Home/What Changed
Everything the Refuge changed
The developers keep this in three buckets: transformed, added, removed. So does this page. If you played the original, start here.
Rebuilt rather than tuned
- Many manuals became something else entirely, orphan skill manuals most of all.
- Heal and Hiding are capped at level 1. Heal scales properly with your stats and level; Hiding is a fixed 2 seconds that works on bosses, insects and demons, so it stops being dead weight late.
- Warp Portal became a default orphan skill that moves the caster and the whole party to a memorised point.
- Every player has Teleport level 1 by default, on a 60 second cooldown.
- Major rebalances across every job, aimed squarely at the skills nobody used.
- Experience rate is slightly lower than the original, but the curve is more rewarding.
- Some debuffs land on bosses now - a thief's Envenom can poison one.
- Base attack speed re-adjusted on the jobs where it was simply strange.
- The orphanage got a visual pass, plus quality-of-life NPCs.
- All of croc's earlier work on the original build is folded in.
New in the Refuge
- Over 300 new items.
- Over 50 new shadow sets covering every dungeon past level 100.
- Amatsu SS - a high-end level 145+ dungeon.
- Two brand new SS dungeons, both finished, both on fully custom maps.
- Bosses had their skills rebalanced, because Hiding now works against them.
- New locations, including new dungeons.
- New endgame content.
- Gear for the jobs that were short of it - Ronin and Peacekeeper in particular.
- The job rebalances that never arrived with the original 1.4.
- Two entirely new jobs: Bouncer and Pit Boss.
- Einherjar Challenge Mode, an optional locked-level run.
- Most of the original's known bugs, fixed.
Gone, on purpose
- Level 100+ job shadow sets. They locked players into one playstyle past 100; the replacement sets are built for variety and for the skills nobody was using.
- Manuals that no longer made sense after the Heal, Hiding and Warp Portal rework.
- Drop rate bonuses from gear.
- The cash shop.
The reasoning
Why the shadow sets had to go
This is the change people ask about most, so it deserves the space. In the original, every job had its own shadow set past level 100. They were strong, they were mandatory, and they were built around whichever skill the set assumed you would press. The result was that reaching 100 narrowed your character instead of opening it up.
The Refuge deletes them and replaces them with more than fifty new sets tied to dungeons rather than to jobs. They are not job-locked. Several of them exist specifically to make an unloved skill worth building around - and one that is still in testing puts you at 1 HP in exchange for chaining a lot of skills in a row, which tells you roughly how far the team is willing to go.
This is also why the power curve overall sits lower than the original's. Nothing is missing; the ceiling simply is not propped up by a mandatory set any more.
And why drop-rate gear went with them
Drop-rate bonuses on equipment create a tax: before you farm the thing you want, you farm the thing that lets you farm. Removing them means the drop tables can be tuned once, honestly, for everyone.
Difficulty moved, it did not vanish
Monsters deal more damage and healing is slower. In exchange, a large share of the skill changes on the classes page are straight damage increases - they exist to pay for the increased monster power and density, not to make you stronger than you were.
Hiding now works on bosses, insects and demons. That is a genuine new tool, and the bosses had their skills rebalanced in response, so it is a conversation rather than an exploit.