Ascension II, Larceny fixed, Black Mage melee ranks, and stronger squads

Update dwmerits and dwmerc through the launcher; everything else in this patch is on the server side and is live now.

Ascension II

The Mastery page on /merits was being maxed in days, so it has a second page. Open the Ascension II tab, or type !merits ascension 2.

Eight new lines, each bought with gil the same way as the first page:

• Bastion - +10 defense and +1 evasion per rank, twenty ranks.
• Warding - +1 magic defense and +1 magic evasion per rank, twenty ranks.
• Attunement - +1 to all eight elemental resistances per rank, twenty ranks.
• Composure - +1 critical hit evasion and +5 critical defense per rank, twenty ranks.
• Celerity - +1% gear haste and +1% fast cast per rank, ten ranks.
• Sorcery - +10 magic damage and +1% magic critical rate per rank, ten ranks.
• Serenity - +1 subtle blow and +1% cure potency per rank, ten ranks.
• Persistence - +2% enhancing and enfeebling duration per rank, ten ranks.

Every line on the second page costs exactly the same total to complete, about 37.8 million gil, whether it has ten ranks or twenty. Your squad members carry your Ascension ranks with them, the same as the first page.

The first page has been repriced

The first eight lines were too cheap for what they give, so their prices are now five times what they were. Nobody loses anything they paid for. The first time you log in after this patch, every rank you hold is re-ranked against the new prices using exactly the gil you spent on it: you keep the highest rank that spend covers, and whatever is left over goes straight back into your Ascension bank to spend again. The effects follow the rank you now hold.

Larceny stole for nine hours

A thief who used Larceny on a monster's two-hour ability, Invincible for one, was wearing it for more than eight hours. That was a unit mix-up between milliseconds and seconds in the copy, and it is fixed. A stolen two-hour now lasts as long as the monster had left on it, plus one second per Larceny Effect job point, and never longer than five minutes.

The same mix-up was hiding in eight other places, all fixed in this patch:

• Modus Veritas was extending a Helix to about fifty hours instead of halving it.
• Dancer steps landing on a target that already had one always granted the full two-minute cap instead of adding thirty seconds.
• Emetic Discharge and Wanion were transferring ailments with broken durations and ticks.
• Some monsters' two-hours (Bozzetto Breadwinner's Hundred Fists among them) were expiring after a fraction of a second.
• An Abyssea conflux surveyor's four-second visitant buffer was four milliseconds.
• Two GM time-extension commands were adding a thousand times too much.

Black Mage can melee now

Black Mage's weapon ranks came from a game where a mage never swings. Ours lean the other way, so they have been raised:

• Staff is now rank A+ (was B-). Cap 424 at level 99.
• Scythe is now rank B- (was E). Cap 388 at level 99.
• Dagger is now rank B- (was D). Cap 388 at level 99.

Every other Black Mage skill and every other job is unchanged. Squad members on Black Mage follow the new caps automatically.

Squads and mercenaries

• Accuracy, defense and evasion. A squad member's melee accuracy, defense and evasion are now worked out exactly the way yours are, from the member's own skill, stats and gear, instead of from a monster's rank table. This is the other half of the attack change from last week. Naked members will feel weaker; geared and skilled members will feel right.
• Hold TP for a bigger hit. A manual weapon-skill rule in /squad can now use TP as a condition. "Check me, act on the enemy / TP at least 1750 / Geirskogul" saves and fires the way you would expect, reading the member's own bar.
• Unbridled Learning for Blue Mage members works. An Unbridled spell takes no set slot; the member casts it while the effect is up and refuses it in words when it is not.
• Blue and Bard spell names. Ten spells the game abbreviates in its own menus (Quad. Continuum among them) can now be picked and saved in the gambit editor and typed at !blu.
• Elemental Siphon on a squad Summoner only works with a spirit out. With an avatar summoned it was quietly draining the avatar's MP into the Summoner every five minutes for free. Six other pet abilities that could error on a squad member's press (Spirit Surge, Spirit Link, Familiar, Reward, Killer Instinct, Repair) now simply wait for the right pet.
• A mercenary listing takes the whole rule set. A listing used to freeze only part of each rule and posture, so a hand-called weapon skill or a count-gated party target was refused as "not a rule this server can run", and switched-off rules ran anyway for the hirer. The whole set is frozen now. List a mercenary again once so the board takes a fresh photograph.
• Release a contract early. !merc release <name>, or the Release button in /merc, ends a hire on the spot. The owner is paid in full and the hirer gets no refund, so it asks twice.
• Mercenary duels actually fight. The two contestants used to stop a yalm out of each other's reach and stare until the draw. They close to melee range now.

Dynamis

Named monsters in every Dynamis zone now pop from their placeholder every time it dies, immediately, the way they did on retail. The old behaviour was a coin flip that, when it won, put the monster up minutes later where nobody was looking.

Report anything odd with /report as always.