Espers: Magicite, attunement, and the grind after the grind

This patch adds the progression system meant to outlast everything else on the server. When every Ascension page is filled and every job is mastered, this is what is left to do, and it is built to take a long time.

Type /esper to open it. Everything the window does also works typed, starting with !esper.

The short version

• Every kill that pays you experience now also pays Magicite: a wallet of thirty counters, eight elements and twenty-two jobs. It is currency, never an item, and it belongs to the character that earned it.
• Magicite plus an Esper Core makes an Esper. There are thirty-two: the thirty-one from Final Fantasy VI and Driftwood. !esper roster lists them with prices; the window shows the same with buttons.
• Equip one Esper and it lends you its spells, job abilities, traits and a stat line, on any job. A Warrior with Shiva equipped casts Blizzard III.
• Fighting with it equipped attunes it. At 100 percent it is mastered, and everything it lent is yours forever, whatever you equip next.
• Mastered and equipped doubles its stat line, so the equip choice still matters after everything is mastered.
• Esper Cores come from the Unleashed: a 20 percent roll per paid account per kill, guaranteed by the fifteenth dry kill.
• Master Driftwood and you get a second Esper slot.

Magicite: what pays, and how much

A kill pays Magicite only when it paid you experience. That is the server's own answer, the same one Spoils asks. Every kill pays three kinds at once:

• the monster's element (a Fire Elemental pays Fire; a species with no element of its own pays by family: beasts and lizards pay Earth, birds pay Wind, undead and demons pay Dark, aquans pay Water, and so on),
• the monster's job (an Orcish Warlord pays WAR),
• your own current main job.

Beastmen and other humanoids have no element, so they pay your own job a second time instead.

The amount depends on how the kill conned to the party that killed it, the same judgement the experience payout made: 1 Magicite up to Even Match, 2 for Tough, 3 for Very Tough, 5 for Incredibly Tough, and notorious monsters pay ten times that. Every paid character is paid. Magicite is progression, not loot, so six characters in one party each earn their own.

Making an Esper

!esper create <name>, or the Create button on the tile. The price is element Magicite, two job Magicites and Esper Cores:

Creation is one step, never partial. You either have it all and the Esper is yours, or nothing is spent and the game says which part is short.

A few examples of what the tiles hold. Shiva (Minor, Ice, BLM/RDM) lends Blizzard I through III with INT, Magic Accuracy and Fast Cast. Cait Sith (Minor, Light, THF/COR) lends Steal and Treasure Hunter. Carbuncle (Major) lends Protect, Shell and Haste. Gilgamesh (Greater) lends Dual Wield and Provoke. Diabolos (Greater) lends Dread Spikes, the six Absorbs and Sleepga. The full list, with every grant and stat line, is on every tile and in !esper roster.

Equipping, and the Final Fantasy VI rule

One Esper is equipped at a time, two once Driftwood is mastered. Equipped means its full grant set and its stat line. There are no partial unlocks and no thirds: it is all there the moment you equip it.

Unequip an unmastered Esper and everything it lent is gone at once. That is the Final Fantasy VI rule and it is deliberate. What you do not lose is the progress: attunement is kept on unequip. Swap to another Esper for an evening and swap back, and Shiva is exactly as attuned as you left her.

Swapping is free of recast and works anywhere except while engaged. Finish the fight first.

Attunement

Attunement accrues only while the Esper is equipped and only on kills that paid experience, weighted the same way Magicite is: harder kills attune faster, and notorious monsters ten times faster. The window shows a bar, and the game tells you at every ten percent.

The pacing is meant to be slow. The intent is that you fight creatures twenty to forty levels above yourself, and that about a thousand of those kills master one Esper. An Even Match kill is worth a tenth of an Incredibly Tough one. Boss content helps and does not replace the grind: an Unleashed kill is worth half a percent, a DWRaid clear or a Nemesis defeat a fifth of a percent, a Gauntlet floor a twentieth.

Mastered: permanent, and the doubling rule

At 100 percent the Esper is mastered, permanently. Its spells, job abilities, traits and its stat line stay with you regardless of what is equipped. A mastered Shiva means Blizzard III on every job forever.

Mastered and equipped doubles the stat line: every modifier times two. Refresh +1 mastered is +1; mastered and equipped it is +2. Treasure Hunter +1 becomes +2, Dual Wield I becomes II, Fast Cast +1% becomes +2%. Nothing is rounded and nothing is halved. Spell and ability grants do not double, because there is nothing to double. The engine's own caps on haste and skill are the only ceilings.

So after all thirty-two are mastered, which one you equip still matters: it is the one whose line is doubled.

Boss content pays too

Battlefield and instanced monsters never pay experience, so they never pay Magicite the ordinary way. Boss content pays through its own reward:

Esper Cores

A Core is a counter in your Esper wallet, never an item: no bag slot, no trade. They come from one place, the Unleashed. Every account that was paid for an Unleashed kill rolls once at 20 percent, on the character that was there, and a run of bad luck is capped: the fifteenth dry kill is guaranteed. A Core landing is announced to the server, like a four-augment Spoil. Every tier needs one Core and Driftwood needs three, so the whole roster is thirty-four Cores. At the average that is about a hundred and seventy attended Unleashed kills, the same order as the attunement grind.

Casting a lent spell

The game client builds its magic menu from your job, so a Warrior's menu has no Blizzard III in it even when Shiva has lent it. The Grants tab of the window has Cast and Use buttons that go through the server, and the same works typed:

• !esper cast Blizzard III
• !esper use Meditate

With no target given, an offensive spell goes at your current target and a beneficial one at yourself. The recast is honoured exactly as if the job owned the spell. A macro line naming a lent spell, such as a /ma line for Blizzard III, is routed the same way while the addon is loaded. A spell your job could cast anyway is refused here; cast it normally.

Your squad

Your mastered stat lines and the equipped Esper's line reach your squad members, the same way your merits and job points do. Spell and ability grants do not reach them this round.

What did not change, and why

• Alts cannot farm for the main. Magicite and attunement belong to the character that earned them, like Ascension. A squad is the character you are playing.
• No Release. Summoning the Esper for an Astral Flow tier action is designed but not built this round.
• Nothing here is an item. Magicite and Cores live in your Esper wallet, so nothing takes a bag slot and nothing can be traded, lost or vendored by accident.

Also in this patch

• Puppetmasters: automaton parts are now account-wide like every other unlock. A frame, head or attachment unlocked on any of your characters is on every character's automaton menu at their next login. This fixes the empty Equipment menu on a puppetmaster unlocked through the Drift Board.
• Squad puppetmasters: !allpup deploy t on an idle squad now sticks. The automatons used to be pulled back three seconds later unless their master was swinging too. A pet an idle member sent in stays in until that member fights and stops, the target dies, or you Retrieve it.
• Squad corsairs: a roll you learn while a corsair is out is pressable at once, instead of after zoning.
• Squad members now wear the superior gear your job points earn.
• Aspir III is a real spell again. The 550 job point gift on Black Mage and Geomancer had been buying nothing.
• Path of Darkness can be finished again: the Alzadaal lamp players click had no script behind it.
• Crafters can make Happo Shuriken (Smithing 107), Waktza Rostrum is on the DWRaid Materials page, and Roppo Shuriken x99 joins the DWRaid ammo shelf at the archers' 40 Driftmarks.
• The Lufaise Meadows Unleashed site moved to the flat beside the Tavnazian Archipelago outpost.

As always, /report from inside the game is the shortest path to us if something misbehaves, and discord.gg/DriftwoodGaming is the second shortest.