather than written down, which meant the difference between a dagger and a maul was never quite the difference the design intended. Every weapon now has a swing time an author chose, and the whole combat model was refitted around them: damage per class, spell cast power, healing cadence, mana costs and the kill-rate ceilings that keep bosses honest. Your damage lands where it was calibrated. What changed is that the cadence you feel now matches the weapon you picked.
Monsters can crit you, and armour finally matters
Crits ran one way: you could land them and nothing could land one on you. Leather-wearing enemies now crit too, five percent of the time for ordinary creatures, ten for veterans and twenty for solo bosses. Alongside that, armour defence became a stat that actually reads: it was scaled so that nothing in the game reaches the mitigation ceiling any more, which had been quietly flattening the difference between plate and cloth at the top end. Fights are more dangerous and your armour choice does more about it.
Combat updates as it happens instead of on a timer
The fight screen used to ask the server for news on a schedule, so a swing could finish and the cooldown bar would sit full waiting to be told, sometimes for two seconds. Combat now pushes each event the instant it resolves. The bars move when the fight moves, and a slow or a debuff shows up immediately rather than at the next check.
The enemy card tells you what you are fighting
A monster card gave you a name and a health bar, and everything you would actually act on lived in the Codex. It now reads, in one line, how hard it hits, what level it is, what kind of creature it is and what armour it wears. The armour is the useful one: it decides which damage type works, and therefore which weapon you should have brought.
The martial stances have real ability books
Casters had spellbooks and everyone else had a stance that mostly changed numbers. Each martial stance now carries its own abilities, spell cooldowns are properly enforced for everyone, and pressing an ability during ordinary region training actually applies it. The spellbook also shows what a spell delivers at your level rather than the value it was authored at.
The market stopped selling the old potions
When alchemy was rebuilt into a per-tier ladder the old recipes were retired and the old bottles were not, so the merchant kept stocking them. The grander names were the weaker ones: a Royal Healing Potion healed exactly what a tier 1 crafted potion heals, and a Greater healed less than half of one for five times the price. Every stocked item is now checked against what the game can actually make.
Leatherworking unlocks in the same order as everything else
Each armour profession taught its slots in a different sequence, so what you could make at a given level depended on which craft you had picked. All of them now follow one order, gloves first, and the order is enforced by the build. Hides were also being treated as free by the pacing model, which had hidden how slow the profession really was; leatherworking material costs have been raised to sit alongside tailoring.
House Leronvale sits inside the capital
Leronvale is the house of arts and letters, and its seat is the Laureate in Vireldan’s cultural district, not a holding on the coast. The regions, descriptions and NPCs that said otherwise have been corrected.
Fixes
- The main story could stop dead. Completing a chapter you had already completed failed permanently instead of doing nothing, which blocked the questline for anyone it happened to.
- A monster’s hide roll is separate from its ordinary loot table, and neither the possible-loot panel nor the Codex knew about it. Creatures were dropping hides that nothing in the game admitted they dropped.
- The drop-rate bonus on set gear was being calculated and then never applied.
- Auto-eat ignored potion potency, boons and blessings, so it healed for less than the same food eaten by hand. Healing and mana restoratives also shared one tally, so a single item could satisfy either.
- Out-of-combat regeneration did not exist, despite blessings referring to it.
- The While You Were Away screen was mint green while the rest of the interface is crimson.
- The combatant cards were spending a twelfth of the screen on the badge between them. It is a plain label now and both cards are wider.