Hello everyone!
This is the largest set of mechanical changes I've made since launch, and almost all of it is in your favour.
Let me start with the part that matters most.
⚔️ Multiclassing No Longer Penalises You
Here's something that has been quietly wrong since the beginning.
Your XP requirement was calculated from your total level — every class level you'd ever earned, added together.
That meant levelling a second class made your first class more expensive. A third made it worse. A fourth worse again.
In a game called 90s Multi-Class MUD, the maths was actively discouraging you from multiclassing.
That's gone.
Your XP requirement now comes from your highest class level. Your second class costs what your first did, and so does your fifth.
Branching out still takes the work — it just no longer taxes everything else you've built.
📊 Your Level Means Something Again
The number in your sidebar used to be a sum.
Level 797 didn't describe a character's actual power. It described a total.
Your displayed level now shows your highest class level.
If your best class is level 100, you're level 100. That's a number you can actually reason about, and it's now the number the game uses for progression and scaling.
The levels you've earned in your other classes still exist. They just aren't pretending to be a power rating anymore.
🌌 Ascension Is Worth Doing Again
Ascension now grants a permanent XP bonus for your base classes — 10% for every class you had at level 100 when you ascended, up to 250%.
Existing Ascension bonuses are unchanged. Crit damage, mana recovery, and stat points all still accrue as before.
This is a fourth reward on top.
And if you've already ascended several times, nothing you've earned has been taken away.
The result is that levelling your classes again after an Ascension is now genuinely faster — which is the whole point.
🛡️ Your Gear Comes With You
When your level drops, your equipped gear now attunes down with you instead of falling off.
You keep wearing it. It scales to your new level.
And as you climb back up, your gear restores itself automatically and for free, all the way to the highest level it has previously reached.
The Attunement Stone is now purely for pushing equipment beyond the highest level it's already reached — which is what it was always meant to be for.
It will refuse to charge you for something the game now restores for free.
🎯 Everything Scales to Your Actual Power — and I Do Mean Everything
Mob difficulty, companion damage, potion strength, shop prices, quest rewards, respec costs, lootbox contents — all of these now use your highest class level.
And if you've ever received level-100 equipment that you couldn't actually equip, that's fixed too.
Lootbox contents, monster drops, and shop stock now match your actual power level.
No more unwearable rewards caused by your combined class levels.
Then I went looking for what I'd missed.
And kept finding things.
Elite chaos bosses in secret portals could be generated at absurd sizes for some characters — one character could face a 240,000-HP boss where another faced the same thing with 31,500 HP. They now scale consistently.
Slick's assassination targets and ambushes had the same problem — an entire contract subsystem was still using the old calculation.
Trap rescues, secret creature bosses, secret vaults, lockboxes, and the labyrinth all had pieces still scaling from the old number.
Bounty rerolls could cost one player eleven times as much as another because of their combined class levels.
The respec confirmation dialog could quote a different price from the one the game actually charged.
Those are now using the same definition of your level as everything else.
One note on potions: some characters will see smaller numbers on them now, but the health pools they're filling are smaller too.
The strongest potions still restore around half your health, just as before.
🔧 Why This Had to Happen
I want to be open about the underlying flaw, because it's the reason for this entire overhaul.
Stat points came from your total level, and capped at 100.
That meant a player with ten classes at level 10 could reach the stat cap — while still having only level-10 skills and level-10 gear.
Ten shallow classes could provide the same core stats as mastering one class, for a fraction of the work.
Meanwhile, every level beyond the stat cap did little except make the numbers larger.
Stat points now come only when your highest class level advances.
Levelling additional classes gives you their skills — which is what multiclassing should actually be about.
I built the original system early in development with a lot of AI assistance, without putting nearly enough maths behind the progression model. Four months in isn't a comfortable time to find a flaw this fundamental, but I'd rather fix it properly than defend it.
🔮 What This Is Building Toward
This is the foundation the Hero system needs.
When Hero classes arrive, choosing one will reset your base classes to level 1. You'll be beginning a new kind of progression, with your base skills set aside while your Hero is active.
Under the old system, that reset would have been brutal.
Your gear would have fallen off. Your progression curve wouldn't have supported the reset properly. And rebuilding your base classes would have meant returning to the same increasingly punishing grind that helped make the old numbers absurd in the first place.
Now the pieces actually fit together.
Your gear follows you down and restores itself for free as you climb.
Your permanent XP multiplier rewards the classes you mastered before Ascension and makes rebuilding genuinely faster.
And the more classes you had taken to 100 when you chose your Hero, the larger that permanent bonus can be.
Base portals aren't going away, either.
Walk into a base portal and your Hero powers switch off while your base classes return. Hero content and base-class content become two different ways to play, and you choose between them simply by which door you walk through.
So if you're grinding base classes right now, you're not wasting your time.
You're building permanent progression that you'll feel when Heroes arrive.
⚖️ What Went Down
I don't want to bury the reductions among all the buffs.
Ascension's stat-point grant has been reduced.
It was awarding enormous numbers — enough to eventually break content outright.
Everything you've already earned remains yours and is completely untouched. Only future grants have changed.
All four Ascension bonuses now also have ceilings. No existing player is currently near one.
There's one other consequence worth explaining clearly:
If you'd taken many classes to level 100, some of the reward numbers you see have gone down — in some places, by a lot.
Quest payouts in the endgame portals are the largest example.
But the monsters came down with them.
The important ratio — how much of a level does this reward actually give me? — is now consistent between players.
You were being paid more because you were being charged more. Both sides of that equation have been corrected together.
And if combat feels a little easy right now, that's fair.
Honestly, not much in the game is a real challenge yet.
Difficulty is getting a proper pass alongside Hero skills, base-class reworks, and genuine mob mechanics once the infrastructure needed to support them is in place.
This overhaul is a large part of that infrastructure.
Tuning the numbers before the systems underneath them are right just means tuning them twice.
Thank you all, as always.
This one took four full days and touched more of the game than anything I've shipped so far.
If something feels off, please tell me. The reports you've sent have helped uncover an enormous number of real problems over the last month.
— TheHand