Your character is what you are wearing

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.