Patch Notes - Revive Here, Reflect, and the Prison

Another wave, and a heavy one. Every line below was reported by a player, patched, and then confirmed in game by the testers themselves. Thank you - especially Szafut and Przemus, who filed most of this batch and then went back in to check every fix.

"Revive Here" finally answers

The second button on the death window sent nothing at all to the server. Taking the client apart explained why: it refuses to fire unless two things are true - your character carries the blessing bit in its status, and the map says an in-place revive is allowed. We had never sent the map-flags packet at all, so every map in the world read as "nothing is allowed here". The client even carries the refusals in its own text table, ready and unused.

• Blessed characters now carry the bit, and map flags go out at login and after every teleport.
• Revive Here raises you where you fell - everywhere except the guild-war map, the prison, and the Eight-Diagram maze.
• The two buttons are properly separate now: plain Revive always walks you back to town, even when blessed. The PvP arena still revives you on the spot, unconditionally.

Reflect, complete

• The icon exists now. The client's own skill data numbered all five Reflect levels identically - so the skill could never be resolved - and had no icon entry at all. Both files are repaired and shipped: restart your launcher once.
• A new mechanic. Reflect now has a chance (30% at level 0) to cancel a blow completely - no health lost, no wear on your armour - and pass the whole hit back to the attacker. You earn the experience for it, and a reflected killing blow counts as your kill. It used to bounce 30% of the damage while you still took all of it. PvP is not covered yet.
• Old characters were not left out: every reborn character with a Warrior in its bloodline has the skill added, and - by the owner's call - every already-reborn character besides, because the lineage columns only began recording recently and older rebirths cannot be read back.

Heaven Blessing keeps its promises

A Praying Stone now gives what the stone says it gives: +20% experience from monsters, +50 maximum stamina (that second segment on the bar, filled the moment you use it), and revive in place through the button above. As before, a non-blessed player who kills you takes no experience from you - and is cursed for about five minutes.

Your weapon can carry an attribute

Poison, HP, mana and shield are properties of a weapon instance - exactly like a +N, a gem or an enchant - not of one particular item.

• On a landed blow, and once per damaging cast, each weapon-side slot rolls a 30% chance to fire the matching skill for free, with its animation and at no cost: HP casts Cure, Mana casts Meditation, Shield raises a short Shield, and Poison lays its damage over time.
• The 5065 client does not render the attribute in the item tooltip, so the game says it in chat - when a trainer hands you the weapon, and every time you equip one. The promotion Cutlass (poison), EndBacksword (mana) and ScarletBow (two open sockets) announce themselves this way.

Super gems show their effects

Every super gem set in worn gear now plays its own effect in combat - Dragon's flying skulls, Phoenix, Rainbow, Kylin, Violet, Moon, Fury and Tortoise, each different. Roughly once every five minutes with a single gem, proportionally more often with each extra one, never more than once in twenty seconds, and with a little random variation so it does not tick like a metronome.

Show off your gear

Use the COOL emote while wearing super (quality 9) equipment and the client plays a big effect in your class colour. A super armour alone gives the class effect; six or more super pieces give the full version. Ordinary gear is just the pose. Three seconds between shows, so it cannot be spammed. The client cannot know what you are wearing - the server attaches that to the emote, which is why the effect never used to appear.

The Adventure Zone, rebuilt

The new canyon opened with 520 serpents scattered evenly across it - about 194 tiles per monster, three times thinner than the neighbouring ape maps.

• Each species now holds its own contiguous territory, at the density of the fairy canyon: 1,980 monsters in 110 packs, respawning every ten seconds.
• The ladder follows the real shape of the canyon and rises with distance from the entrance: the arrival valley is Serpent (102), the north-west arm Senior Serpent (107), the north-east arm Alien Serpent (112), and the great eastern basin Basilisk (117).
• No pack stands within forty tiles of either portal, so nobody is jumped on the loading screen.

Law and order

• City guards hit a hundred times harder - 500,000 to 900,000 damage instead of 5,000 to 9,000. A guard still attacks only a player with a flashing blue name, an active aggressor: they are what replaced safe zones in the cities. The decorative patrol guards are unchanged.
• The realm has a prison. A GM can jail a player for a set number of minutes - offline characters included, arriving in the cell at their next login. The sentence runs on the clock, so it cannot be waited out by hiding, and there is no way out: not by portal, NPC teleporter, Conductress or city scroll. The Jailer will read the remaining time off his ledger in days, hours and minutes, and when it expires you are let out to Twin City.

In the field

• Loot ownership now covers monster drops only. Loot from a killed player, and anything dropped by hand, is free for anyone to pick up at once - no more "this loot is not yours" when a friend hands you something. The twenty-second owner lock stays on monster drops, so nobody steals your kill.
• Nectar and Healing Rain heal your team only. They used to heal every player on screen - strangers and enemies included.
• Party experience reaches 35 tiles. The old limit was the 18-tile combat range, so at HD resolution a member keeping out of the fight silently earned nothing.
• Virtue tells you when you earn it - a system line and a chat entry, both carrying your running total. Virtue has no window of its own in this client, so the other place to check the balance is Shelby.
• Lucky Time announces its bonus drop. When luck adds a Meteor, a +1 Stone or a DragonBall, a line names it; before, it simply lay among the ordinary loot.
• Fire of Hell costs stamina, not mana - 20 a cast, so a full bar is five casts. The client tooltip still quotes mana; the server is what counts. Auto-attack stops with a notice when the bar runs dry.
• Mine gems are rarer - about one gem per five minutes of digging, where it used to be one per two.
• Levelling up fills your bars - confirmed and deliberate: every level-up sets health and mana to full, on every path experience can come from.

Town, NPCs and services

• Skill books respect the Fire and Water paths. A path spell's book can only be read by a Taoist on that path, exactly as the Taoist Star and Taoist Moon trainers filter it. DivineHare - the one book with no skill data in this client - now says so plainly instead of doing nothing, and stays in your bag.
• The Weapon Master quotes real levels. He was printing an item's internal tier instead of its level, hence "level 24 to 25" while upgrading a 121 into a 122. Long dialog lines are also broken into short ones now, which clears the garbled character that showed before "The Meteor" - the same fix covers the Godly Artisan.
• The Barber can shave you bald - a new "Shave it all off" option, same 1,000 silver.
• Dyeing moves back to the Dye House. The last notes said the Dye Master tints gear in Twin City; by request we are back to the authentic arrangement - he sells the door, and the Dye Girl dyes inside.
• The guild bulletin lost its stray question mark - and it was our doing. Our text filter replaced every character outside printable ASCII with "?" instead of dropping it, and the client prefixes your text with exactly such a byte. Announcements already stored have been cleaned.

Guild War

• The pole stands where the map draws its pedestal, and damage numbers appear again when you hit it. The HP refresh used to delete and recreate the object every second, taking the floating numbers with it.

Launcher and client

• Launcher 1.4.8 - at HD resolutions the chat channel column now travels with the chat window instead of hanging in the middle of the screen.
• Launcher 1.4.9 - a new taskbar icon. The logo file carries a wide, nearly transparent glow, so the real artwork filled only about 60% of the image; the icon is rebuilt with the glow trimmed. The site logo grew for the same reason.
• The in-game tip about the maximum plus now says +12, not +9.
• Restarts give you a minute. Before every restart a countdown ticks in the centre of the screen, every second, for sixty seconds - with a chat line at 60, 30 and 10. No more asking whether we may restart: you get a minute to finish the fight.

Keep the reports coming.