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NEW FEATURES
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CCL Duels (Early ELO System)
- Guild standings gain a sortable ELO column, and your division header shows your rating and rank tier beside it.
- Rival guilds now carry a real, moving rating: each week they play simulated near-rating duels among themselves, so the ladder is a live race. Your declared challenges move both sides — your win drops the rival, your loss lifts them.
- A rival's guild dossier lists their live Proving Ladder ELO alongside roster, average OVR, division rank and tower floor.
- Strength of the Realm, an annual award at the season finals: the year-end ceremony names the realm's strongest guild by rating and shows your placement. Realm champion pays 15,000g, podium 6,000g, and your division's strongest 4,000g, with the honors tracked in a trophy strip on the standings.
- Ladder rank tiers now read Uncharted · Rising · Ascendant · Luminary · Zenith across every rating surface.
- Online leagues track a duel Elo: every resolved Guild Duel moves both guilds' server-held ratings, shown in the lobby standings with the same rank tiers. It never touches renown or the CCL race.
The Battle Visualizer
- The Hex Battle System camera is now controllable: zoom in and out, drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, and a reset button to snap back. Any manual input switches the auto-follow camera off; the ⌖ toggle hands the fight back to it.
- Ultimates take the whole stage: letterbox bars slide in, a gold-edged diagonal slash band sweeps the board with speed-lines streaming through it, the caster's portrait slams in from the left and the move's name lands from the right over a gold rule.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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- Tower difficulty sliders now show a live preview of the enemy strength your settings produce at floors 10 through 100, warn you when a Curve above 1.0 is making mid floors easier, and state plainly that ROVR and Curve set enemy strength, not death chance — raise Tower Lethality for that. The slider descriptions were rewritten to match.
- A bulk market order the warehouse can't fit now posts a warning naming exactly what was turned away at the gate, instead of arriving silently.
- Battle roster rails restyled into rows on the panel: hairline dividers, a rust-red divider flagging any hero below 30% HP, a brass wash across the whole acting row with a swelling glow, and a gold ring on the focused hero. The enemy rail gets the same treatment.
- The big ghost OVR numeral is back on individual roster cards.
- Class lines in the rail, focus card and dossier are tinted by class rarity, so identity reads at a glance.
- Fallen heroes in the roster rail tell you their fate immediately: SLAIN wears a strikethrough and a tilted seal-red stamp, INJURED keeps the name intact behind a brass pill. Live on quests, raids, tower descents, and garrison skirmishes.
- Roster cards show a charge diamond per round on a metered ultimate (with a lit star when it's ready) and a ready dot with a rounds-left numeral for kit abilities.
- Every unit on the board wears a team-colored ground ring — brass for your company, gold for the commander, wax-red for the Tower's own — and the acting highlight keeps its side hue instead of flashing bone-white for both armies.
- An ultimate cast lights the caster's row gold and lands a flash and ray burst over the board.
- Rival guild profiles restyled to match the adventurer dossier, with a masthead, vitals line and gold-underlined tabs.
- The Compendium tab now carries an amber count of recipes still left to discover — no badge means you've found them all.
- Picking the Experimental technique now states plainly that discovery only reveals recipes early: every recipe also unlocks through tower, quest, and Crown progress, and nothing is experimental-only.
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BALANCE
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- The Quarry unlocks the Miner at Tier 1 instead of Tier 2, so ore gathering no longer waits on guild tier 4. The Lumberjack still arrives at Tier 2.
- Crafters, gatherers and staff can roll S-tier potential once your guild tier opens those rates — the 2,000-renown floor that quietly downgraded every S roll to A is gone. A-tier still needs 500 renown.
- Raids with two or more parties muster the enemy one rank deeper on the same board, so the horde spreads into pockets instead of forming one packed wall. Enemy occupancy drops from roughly half the field to about a third at three parties, and a few parity fights swing with it. Single-party raids are unchanged.
- Tower battles now wear equipment. Surviving fighters take durability damage scaled by floor depth and outcome — a flawless clear scuffs least, a wipe wears hardest. Broken gear unequips and can be repaired at the Blacksmith, broken relics shatter into Relic Fragments, and a feed notice names what took the beating.
Attack Range
- Melee classes now strike from 2 hexes away instead of 1, so front lines no longer pile onto the same adjacent tiles. Affects Monk, Rogue, Crusader Paladin, Barbarian, Assassin, Blood Knight, Berserker, Hexblade and Spellblade.
- Reach and skirmisher melee classes hit from 3 hexes: Earth Shaman and Mistwalker (was 1), Reaper (was 1), Lancer and Dragoon (was 2).
- Archer, Ranger and Northern Ranger now shoot at range 7, the longest reach in the game.
- Fire Mage, Frost Mage, Arcane Mage, Void Mage and Stormcaller now cast at range 6, up from 4.
- Warlock, Sorcerer, Summoner, Chronomancer and Necromancer now cast at range 5, up from 4; Totem Shaman goes from 3 to 4.
- Healer and Tank reach is untouched — Tanks still hold the line at 1 hex, and healers keep their existing range.
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BUG FIXES
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- The OVR shown on the battle rail and focus card is the hero's real registry OVR again — a hero the dossier rates 85 no longer reads 178 in the arena.
- The Tower pre-battle injury forecast now accounts for the engine's per-outcome injury scaling, so a dominant clear stops advertising 30-55% injury risk on a fight that injures no one.
- Units no longer slide off their hexes when you zoom the battle board — the ground and the fighters now scale together.
- Cast and ultimate banners no longer render behind the boss HP header; the header steps aside for the length of a cut-in and returns when the beat ends.