X-Magic, and the endgame loop closes

Weapon Burst gave melee a chance to fire off a free spell mid-swing. This patch gives casters the other half — and then doubles the Merit Point system underneath it, puts mounts on the Conquest store, and closes the endgame loop that Dynamis has been feeding.

Everything below is live now.

X-Magic: your spells cast twice

There is a new augment on the Drift Exchange, and it goes on a ring. Wear one, and every spell you cast has a chance to immediately cast a second spell — free, no MP, no recast, resolved on the spot.

It is not a copy of what you just cast. There are five kinds, and you pick one when you buy:

• Elements — off a spell aimed at an enemy: a tier-II nuke of a different element than the one you just cast. Fire, Blizzard, Aero or Thunder.
• Grace — off a spell aimed at an ally or yourself: Cure III, Regen, Protect or Shell.
• Ruin — off a spell aimed at an enemy: Bio, Dia, Gravity or Addle.
• Siphon — off a spell aimed at an enemy: Aspir or Drain.
• Veil — off any spell at all, and it always lands on you: Stoneskin, Phalanx, Aquaveil or Blink.

Each kind only answers the sort of casting it is for. That is the whole point — a healer's augment should not be paying out on nukes, and a nuker's should not be waiting for you to cure something. Elements deliberately never repeats the element you just cast, so it opens a magic burst window for your party instead of piling onto the one already open.

Roughly, per cast: Elements 38%, Grace 40%, Ruin 48%, Siphon 35%, Veil 40%.

Two things move those numbers. Cast time: the chance scales with how long the spell you cast actually took, measured against a four-second benchmark, so the figures above are what a four-second cast gets and a one-second cast gets about a quarter of it. Fast Cast and haste are included in the measurement, so gearing for speed costs you nothing — it is the spell's own class that matters. Without this rule, spamming the fastest spell in your list would be the only correct way to use X-Magic and Stone I would quietly become the best spell in the game. Skillchains: a cast into an open skillchain window doubles the chance.

The rules worth knowing before you spend:

• Rings only, either hand. One X-Magic per ring — the engine fires at most one per cast, so a second kind on the same ring would be dead weight, and the shop refuses it and tells you which slot to name if you want to swap kinds instead.
• Two rings do stack. The same kind on both hands raises the chance, and it helps most on fast spells, where the cast-time scaling has room to give back. It never makes the follow-up hit harder.
• The follow-up is a real spell. Real damage, real resists, it can magic burst, and it builds real enmity. It is not a cosmetic flourish.
• The follow-up cannot itself proc. No chains.
• Your alt-trusts get it automatically from the gear they are wearing. Put a ring on your alt and it works.

The price is 5,000 Burst Tokens plus 1,000 Drift Coins — the same price as Weapon Burst, out of the same purse. That is deliberate: your tokens arm your melee or arm your caster, and not both at once. The Gauntlet in /arena is where the tokens come from.

Typed: !drift augments lists the shelf, !drift augment m1 <ring> quotes one (m1 Elements, m2 Grace, m3 Ruin, m4 Siphon, m5 Veil), !drift confirm buys.

Merit Points, roughly doubled

The Merit Point system was built for a character. This server hands you a squad, and your merit sheet arms all of it — so it needed to be a lot bigger.

• Every weapon skill can now be merited. The Weapon Skill category's combo total went from 15 to 70. The old cap let you finish exactly three; now you can max every one. Your squad feels this most — weapon skill merits are one of the things alt-trusts genuinely inherit from you.
• Job ability merits doubled. Both groups went from 10 points to 20, on every job. Job group merits are judged at each member's own job, so the extra points arm whichever member is on that job.
• HP, MP and all seven attributes go to 30 upgrades, up from 15. At full merits that is +300 HP and +300 MP and +30 to an attribute. The top half unlocks as you level: 15 at 80-84, 18 at 85-89, 22 at 90-94, 26 at 95-98, and the full 30 at 99. Nothing you already own changed.
• Critical Hit Rate merits now work on your squad's normal swings, not only their weapon skills. The same merit was answering two different ways for the same member.
• Lowering a merit refunds the point it cost. It used to simply destroy it, so re-speccing quietly charged you.

Merits are still assigned in your Mog House, as before — that one stays, and deliberately.

Mounts, on the Conquest store

The Goods tab of /cpx grew a Mounts section: the full set of mounts that work on this server, priced at a middling cost and payable in either Gil or Conquest Points.

You are buying the item or key item that unlocks the mount, exactly as retail does it — take it to Mapitoto in Upper Jeuno and trade it, and the mount is yours. All you need first is your Chocobo License; Mapitoto now accepts either that or a Trainer's Whistle as the door.

Three more gambit stances

The Stance drop-down in DWGambits gained three positions:

• Hug the Mob — right on top of it, about a yalm out. This is the one people asked for: it is what lets a member Sneak Attack onto your tank when you are playing Thief.
• 18 feet back and 24 feet back — for the members you want well clear of an AoE.

Relic Reforge: Dynamis armor becomes iLvl 109

Open /raid and page through the shop strip past Weapons — the last tab is Relic Reforge. Hold a Dynamis relic armor piece, pay driftmarks, and the relic is consumed and replaced by its reforged iLvl 109 counterpart: Warrior's becomes Agoge, Valor becomes Caballarius, Assassin's becomes Plunderer's, Étoile becomes Horos, Argute becomes Pedagogy — the classic reforgement lines, five pieces for every job that has a classic relic set.

• The price is 1,500 driftmarks per piece, 2,250 for bodies. Driftmarks come from raid clears, same as ever.
• The tab lists what is in your bags right now and only that — hold the relic, open the tab, click Reforge, read the quote, confirm within 60 seconds.
• Two gates, both already open on this server: the item level cap, and Chains of Promathia finished — account-wide, any character, credited retroactively.
• Worn gear refuses, and every failure leg refunds the marks. GEO and RUN never had a classic relic; the Outfitter already dresses them at 109.

No addon? !raid reforge lists what your bag can convert, !raid reforge with an item id quotes it, !raid confirm settles.

The Pop-Items shelf: kings for keys

The Drift Board grew a fourth storefront, and this one is priced in items instead of points. Open /quests and find the Pop-Items tab: the classic forced-spawn keys for the old world's camped notorious monsters, paid straight out of your bag with two things Dynamis has been piling up — hundred-pieces (any mix of Jadeshells, Silverpieces, and Byne Bills; the exchange NPCs turn singles into hundreds) and Job Testimonies, each a different job's.

Five tiers, twenty keys:

• Curiosities — 1 hundred-piece plus 1 testimony: the old camped oddities, from Delkfutt's giants to the Chaos Elemental.
• Hunts — 3 plus 2: Hakutaku, Tarasque, Ullikummi, Wulgaru.
• Sky — 6 plus 3: Seiryu, Suzaku, Byakko, and Genbu, each sold as the gem-and-stone pair its ??? actually trades.
• Kings — 9 plus 4: Fafnir, Behemoth, Adamantoise.
• Kings HQ — 20 plus 5: Nidhogg, King Behemoth, Aspidochelone.

Your bag is the wallet — the warehouse does not pay, and a refusal names exactly what is short and takes nothing. Buy, and the answer is the whole quest: take it to the ??? in the zone named, and good hunting.

A few things stay off the shelf on purpose. Kirin's four seals are the sky gods' own drops — selling them would sell Kirin. The Pandemonium Key keeps its walk; the server's biggest flex kill should stay one. And sea keeps its triples.

Typed: !drift pops lists the shelf, !drift popbuy with a row number quotes, !drift confirm buys.

Dynamis every three hours

The wait between Dynamis runs drops from six hours to three. It is still one shared clock across every Dynamis zone — no hopping city to city — but two runs an evening is now a plan instead of a weekend. That is deliberate: the Pop-Items shelf is priced in Dynamis currency, and this clock is what feeds it.

Stash and Trash, straight from your bags

Every row in /bags — on your character and on any logged-out alt — grows two new buttons beside Send, Fetch, and Use:

• Stash puts the stack straight into the account warehouse. No inventory round trip, works from an offline alt's bag, and the debit and the deposit commit together, so it cannot half-happen. Take it back out any time with /warehouse.
• Trash throws it away, straight out of the bag. It always asks first, shows the exact item card — augments included — and warns in red when the thing is rare, ex, or augmented. It acts on the exact cell you clicked, so a bag that shifted under you refuses rather than guessing.

Typed, the same verbs are !squad stash and !squad trash — trash demands an explicit quantity, because it is destroying something.

Fixes

• Dragoon wyvern healing breath now reaches your alt-trusts. Elemental and Healing Breath were skipping trust-owned party members entirely, so a wyvern in a squad healed almost nobody. It now picks the neediest member in range, the same way it does for a party of players.
• Spell, ability and weaponskill "target was hit" events now fire on players. They never had — an internal lookup could not resolve a character at all — which quietly disabled a whole class of effects that land on a party member.
• Closed a way for a client to ask the server about characters it had no business seeing. Nothing for you to do; it is fixed server-side.
• The kill feed — defeats, gil, experience, limit and capacity — is colour-coded and re-filed into Window 2 on the stock chat config, so it stops drowning in battle spam. /quests feed off turns it off and the switch sticks.

Clean bags, busy forges, short clocks, and a second spell on the way out. Go wake a king.