Patch Notes: v2.0.0-beta.1828 (Beta)

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Heroes & Evolution

• Four new apex classes join the roster: the Dryad (an ultra-rare grove-healer who shields the whole party in living bark, roots enemies, and pours out party-wide healing), the Mistwalker (an ultra-rare melee assassin who blinks through fog with high evasion and guaranteed crits, stunning and blinding from the mist), the Embersworn (a fire-wreathed tank who ignites every enemy with burning damage-over-time while soaking blows up front), and the Levinguard (a storm-forged lightning tank who hammers all foes with thunderclaps and chained bolts).

• Every base class now walks a clear path past its starting Drive — each has a single same-role evolution apex, and classes that can't evolve follow titled Legend paths instead, so no hero is left without a destiny.

• Legends now arrive with more than a title: each Legend path grants a small permanent party-wide passive the hero radiates whenever deployed — the Slayer sharpens party damage, the Mentor speeds party XP, the Guardian softens the party's wounds, the Broker draws richer quest gold — and a party of Legends stacks them.

• Knights can now evolve down an elemental road, into the Frostguard (the frozen ward) or the Embersworn (the burning bulwark) — but the road only opens after the hero has personally felled an elemental raid boss, and which element you've broken decides which evolution the Crossroads offers.

• Roughly half of raid bosses now arrive bearing an elemental epithet — Frostbound, Emberforged, Stormcalled, Venomplagued, or Shadowclad — and downing a Frost or Fire one credits every hero in the party toward the Knight's elemental evolution.

Combat

• Lightning is now a full-fledged damage element with its own strengths and weaknesses — Mercenaries, Harpy Flocks, and Dragons are vulnerable to it while Giants and Ancient Golems shrug it off, it clashes with Nature in roster chemistry, and the Stormcaller now wields it while the Lancer adds it to its strikes.

Quests

• The quest board has been rebuilt as a stack of illuminated frontier writs — every card and its full detail panel now read like a posted contract, with manuscript fonts across both Contract Details and Tactical Intel.

• The process of re-writing all of the game's text is getting there! Every quest type now opens with its own authored briefing grounded in the official region named on the card.

• Crown contracts, alliance jobs, and raid postings have been rewritten, with twenty fresh subtitles and reworked rumors that quietly hint at the deeper history beneath Hiltcrest.

• A new low-combat Frontier Work quest category covers the civilian jobs that keep a town alive — mending storm-struck holdings, relief drives, reopening shut-down workings, and a healer's rounds through sickness — paying in goodwill as much as gold.

• Festering contracts now appear on roughly one in five breach-flavored postings: left unanswered they grow harder and richer each week, climbing +3 required power and +10% reward for up to five weeks.

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Ambitions

• Every adventurer's zodiac Drive — their first life-goal — has been reworked sign by sign to be harder and more distinctive: instead of nearly every Drive asking for more quests or a flat power number, Drives now span raids, Tower floors, faction dispatches, captaining and commanding, morale streaks, forged bonds, league placement, equipped gear quality, and long-term contracts, with no two Drives in a sign duplicating each other.

• Each zodiac sign gains a fifth possible Drive that pulls a hero toward the deeper game — holding a garrison, climbing the Tower, completing dispatches, courting a faction, leading in the league, or standing beside others at their Proving — so a hero's starting ambition now varies more from recruit to recruit.

Classes & Combat

• Class rarity now confers inherent power — every step up in rarity adds +5 to all stats (and so +5 OVR), making a rarer class fundamentally stronger at the same potential. This applies to recruits, rival adventurers, and evolved heroes alike.

• Tanks now draw the enemy's attention in the Tower — roughly 70% of a boss's blows land on a standing tank instead of your squishier heroes, and the Knight's Taunt hard-locks the boss onto the taunter.

• Several classes have been retiered to better match their power: the Berserker is now rare (down from ultra-rare), the Holy Knight, Enchanter, and Stone Druid are now uncommon, and the Drunken Monk and Spellblade are now rare — so they turn up more often when scouting.

Multiplayer

• The shared free-agent and staff pool now scales with the number of human players (for real this time), so larger leagues no longer drain crafters, gatherers, and other support staff to nothing.

• Strong rival guilds (Tier 6+) now more effectively climb the Tower over a season — they get a dedicated tower-run budget instead of being crowded out by quests and stalling at low floors.

• Rival guilds now gain renown on merit rather than being rubber-banded toward the middle, so leading rivals can genuinely pull ahead and trailing ones stay competitive instead of the league compressing to mid-tier.

• Rival guild renown now scales with the league's chosen difficulty exactly like yours, so AI guilds keep pace on every difficulty.

• League divisions now re-shuffle every season, matching single-player — your guild's division genuinely changes year over year, announced by the Crown Herald.

• The cap on submitted renown now scales with how many weeks you were away, so catching up after several weeks offline no longer clips your legitimately earned renown down to a single week's worth.

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Quest Board

• Each quest card now carries its issuing faction's accent color throughout — type and faction read at a glance instead of from a faction-colored side bar and emoji.

• Selecting a quest marks it with a rising-ember effect and a soft accent glow, and hovering any quest, contract, or raid card previews that card's type color.

Dossier & Ambitions

• The hero Dossier now spells out whether a hero will change class (Evolution) or earn a titled destiny (Legend), and even classes that can't evolve get a look-ahead at the Legend paths they're closest to.

• At the Crossroads, the Legend road whose deed echoes the hero's completed Drive sorts to the top and wears an "Echoes their Drive" badge, and the panel opens with a callback to the Drive that carried them there.

• The Dossier's ambition journey spine got a polish pass: the current step pulses with a glowing ring and orbiting sparkles, step nodes lift on hover, and tooltips snap in cleanly.

Interface & Reports

• The rising-ember glow that marks your selection on the Quest Board now also lights the card you've opened in Parties, Gear, Crafting, and Factions, tinted to each screen's accent.

• Tower and Crown Cup battles gain a 0.5× slow-motion speed plus Pause and single-step controls so you can follow the action blow by blow, and the league Rival Challenge gets the full speed cluster (0.5× / 1× / 2× / instant).

• The raid Chronicle now marks fallen heroes with a red skull, distinct from the orange marker for injuries, so casualties read clearly at a glance.

• When several heroes are ready to ascend at once, the quest board shows a notice naming who is still awaiting their Proving, since only one trial posts each week.

Online Leagues

• Accepting a series of countered trade offers now correctly counts against your weekly trade-caravan limit, closing an exploit that let you exceed your Trade Routes capacity.

• The adventurer career chart now labels its number "Base OVR" to make clear it tracks base overall, not the bonus-inclusive party figure.

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Names & Portraits

• A custom name you give an adventurer is now a permanent, guild-wide rename that shows up consistently on every screen — the registry, party formations, dossiers, and recruit cards — instead of quietly reverting to the original name on some surfaces.

• Renames now stick through every life change: you can rename an academy trainee, and you can still re-edit or undo a custom name after a hero is retired into staff, traded to a rival, or graduated.

• Battle reports, the live feed, and the tactician's debrief now refer to your heroes by their custom names instead of the names they were born with.

• Uploaded custom portraits no longer revert to procedural artwork after a hero is retired into a staff role, graduated, or otherwise transformed — your chosen portrait follows them through every transition.

Quests & Reports

• A hero's Proving trial is now unmistakable on the board — it keeps its proper title and wears an ornate greenknot frame no routine contract shares.

• The Proving trial of Ascension no longer shows a misleading 0g reward tally — its report now plainly states that the reward is the Ascension itself and you do not receive gold, sorry!

Equipment

• Scrounged starter gear no longer falls apart after a mission or two — it arrives worn but sturdy and wears down gradually over many quests like any other equipment, so green recruits stop stripping naked after every job.

Linux

• Native Linux builds that failed to open on certain Wayland compositors now recover on their own: after a launch that never renders, the game automatically falls back through XWayland and other graphics modes, writes a launch-error log, and remembers whatever fix worked — and you can also force XWayland yourself from Settings.

Town

• Removed an in-development Dwarven Forge feature that had begun appearing in the live game on accident — I'm a ways off from completing that, sorry!

Online Leagues

• Crown Cup League standings are now shared and identical across every guildmaster: divisions are built the moment a league is created, so the lobby shows the same brackets before the first week and every guild can see each other and track each other's annual renown.

• Placing a sealed bid on a free agent or staff member no longer flashes a premature "signed" celebration — the modal reads "Sealed Bid Ready" and waits for the league to resolve the contest before anyone is hired.

• Headhunted recruits you paid a scout to find no longer vanish before you can sign them — these private finds now hire instantly instead of being thrown into a league-wide bid that always failed.

• Renaming your guild now propagates to every other player, showing your new name in their standings and rosters.

• Your guild now reliably appears in the standings even in an older league whose brackets had already formed — missing guilds are re-placed into a division automatically.

• Rival recent-activity feeds, year-end review standings, and the leaderboards now match across every guildmaster, drawn from the shared league ledger instead of a private, divergent copy.

• Crown Cup history is recorded per year (so a multi-year catch-up no longer loses a season's result), wins and victory ceremonies are delivered durably even to players who were offline when the cup concluded, and the server-resolved cup now opens a watchable results screen showing the four champions and your placement.

• Rival guilds propose material trades again on the Guild Trading screen, anonymized enemies now read as "Hidden Knight" rather than a bare class name, winning the Crown Cup counts toward your achievement stat, and division champions use the same tiebreaker the standings display.