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Until today, almost nothing that fell off a monster was worth carrying home. Gear you made was better at every level, in every slot, and the whole road south dropped nothing you would wear. Two of the six equipment slots held items with no combat stats at all.

Hunting now pays, and it pays in its own currency. There is dropped gear for all three fighting styles across every band of content, and it is worth about 80% of what you could craft for the same level. That is deliberate: a drop should never be a reason to skip a trade. It is there for the fighter who has not levelled one, and for the day the thing you wanted to make is still a few levels off.

Rings are where the real finds are. No trade makes jewellery and none ever will, so rings can be genuinely exciting without making a recipe pointless. There are five new ones, and the two pieces of jewellery already in the game carry accuracy, damage and armour now instead of health alone. The rarest comes off the Herald.

The drop rates were wrong, and badly. A fight takes under half a minute, so a one-in-eight drop is one every few minutes — which is roughly what a couple of monsters were doing. Gear is around 1 in 400 now and rings around 1 in 1000. Finding one should be worth mentioning in Lucerna.

Every trade now unlocks its tier in the same order: boots, then head, then chest, then the weapon. The weapon is the largest jump a tier gives you, so it belongs at the end of one rather than the start, and it now stays useful for about ten levels rather than four. One consequence is that three weapons have gone — the iron greatsword, the boarhide warbow and the woollen greatstaff. Each sat oddly between tiers and was outdone almost immediately; their numbers moved onto their tier's ordinary weapon, which is now the last thing that tier gives you. Nobody owned one.

Better-than-crafted gear off a hard boss is still coming, but it belongs to an endgame that does not exist yet. There is no point in a drop that beats the best set in the game before anyone can assemble the best set in the game.

The zone page is now three tabs

It had grown to nearly seven screens on a phone, so reaching your inventory or the map meant scrolling past everything you can do where you stand. It is split into Here, You and Paths, pinned under the status bar so the tabs are never something you scroll up to find.

Your tab is kept when you travel, and a task finishing no longer throws you back to the first one — if something resolves while you are on another tab, Here carries an ember dot until you look. Chat is untouched on both layouts.

The shops lost their Buy 1 / Buy 5 / Buy 10 rows for a single Buy, which is how every other verb in the game already worked. Sell all, Store all and Take all stay: they are not preset counts, and without them a stack of thirty is thirty clicks.

Somewhere harder, off a road you already know

Hollowmarsh opens east of Blackmire. Blackmire asks for level 20; Hollowmarsh asks for 42, so it is somewhere you are turned away from early and come back to much later.

That is a change in how the world is built rather than just another zone. Until now every step away from Lucerna was a step up in difficulty, which meant new content could only ever go on the end of the road. It no longer has to: a place can be as hard as it likes wherever it sits, and the level on the door does the work. Expect more of these, and not all of them southward — the corruption still comes from the south, but trouble does not have to.

Its three residents run the weapon triangle the opposite way round to Emberfall, so from level 42 to 50 each step now answers a different side of it. Whichever way your gear leans, something at your level is worth the walk. What they drop is what that tier already dropped, at the same odds — another place to hunt it, not a better one.

The maps have been rebuilt. The one on the zone page was drawing the entire region into a phone-width column, with names sitting on top of each other. It now shows the country immediately around you, at the same zoom wherever you stand, with roads running off the edge toward everything it does not draw. The full map keeps its own width and scrolls inside its frame. The road south has been redrawn to bend rather than run in a line, which was the other half of why names collided.

Every XP value in the game used to be a number somebody picked and wrote next to a thing. That is the root of several problems that kept reappearing in different forms, and it is gone. XP is now derived from work done, in every skill.

Combat pays per point of damage. A kill is worth the monster's health. Kill something with 94 health and you are paid for 94 damage, at level 14 or level 99.

Two things follow. Your XP per hour is now your damage per hour, so every level and every upgrade raises it directly, and being under-geared costs experience rather than just time. And farming things far below you stops paying — a goblin holds 16 health, so it is worth the same small amount whatever your level. You can still one-shot it. Nothing is slowed down and no penalty has been added; it is simply not worth much.

The other skills pay for the material they move. A gather is worth what the node yields. A craft is worth what the recipe consumes, and takes about four and a half seconds per unit of it. Breaking something down pays half of what making it paid.

That fixes some things that were plainly wrong. Crafting XP had been taken from an item's vendor value, so within one tier a sword paid nearly four times what boots paid while wanting six fewer levels — nobody would have made the boots. Disenchanting paid by the item's level, so everything in a tier paid the same and breaking the cheapest thing was always correct. Both are now flat across a tier and climb between tiers.

Fights above level 18 got much shorter. They had been built to a target that was far too long. Most are now eleven to thirteen exchanges instead of twenty to thirty, and although the XP per kill fell with the health, the fights fell further — so the rate went up.

The honest part

Most XP numbers went down, some of them hard. If you have been farming one spot, that is a real change and it is meant to be: some monsters were paying more than anything built for a character twice their level.

What you get back is a curve that climbs. Every point of it is bought with a level or a piece of gear. There is no target for that number any more, and that is deliberate — rates are supposed to rise, because that is what a level is for. Once there is content all the way to 99 there will be a single dial for how long the whole climb takes, set by playing it rather than guessing.

Potions, and a fifth trade

The one healing potion in the game healed 90, which is most of a new character's health and a fifth of a strong one's. There are five now, and each restores a little over half the health of a character at the level it is meant for, so a potion feels the same at every stage.

A vendor sells the first one, so nobody is ever stuck without a way to heal. The other four are brewed. Alchemy is a new trade, its station is the apothecary in Lastlight, and its herbs grow only in the corrupted zones — Bloodroot in the fen, Gravebloom at the far end of the road. They are gathered with Farming, which already grows things.

Potions are the only thing in the game you use up rather than keep, which is what makes them worth trading. Everything else you buy once.

Potions take up space now

A potion costs an inventory slot, the same as a sword. They used to stack, so any number of them rode along in a single slot, which meant deciding how many to bring was not really a decision. Bags are now 30 slots rather than 20 to take some of the sting out of it.

The bag also draws one row per slot now, so ten daggers are ten rows rather than one row claiming to be ten. It matches how the slot counter has always worked.

Lastlight has a bank door, and it opens onto the same shelves as the one in Lucerna — your storage has always belonged to you rather than to a building, so there is nothing to move and nothing to keep track of. It is a second door, not a second bank. The auction house stays where it is and always will: a market needs everyone in the same room, and storage does not.

If you were carrying more potions than now fit, they have been sorted out for you rather than lost: twenty stay in your bag, as many as fit went to your bank, and anything with nowhere left to go was sold at the vendor price and paid to you in coin.

Two trades have better names

Leatherworking is now Bowyery. Tailoring is now Artificing. Your levels and experience move with them; nothing else about either trade changes.

The old names described the material, which was only ever half the job. A leatherworker made the jerkin and the bow, and a tailor made the robe and the staff — so both names quietly ignored the weapon. Blacksmithing keeps its name, because metal genuinely covers both halves.

Silvenwood and Aldenfield read a little differently for it. There is stave-wood drying under the eaves in the wood now, and the artificers in the fields turn out to have come for the thread.

A big day. Four things.

The four stats are gone. Your character is a combat level and whatever you are wearing. Every weapon and every piece of armour now carries four numbers you can read directly — accuracy, damage, armour and health — and monsters are described the same way.

The stats never did what they promised. They were worked out from your level, so everybody had all four in equal measure and no build was possible. What replaces them is gear that actually matters: low-level equipment will not carry you any more, and armour no longer softens a blow, it stops the blow landing. Critical hits are gone; damage is a straight roll up to your maximum.

Armour also has a style now, so the answer to a monster is a matched set rather than a swapped weapon. Every trade makes a head, chest and boots at every rung — previously only smiths made helms and only leatherworkers made boots, which left one style unable to fill four of its six slots.

You can watch the fight. Open the fight log in the status bar and the swings appear one at a time as the bar fills, with both healths draining alongside. Potions are named when they are drunk, which used to happen silently.

Running away is no longer free. Leaving a fight costs the wounds that have already landed, and if those were enough, you die on the way out. The button says Flee. Without this, the log would simply have let you read the outcome and leave before the killing blow.

The map goes south. Four zones past Gloamfen, levels 20 to 50, ending at a second boss. Three new tiers of gear and the materials to make them. And Lastlight, a tavern and a vendor on the road before the gate — the south had got long with nowhere to sleep and nowhere to buy a potion. You can now claim any tavern you stand in as the place you wake.

Three things today.

The weapon triangle. Every monster now has a type, and your weapon decides which side you attack from. Strength beats dexterity, dexterity beats intellect, intellect beats strength, worth 12% either way. The fight log tells you when a matchup helped or hurt, and every monster's reference page names its type.

It went in with a hole: everything below level six fought as dexterity, so a new intellect character was penalised everywhere with nowhere else to go. Three new low-level monsters fix that — the early road now has all three matchups on it.

A cave under Gloamfen. The Rotmaw is two rooms and the first place that is not simply somewhere you walk to. It has its own map: step inside and you are looking at the cave rather than the world. Three level 16 trolls, one of each type, and a boss at the bottom with the game's first necklace.

Everything pays less XP. Monsters, nodes, recipes and disenchanting all pay about a fifth of what they did. Getting to 99 was on course to take about seventy hours, which is not the game we want. Your levels are unchanged — what changed is the road ahead, not the ground behind you.

Coins came down too, hardest at the top, where an hour of fighting was paying more than the shops could absorb.