Elite and Super three times as often, and a Training Grounds that works

A short restart. Everything below is live.

Elite and Super gear falls three times as often

A player counted ten thousand kills on Bird Island and saw neither. That is not a bug report we could dismiss, so we measured it: a kill rolls for gear twice at one in ten and the chain stops on the first miss, which is about 1,100 pieces per ten thousand kills -- and at the old rates that paid one Elite and a third of a Super. A quarter of such runs ended with nothing at all. He was the one player in four.

Both are now three times as likely: an Elite roughly every 3,000 kills, a Super every 10,000. Coming up empty over ten thousand kills falls from one run in four to about one in twenty.

Worth knowing, because it is easy to assume otherwise: the odds are the same on every map. A monster's level decides the TIER of what drops, never its quality -- Twin City and the Ice Crypt pay Elite at the same rate, and only the usefulness of the piece differs. There is no better map to farm for Elites, only better maps to farm for good ones.

The drop rate guide is generated from the live server, so every number in it moved with this change.

A heal no longer heals the monster you are fighting

Cast a heal at full health and it used to reach for "the nearest wounded monster" instead. That was written when the health a heal restored was its only way to earn skill experience, and it aged into something absurd: it undid your own damage, and on the Training Grounds it refilled the very stake you were working on.

A heal now reaches the ally you clicked, or you, or nobody. A monster is never a valid target for one. Training a heal still works -- every successful cast earns, and the yard charges nothing for it.

The Training Grounds

Several things at once, all from players working there.

Skills keep casting. Nearly everything now repeats on the yard: area spells, weapon skills, stamina skills, heals, buffs, Meditation, Roar and Dash. Click a target and it keeps going until you move. Only three still fire once, because a loop could not work for them -- a transformation, a resurrect, and anything driven by the XP bar.

Scatter and the other sweeps actually reach. The dummies stand in rows, and the field's narrow cone missed the row you were standing in by five degrees -- aim it down and you hit nothing at all. On the yard the sweep is far wider and reaches further, so one cast takes your whole row, both sides, plus the row you aimed at. The row behind you is still spared, so which way you click decides which neighbour you train on.

The dummies take real damage and never stop paying. They used to stop just short of death and sit there, and once experience began counting what a target could absorb rather than what you swung, a dummy pinned at a sliver paid nothing for every blow after it. They now carry a full pool, fall properly, and are standing again the same instant -- so the bar tells you what your blows are worth and the training never goes quiet.

PK is off. The yard is a sparring ground, and a place where everyone stands still working a stake is the easiest place in the world to farm the defenceless. It was open by omission, never by decision.

The Divine Hare

Two fixes. It is cast once -- it used to engage the combat loop, cast a second time, and stop, which looked broken from both ends. And the button that returns you to your own shape works: it was a packet nobody answered, pressed fourteen times in three days by someone stuck as a hare until the timer ran out. Your health carries across at the same fraction, so it is a return, not a free heal.

The guild castle is a crossroads

The war map is no longer somewhere you visit on Saturday evening. Four stations stand by the entrance, and between them they are the fastest road to the four best hunting grounds we host -- the Adventure Zone, the Ice Crypt, the Sky Maze and the Meteor Zone. Each has a station of its own on the far side that brings you straight back.

Anyone may walk in now. The castle stopped being members-only the day it became that road; fighting for it still needs a guild, and so do Siege Bombs.

You always arrive on the same spot, so the stations can be found -- except while the war is running, when arrivals are scattered across the old entrance cells. A siege where every attacker steps out of the same square is a siege decided by whoever camps it.

Disconnects

Two changes for anyone whose connection is less than perfect.

A dead link is noticed in about a minute instead of the several it used to take. Until now your character stood frozen in the world for those minutes, still there to be hit, while the connection was already gone.

And logging back in can no longer knock out your own new session. If you reconnected before the server had given up on the old one, the old session's cleanup could quietly evict the new one -- you would be playing, but unreachable by whispers, missing from the online list, and skipped by every announcement including a restart countdown.