Hello everyone!
A smaller update, and a documentation one. The elemental system has been in the game for a while now with no explanation anywhere outside the patch notes it arrived in — and patch notes sink out of sight. So it now has a proper page in the Player Guide.
The new page
Elements & Reactions sits directly after Combat in the guide, and covers:
How an element lingers on an enemy after a skill hits it, and how your next hit spends it.
Every reaction, in a table: which pair causes it, in which order, and what it does. Including that an ordinary weapon swing is a hit with no element — which is what shatters frost.
How a reaction's size is decided, and why a weapon swing and a skill produce different amounts.
That an enemy carries only one lingering element at a time, and which skills replace it.
Earth and Wind, which never linger and never react — they change whose turn it is instead.
Which classes carry which element, and at what level you first meet each one.
The reaction table and the class list are both built from the game's own data, so they cannot drift out of date when something changes.
The Combat page
The Combat page now describes an enemy's turn: that every enemy attacks twice a round, that each attack can be dodged separately, and the limit on how much one enemy can take from you in a single round. It also explains the glancing-blow line you'll see when an attack is stopped completely.
Also
help reactions now has an entry in the command directory, so you can find it without knowing it exists.
help elements now works too, since that's the word most people would try first.
Fixed:
Nothing, this time. This one is purely explanation.
Thank you all. This is the sort of thing that's easy to put off forever, and a few of you asking questions that the guide should have answered is what moved it up the list.