Cooking
Added a new Cooking profession. Cooking Fires work like the smithing and woodworking stations you already know: gather ingredients, stand near a Cooking Fire, and cook up a dish. Cooking has its own skill that levels up as you cook. Cooked dishes fill your hunger like any food, but also grant a temporary "well-fed" buff on top — only one dish's buff can be active at a time, so eating a new dish always replaces whatever buff you had going. Five starter recipes, using ingredients you're probably already sitting on:
Grilled Anchovy (anchovy + mushroom cap) — HP regen
Hearty Stew (ham + mushroom cap + cheese) — Vitality
Mana Brew (crab + mushroom cap) — MP regen
Scholar's Breakfast (eggs + cheese) — Intelligence
Fisherman's Platter (bluegill x3) — HP and MP regen
Black Grouse now also drop Eggs, the key ingredient for Scholar's Breakfast.
Death Location Marker
Dying now drops a grave marker on the map at the spot where you fell, so you can find your way back to retrieve anything you lost. It fades away after about an hour.
Warlock: Decrepify Now Inflicts Decay
Decrepify no longer just strips resistances, it also wracks everything caught in the blast with a lingering decay that ticks damage over time.
Reduced stutter during heavy combat (lots of spells/projectiles in flight at once, e.g. chain lightning, multi-projectile shots) by reusing effect visuals instead of creating and destroying them on every cast.
Fixed a crash that could happen right after changing zones/floors or relogging, triggered by casting or being hit by a spell shortly after.
PvP Leaderboard
Added PvP Kills and PvP Deaths tabs to the website Leaderboard, ranking characters by total PvP kills and deaths. The PvP Kills tab also shows a live feed of recent kills so you can see who's been fighting who.
Fixes
Fixed the copper pickaxe and copper axe tooltips claiming they were better than iron, when iron is actually the stronger tier.
Fixed the Hunt Tracker sidebar widget rebuilding itself from scratch on every hit taken/dealt, which could cause noticeable stutter during sustained combat (especially with multiple damage-over-time effects ticking). It now updates its numbers in place.
Fixed mobs getting stuck walking straight into walls and obstacles (especially wide ones) instead of pathing around them when lured or chasing a moving target.
NPC sprites have been replaced with sprites from a new set that will eventually be used for player characters too.
Fixed party loot (auto-split consumables/ammo/materials) letting players exceed their carry capacity.
Fixed tainted items showing purple instead of blue in the party loot roll list.