Make it hit you instead

Until now a Warrior had no way to peel a monster off a friend. If something decided your healer was the tastier target, that was that. You hit it harder and hoped. Three new abilities fix that.

Taunt, Spit and Insult all do the same job, each a touch louder than the last. You hurl an insult (or actual spit) at a monster, it takes a small hit, and its attention snaps onto you. Whatever it was chewing on, it wants you instead. The pull lands even on a miss, so a whiffed Taunt still drags the thing your way.

Underneath, it just reads the monster's grudge list and shoves you to the top of it:

var currentMax = 0;
foreach (var kvp in monster.AggroList)
    if (kvp.Value > currentMax) currentMax = kvp.Value;

monster.AggroList.SetAggro(caster, currentMax + bonus);
monster.Target = caster;

Taunt you can learn straight away at Kousai in Mileth. Spit comes at level four and Insult at fifteen, and for those you head to Abel and find Bodil, the combat master in the training hall off the square. Bodil earns a mention of his own here. He had been standing in that hall a good while with nothing to teach, waving everyone off to learn elsewhere. He teaches now: the two taunts to Warriors, and Throw to Monks and Rogues, which is the job he was always meant to do.

The numbers on all three, how much they sting and how hard they yank, are ours and still being felt out. They pass their tests on our side, but we have not yet watched one land in a live fight, so if a taunt does something strange, tell us.

Two new draughts, and Cian's shelf set right

The alchemist's shelf in Mileth has its small potions in stock. Cian sells a Beag Ioc Deum that mends thirty health and a Beag Spiorad Deum that restores thirty mana, the first thing in the game that refills your blue bar from a bottle. The larger Mor Ioc Deum sits beside them, a good deal cheaper than it used to be.

Cian had been quietly broken for a couple of days, listed as selling nothing at all. That is sorted. He sells the draughts and still buys the spoiled food and crypt junk you drag up to him, at sensible prices now, so the Mold and the Rotten Cherry that were worth nothing finally fetch some coin. Over in Abel, the magic-shop keeper Egil will also take a spare healing draught off your hands, 150 apiece.

Abel's storehouse opens for business

Lamont, who minds the storeroom behind Abel's bank door, has something to trade at last. Two Priest headpieces, the Holy Wimple and the Holy Toque, and, for anyone with fifty million coins to park somewhere, a single Gold Bar. Until now he stood in an empty room.

While we were in Abel's shops we checked a handful of pieces against our records. The two-handed swords from the weaponsmith, the Long Sword and the Black Death, had their attribute penalties wrong, and a few bits of armor (the greaves, a Pearl Necklace, the Magi Skirt) carried puffed-up durability and the wrong level. All squared away. The way the hats sit on your character is a guess for now, since we have no source for the worn sprite, so if a Priest dons one and it looks odd, that is a known gap.

We walked the crypt, and a lot of doors led nowhere

Most of the rest of this update was chasing bad warps, and the worst of them were down in the Mileth Crypt.

The crypt is big, seventy-odd floors and side rooms, and its staircases had been wired up wrong, the same flights of stairs running to different floors than they should. A huge stretch of it was simply cut off from the entrance. Stairs took you to the wrong floor, or to no floor at all. Someone reported that Crypt 6-2 had no way down to 7-3. True, and it was far from the only one.

So we rebuilt the whole web of connections against the real layout. Wrong stairs got repointed and dead ones got wired. A room that had been mislabeled an "Imperial Forward Camp" is Crypt 5-2 now, monsters and all. Before this, twenty-eight of the crypt's floors could not be reached from the front door. Now sixty-six of seventy-three can. Seven small rooms stay sealed, with no doorway we can find in any of our sources, and those are most likely meant to be secret or were never used, so we left them be rather than invent a way in.

The vestibule got the same once-over. There are two staircases down there, and the second, the flight to Sgath's Pit, did nothing when you stood on it. It descends properly now, and coming up the stairs sets you down cleanly beside them, with no bounce.

A tidy-up around Mileth

A scatter of smaller warp and sign fixes around town, all of them from people walking through and saying what felt off.

The Mileth College, where the reading halls are, used to drop you inside a wall every time you stepped out of a lecture room. The halls were built at one size and their doorways drawn at another, so the trips out landed you a few tiles into solid stone. Every College door is a clean two-way now, floor on both ends.

There was an odd warp in the middle of the village too, one that flung you five tiles sideways across open ground for no reason anyone could see. Gone. You just walk across it.

The signs got reworded. We put readable signs up all over Mileth not long ago, and a fair few of them pointed you toward the very thing they were standing next to, a placard three steps from the inn door cheerfully announcing that the inn lay to the north. People took the hint and walked north. So every sign sitting beside its subject simply names the place now and says a line about what waits inside, no compass at all. The one sign that really does point somewhere far off, the one aiming you at the road's edge where the map of Temuair opens, kept its directions, since that is a walk you do have to make.

The grey notice boards around town take posts now, not just a read. The church board, the law board on the road, the ones in the Commons and the two halls and the library, each is its own board you can pin a message to, with a note up top saying what it is for. Before, only the board in the square would hold your words.

One last small thing. The marker that pops when an attack misses is the right one now, a clean "Miss" over the target where it had been showing the wrong cue.

Go grab Taunt, haul something nasty off your friend down in the crypt, and let it gnaw on you for a change.

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