Adventuring

Everything in this chapter happens between leaving town and coming back to it: who you travel with, how the spoils get divided, what it costs you when a fight goes badly, and how you get where you're going. None of it is job-specific and none of it changes as you level. Learn it once and you can walk into any party in Vhael and know the rules everyone else is already playing by.

Adventuring Together

A party holds six players. That number is the unit the entire game is balanced around — a tank, a healer, a support, and three damage dealers is the shape most content assumes, though almost nothing enforces it. Everything in Vhael can be attempted solo, and jobs are built so that a Cleric hunting alone is still a Cleric rather than a punishment. What grouping buys you is speed, safety, and access to the harder end of the difficulty range.

There is no party finder. No queue, no automatic matchmaking, no button that assembles six strangers and teleports them to a dungeon door. If you want a group you ask for one — in the city, in the field, in a shout channel — and that is a deliberate choice about the kind of server the game wants to be. The practical consequence is that a good reputation is worth real experience per hour, and it takes about a week of playing to build one.

Kill another monster quickly enough after the last one and the kill chains, paying bonus experience that grows as the chain holds. Let the window lapse and the chain breaks back to nothing. Six players clear faster than one, so parties hold longer chains almost automatically — which is how grouping pays for itself without the game ever docking a solo player for hunting alone.

TODO: chain tiers, the length of the window at each tier, and the experience multipliers. Numbers pending balance.

Several parties can join into an alliance for content sized past six players — raids, and the field bosses that laugh at a single group. An alliance shares claim on what it fights, so two parties working the same target aren't stealing from each other.

TODO: alliance size, chat and loot behavior across parties, and how experience divides. Design pending.

The moment you, your party, or your alliance attacks a monster, it becomes claimed — and only the claiming side can keep fighting it. Nobody can tag your target, whittle it while you tank it, or steal it out from under you at low health. Read claim status off the monster's name plate:

Weaponskills & Skillchains

Underneath whatever your job is doing, there is a second combat layer that works the same for everybody. It runs on its own resource, it belongs to your weapon rather than your class, and it is the main reason a coordinated party out-damages six people standing near each other.

You have two pools. MP pays for your job's rotation, the abilities you picked up as you leveled. AP pays for weaponskills. AP fills to 3000 and banks at about 25 a second while you're landing and taking swings, so a slow weapon and a fast one arrive at a full bar at roughly the same rate.

Weaponskills come off your weapon type and your level, never your job. A sword user learns sword weaponskills whether they're a Paladin or a Rogue, and swapping weapons costs you nothing but the swing you spent doing it. Your subjob grants none of them. There is no per-weapon proficiency to grind before a new weapon feels good, which is a deliberate reversal of the older games this borrows from, where experimenting with an unfamiliar weapon meant weeks of penance first.

A weaponskill costs a minimum of 1000 AP, and everything above that minimum is spent too, scaling the damage. That is the decision the whole system is built around: fire now at 1000 for a fast, cheap hit, or hold toward 3000 for a heavy one and risk the window closing while you wait. Weaponskills never miss. No accuracy check, no wasted bar.

The first weaponskill landed on a monster opens a window on it. Every weaponskill fired into that window while it's open adds a link. When the window closes, the accumulated links resolve into a single elemental hit on that monster.

The window does not refresh. Links extend the chain, not the clock, so a party that opens early and feeds steadily gets a long chain and a party that dithers gets nothing. Two links is the minimum; a lone weaponskill that nobody follows fizzles and pays out nothing at all. Kill the monster before the window closes and the chain dies with it.

Only players open and feed chains. Monsters spend AP on their own weaponskills but never link. Chain damage generates no threat, so a healer or a support adding a link is not going to pull the monster off your tank.

Every weaponskill carries one or more of the eight elements, and the elements that went into the chain decide what the payload looks like.

Both ends of that table are worth building toward. Against a known weakness you want purity. Against something resistant, or something you have never fought, you want breadth. Higher-tier weaponskills carry two elements instead of one, which is what lets six players reach all eight without needing an alliance to do it.

Every weaponskill chains with every other one. There is no lattice of valid and invalid pairings to memorize, and no combination that fails to link.

A weaponskill's element follows how it is performed rather than what the weapon is made of or who is holding it. Fast and evasive reads as Wind. Heavy and crushing reads as Earth. Precise and disciplined is Light, reckless is Fire, cold and executing is Ice, sudden is Lightning, grinding attrition is Water, and anything cruel or draining is Dark. Every element has at least three weapon types that can produce it, so no party is locked out of a colour by what its members happen to swing.

Tanks, healers, and supports get one unique job ability that also spends AP, granted at level 5. It costs well under a full bar, so the choice is when to use it rather than whether you can afford it at all. Damage jobs get none, because their AP decision is already interesting and a second button competing for the same bar would flatten it. Take a support subjob and you inherit its ability at half level, which is the only way a damage main ends up with one.

Dividing the Spoils

Loot in Vhael is not handed to you. When something dies its drops fall to the ground around the corpse as beams of light, and somebody has to walk over and pick them up. Anything a party member picks up goes into the party's treasure pool rather than straight into their bag, and the pool is what actually decides who keeps it. Hunting solo, your pool resolves the instant you touch the item, so the whole system is invisible until the first time you group.

Two different things are being rolled, and they answer to different inputs. How much drops goes up with the rank of what you killed and with the size of your party, though each extra body past the first is worth less than the one before and the bonus stops climbing at a cap. How good it is ignores your party entirely: rarity comes from the monster's rank and the zone you're standing in, and nothing else. Six players don't find better items than one player. They find more of them.

Amber is rolled separately from items and split across everyone who contributed threat, so the healer and the tank are paid for the fight they actually had.

An unclaimed monster drops nothing at all. If something dies without ever having been claimed — killed by a guard, killed by another monster, killed by falling — there is no loot roll.

A party picks one mode, and it governs every item the pool takes in.

A loot filter is a set of rules deciding what you see on the ground at all. Filters are written by players, shared freely, and maintained by the community the way any other reference is — expect to be running somebody else's within a week and tuning your own within a month. The filter does double duty: it hides junk in the field, and it ticks the auto-pass box on your behalf for anything it filters out, so you are never asked to vote on an item you had already decided you didn't want.

Each rarity has its own beam. Items landing in the same spot stack into a pile, and the pile shows a single beam in the color of the best thing in it, so a white beam is never hiding a purple. Every item carries a floating label with its name, quantity, and rarity color; hover it for the full tooltip, click it to pick it up. Loot claimed by another player renders greyed out with its tooltip replaced and its clicks blocked — visible, but not yours.

Truly exceptional drops announce themselves to the whole zone with a distinct beam that everyone can see and nobody but the owner can touch. You will know the first time somebody near you finds something extraordinary, and that is the point.

Money & Storage

Amber is the coin of the realm — the currency you pay vendors with, bid with at auction, and hand across the table in a direct trade. It has nothing to do with Aether, which is a crafting material and never a price. Amber comes off kills, out of quests, and from selling what you don't need.

Every major city has an auction house, and trade between players runs through it or hand to hand. Sales are taxed — a deliberate drain to keep prices honest. Vendors, meanwhile, are not a gearing strategy: they stock randomly rolled low-level bases, low-level materials, and a handful of cheap consumables, and exist mostly to give Amber somewhere to go. If you are shopping at a vendor for an upgrade, something has gone wrong with your week.

Trade is Amber and barter only. There is no real-money trading, of any kind, ever.

Equipment binds to you when you equip it, so anything you have worn is yours permanently and cannot be resold. Quest rewards, raid drops, and certain Notorious Monster items arrive bound from the start.

Your stash is tabbed, shared across every character on the account, and grows as you level jobs — storage is a progression reward, not a fixed allotment, so the hoarding problem eases the further in you get.

TODO: tab count, per-tab capacity, and which job levels unlock what. Numbers pending.

When It Goes Wrong

Dying does not take experience away from you. It saddles you with debt: a bar that fills as you die and drains as you earn, and until it is clear the experience you earn is paying it off instead of moving you forward. Fill the debt bar completely and you lose a level.

Losing a level is more than a number moving backwards. Gear has level requirements, so a de-level can lock you out of your own equipment until you climb back — which is the real cost, and the reason experienced players stop pushing when the debt bar gets deep rather than trying to power through it.

You respawn at your last set point. Dying to the same monster over and over adds a growing timer to each respawn, so the answer to a fight you keep losing is a different fight, not another attempt.

You can sync down to a lower level to play with friends who haven't caught up. Sync is total: your gear, your abilities, and your item level all gate to the synced level, and anything above it is simply gone for the duration. Nothing scales down gracefully — for every mechanical purpose you are that level.

What you get in exchange is that the trip is worth taking. You earn experience as the synced level and roll loot at the synced level, which keeps low-level drops meaningful and means a capped player helping a friend through an early zone is not wasting an evening. Level-based equipment sets swap in automatically when you sync, so the gear side is one click rather than fifteen.

Getting Around

Mounts are ground-based. There are no flying mounts, and there will not be — the world is built to be crossed, not skipped. Within a zone you can quick-travel between expedition points you've already reached.

Every Awakened can call themselves home to a set point, on a cooldown. Setting that point somewhere sensible is one of those small decisions that quietly saves hours.

Ships run between the coastal cities. Airships are faster, cover more ground, and are an Imperial monopoly down to the last port — which is why landlocked Shieldhome is effectively unreachable without Imperial say-so, and why the Empire likes it that way.

TODO: how and when players gain airship access. Pending.

Dungeons & Raids

Dungeons are instanced, and you get to them by walking to the door. There is no queue and no teleport — the journey is part of the content. Once you're inside, nothing stops you running it again: there are no lockout timers on dungeons, so a group that wants to farm one all night can. Content is tuned for a full party but entry is never gated on bringing one; if you want to try a six-player dungeon with four, the door will let you.

Raids are the alliance-scale version, and raid drops arrive bound.

TODO: raid design — encounter structure, alliance size, and reward cadence. Pending.

Notoriety

Notoriety is your name in the world: reputation and rank, tracked entirely apart from your character level. It is what gates the main story, roughly one rank tier per act, which means the story does not open up because you ground levels — it opens up because you did work that mattered to somebody. Early Notoriety is earned with your starting city; from the middle of the story onward you are climbing the Imperial ladder instead.

Between the gates, everything is open. Quests and town objectives fill the space in whatever order you like once their prerequisites clear.

After the Cap

Experience does not stop mattering when you stop leveling. Merit — the post-cap sink — converts continued play into small permanent stat gains, which is what keeps a capped character's grinding hours from being purely about loot.

TODO: merit categories, costs per rank, and caps. Design pending.