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.
Potions, during the fight
Your character drank on the way into a fight and never again, which is no use in the fight where you actually need one. It drinks whenever health falls below half now, at the round it happens, and the log names the bottle.
It reaches for the strongest potion first. Somebody carrying good potions into a hard fight means to use them, and working up from the weakest would sip a stack of minor potions picked up along the way while something hits you for a hundred. Twenty potions and a boss is now a plan rather than a waste.
Drinking by hand during a fight is gone, and it should have gone sooner. A fight is decided the moment it starts, so a potion drunk while one runs healed a number the result then overwrote — the health went up on screen, the bottle disappeared, and nothing changed. It cost at least one death that we know of. The row says "drunk in the fight" instead.
The health in the top bar now counts down with the log. It used to show what was stored when the page loaded, which during a fight is the health you started on — the number that made the above look like it was working.