The World
There is one town and 10 places to fight. The town is safe. Everywhere else, another player can come for you.
Choosing where to fight
Every zone has 10 difficulties, and once a zone is open you can pick any of them. Nothing is held behind your level. Lower difficulties are quicker and safer, and pay more kills, more items and more gold in an hour. Higher ones pay better gear and more experience per kill, and will kill you if you have overreached.
You do not have to guess. Before you commit, the slider rates each difficulty against what your fighter is actually carrying: Comfortable, At par, Risky, Deadly. It will not stop you choosing Deadly. It just makes sure you knew.
The one real gate is between zones. To open the next one you have to conquer your current zone: reach tier 20 at difficulty 10, which means killing that tier’s boss. That is the only requirement. There is no level you need to be.
Conquest stars
The first time you clear tier 20 at any difficulty, that difficulty keeps a gold star forever. There are 100 of them, 10 per zone, and collecting them is a record of how much of the world you have taken back.
A first clear also hands you a sealed cache: one item, held for you until you choose to open it. It is attuned to the difficulty that earned it, so what comes out is decided by where you were standing, not by what you are wearing when you open it.
A star is not finished at tier 20. Go back to a starred difficulty and push deeper, and the star climbs through 4 further grades. Each one pays another sealed cache, so a single difficulty pays 5 across its life.
| Grade | Reached at |
|---|---|
| Gilded | Tier 40 |
| Blazing | Tier 60 |
| Radiant | Tier 80 |
| Eternal | Tier 100 |
The thresholds are the same at every difficulty. The fighting behind them is not. Tier 100 in the first zone is a very different proposition from the same tier in the tenth.
What changes from zone to zone
Each zone leans on an element, such as fire or ice, and its monsters send more of their damage that way. The elements themselves are flavour. There is no separate fire resistance to build, only one elemental resistance that covers all of them, so a new zone never leaves you exposed to something specific.
What does change is the mix. Some zones come at you mostly with steel, which is what armour is for. Others come at you mostly with magic, which is what resistance is for. Each zone drops the defence it presses on, so the gear you find there is the gear you need there. Each one also raises the ceiling on Item Power, which starts the hunt over again.
