Patch 2026-08-08

Patch 2026-08-08

build 618efcd91

Patch 2026-08-08 - a progression round. Enlightenment is retired, the personal level cap goes with it, and the Class Ability Point lane it fed is replaced by a direct purchase with experience. Alongside that, Weapon Mods open for business with a much larger catalog, a new salvage reforges an item's enchantments, and equipment mods gain a workmanship term and a roll-quality readout. This page covers everything player-facing since Patch 2026-08-04.

Progression

• There is no personal level cap. Levels now run continuously to the end of the experience chart. The old ceiling of 275 plus five per enlightenment is gone.
• Experience is never wasted. A character sitting at its old personal cap earned nothing at all - not total experience, not unassigned experience. Everything was discarded. That freeze is lifted, so endgame kills pay out like any other.
• Enlightenment has been retired, and the /enl command with it. If your character had enlightened, the experience those resets consumed is returned to you automatically the first time you log in, as levels and unassigned experience. Everything enlightenment granted - the attribute and skill gains, and the Class Ability Points earned at its milestones - is untouched and stays yours.
• A new way to buy Class Ability Points. From level 275 onward you can trade unassigned experience for points at the new Reckoning-Stone of Toil in the Drift Network hall. 200 billion experience for the first point, 40% more for each one after, no limit. It spends unassigned experience only and never touches your level. See Levels and experience for the price table.
• The reckoning-stone is now two stones. The old single pedestal has been replaced by a matched pair standing together in the same alcove: the Reckoning-Stone of Radiance for the Luminance exchange that was always there, and the Reckoning-Stone of Toil for the new experience purchase.

Weapon Mods

Weapon Mods are switched on, and the system they switch on is much bigger than the one that was described before.

• Eighteen special modifiers, up from thirteen. The six additions are Heft, Leverage, Tension, Attunement, Focus and Execution - flat damage, damage-multiplier and critical-damage effects that land inside the combat formula rather than as a visible rating. Cleave has been retired.
• A weapon can hold four specials, up from three.
• Specials no longer come out of the tinker budget. A weapon still has its ten tinker slots and can still be tinkered normally; its specials now sit alongside them, and neither salvage touches your tinkers, imbue or slayer any more. A Tourmaline reroll used to wipe the lot; it does not.
• Both crafts are now special-only. Tourmaline throws away the whole special set and draws a fresh one, which is the only way to change how many a weapon carries. Amethyst swaps a single special for a different one and leaves the rest alone - and on a weapon carrying none, it simply adds one instead of refusing.
• Every modifier shows how good its roll was, as a bracketed percentage on the appraisal panel - Devastation [67%]. A Tier B modifier stores that roll rather than its final number, so a later balance pass reaches modifiers already out in the world instead of only new ones.
• High-quality weapons gain a visible aura. Add up the intensity percentages across a weapon's specials: 300% earns Exceptional, 350% Elite, 375% God. Crossing a threshold is announced in teal and the weapon takes on a permanent effect; a reroll that drops it back below loses the aura, and you are told when that happens.

New content

• Serpentine Salvage reforges the enchantments on a piece of looted gear. Every item enchantment is replaced by a different one at the same level, drawn from the pool that item could actually have been found with - so a level 8 spell becomes a different level 8 spell and the arcane lore requirement never moves. Cantrips are left alone. It is the only salvage that works on weapons and armour alike, and it is sold by Salvage-Broker Bevan Tolliver as a one-use sealed bag for a Trade Note or a ten-charge hammer for ten.
• Reusable salvage hammers. Bevan now also stocks a Sealed Obsidian Hammer alongside the Serpentine one - ten applications of the matching salvage in a single tool, ten Trade Notes, crumbling to dust when the last charge is spent.
• Ordinary tinkering salvage over the counter. Bevan has added four bags of plain retail salvage at a Trade Note each - Salvaged Steel (armor level +20, not Covenant), Salvaged Iron (weapon damage +1), Salvaged Mahogany (missile damage modifier +4%) and Salvaged Green Garnet (caster elemental bonus +1%), all unwrapping at workmanship 10. These are not custom crafting: they count against a weapon's normal ten-tinker limit the way gathered salvage always has. Note that three of the four unwrap into a bag named simply "Salvage", so tell them apart by icon and appraisal.

Changes and tuning

• Equipment mods now scale with the item's workmanship. A workmanship 10 piece gets the full strength of whatever it rolls; a workmanship 5 piece gets half. Items that already carried mods were migrated to the new term in place, and since the overwhelming majority of modded gear was workmanship 9 or 10 the practical change to existing pieces is a fraction of a percent. An item with no workmanship at all can no longer be modded.
• Every mod now shows how good its roll was. Each line on the appraisal panel carries a bracketed percentage against the best that mod can reach - Deadeye [100%], Venom [20%]. It reads as pure roll luck; workmanship is already accounted for in the value beside it.
• Mod strengths read in per cent, not "pp". Twenty-one mods described their effect in percentage points. Nothing about their strength changed, only the wording.
• The Alternate Character Bonus now needs a five-level gap. A character one level behind your account leader used to qualify for the catch-up boost. It now takes a deficit of at least five levels, and progress is compared by level alone. Exactly five behind switches it on; four does not.
• The Other Shoulder hits considerably softer. The sealed second boss of Held Door was tuned above D4's trash despite sitting a rung lower, which was backwards. It drops from level 140 to 110, from 1,600 health to 1,120, with its damage and defences cut to match. Its experience award comes down from 600,000 to 400,000 to suit.
• Breathing Door waves arrive closer to the node. The Spiracle Node's trash waves were spawning out in the doorway chambers well beyond the pit, up to nearly thirty metres away. They now come up on the pit floor in a tight ring around the node, so the fight stays where you provoked it.
• The Iron Sill is half as dense. Every floor band had its monster count roughly halved.

Fixes

• The Other Shoulder can no longer heal itself in a loop. It cast a heal on dropping below a quarter health - and because that band re-triggers every time health crosses back into it from above, each hit that pushed it under again set off another heal. Below 25% it was effectively unkillable. The heal is gone; the flavour text that came with it stays.
• Portal Recall keeps the destination realm. Casting Portal Recall after using a realm-attuned portal sent you to the base-realm copy of the destination instead of the realm copy you had actually been to. Summoned portals had the same fault.
• Player corpses no longer linger indefinitely. A corpse's decay timer only ran while its landblock was loaded, so a corpse in a quiet corner of the world could sit there effectively forever. Corpse lifetime is now bounded to one week of real time regardless of whether anyone visits.
• Two items were missing a buff from their spellbook. The Driftwarden Gauntlets now carry Dual Wield Mastery, and the Meridian Keystone carries Arcanum Salvaging. See Meridian reward pieces.
• The Holtburg Unbidden Door faces the right way. It was rotated a quarter turn out of alignment with its surroundings.