Hard Expedition opens in Krao and Draupnir, and Daevanion gets the Ariel Board — Oct 20/21 patch notes

This week's centerpiece is a new difficulty, not new content: Krao Cave and Draupnir now have a Hard mode. The gate is 2,600 Item Level — anyone who hasn't reached it stays on Normal.

The two rules that change how you play are both about pacing. The boss's Frenzy kicks in at 4 minutes, turning the fight into a timed DPS check, and each player can only revive 3 times. A group that wipes early doesn't recover.

Hard mode's reward table is entirely new, and the detail that matters is that Philosopher's Stone: Revelation (Bound) shows up twice: it can drop by chance, and it can also be selected as a guaranteed reward.

The other item that changes the routine is the Ariel Fragment (Bound) — the currency that opens the entire next chapter. And Hard mode becomes the complete material source: all Unique crafting materials now drop from both Krao and Draupnir.

The Ariel Fragment isn't used directly: it goes through Material Conversion, and there are two paths with opposite economies.

The expensive path has a cap — 100 fragments for 1 Daevanion Crystal: Ariel (Bound), 30 times per character. The cheap path doesn't: 1 fragment becomes 5 Enhancement Stones, as many times as you want. That's where the surplus goes for anyone who's already closed out the 30 conversions.

The Ariel Board arrives as an entirely new Daevanion line, and it only advances one way: Ariel Fragments collected in Expedition (Hard) and converted through Material Conversion.

The cap isn't per week or per character — it's per dungeon. Anyone chasing maximum points has to run Krao and Draupnir, not repeat the same one.

The achievement layer keeps pace with the new content, and it carries a real cosmetic prize: Unique cosmetics drop from Expedition (Hard) achievements.

Just one line, and it's visual. Spinning Strike wasn't displaying its skill effects correctly — no damage impact, but it did affect fight-reading, which is what the Chanter relies on to chain skills.

This is the chapter that moves real damage the most, and it cuts both ways. Icy Tempest recovers its additional damage against targets with stacked Frostbite and scales with skill level again — two concrete gains.

The other two go the opposite direction. The extra Frostbite reapplication from Specialization 1 was a bug, and Fire Barrier was dealing additional damage against targets that didn't even have Embers. Anyone measuring their own DPS against the old number will see it drop starting this week.

The notes' only event is a shelf, not a quest. For almost two months, the Spirit Stone of Resurrection (Season 1) goes on sale for Kinah at the Breeze Association.

Notice the math on the two steps: both deliver 30 stones, but STEP 2 costs double. It goes from 833 Kinah per stone to 1,667 — and both limits are counted per server, per week, not per character.

The Abyss gets four tweaks pulling in the same direction: more people inside, longer fights. The player cap rises, the Dimensional Core in the Abyss Lower Floor and all bosses gain HP, and Kaira and Argo get a bigger collision area.

The other two lines correct the overreach of the Marketplace's anti-bot filter: some of the players locked out by play history can trade normally again — and the rest stay restricted.

Three lines, and the first is a rare case of content blocked by scenery: Halloween decorations left Empyrean Vestiges unreachable at two spots in Verteron. They're being moved, not removed.

The other two are interface issues — the duplicated [Movement Control] key binding, and a title effect that didn't match the item's own description.