The Hollow King's arena

The Hollow King's arena

The Hollow King has an arena of his own. Choose Fight Boss at the Veil Gate by the pond north of town to reach it: a fenced ring in a dark autumn wood beyond the gate, where it's always night. Giant jack-o'-lanterns and glowing pumpkins light it, a witch's cauldron bubbles in the trees, and bats and fireflies flit about. Everyone can fight him there at once, and you step back through the gate inside to leave.

A new fight

His fight is now about fighting him instead of chasing him around. He comes after you anywhere inside the fence, smashes whoever stands in front of him, and now and then charges down a lane. He marks the ground before both, so stepping aside is enough. He and his head go round the pumpkins instead of through them, and his charges stop short of them.

• Lights out. At three quarters health the lights go out, and the arena turns dark for everyone, whatever your Night Darkness setting. His head pops off and patrols the arena like a guard, stopping to look left and right before moving on. You can see where it's looking: it turns its face and a cone of lantern light sweeps ahead of it, and his blind body lunges at anyone standing in it. Nothing can be hurt until the dark lanterns are relit (two if you're alone, three for a group). Then the light dazzles his head, which stands still for you to break, and he fights on.
• The hush. Just under half health, he blows everyone back and hushes the arena. It goes dark for a few seconds, he can't be hurt, and he winds up and hurls his head at anyone who moves.

Each happens once a fight, and the message when he falls tells you how long the fight took.

His health now grows with each fighter by what they can actually hit for, so a fight takes about the same time alone at a low level as in a big group, and every hit he lands takes the same share of your health at any level. He no longer bounces his head around with decoys, keeps snuffing lanterns all fight or calls ghosts to help him.

New skill and Heal buttons

The attack button now only attacks, so a fight no longer turns into picking a flower. Two new round buttons sit beside it:

• The skill button mines, chops, fishes, forages, waters or tills whatever is in reach. It appears only when there's something to do and shows what it will do, with the action's timer and an XP ring for that skill.
• The Heal button, above it while you're hurt, eats the food from your backpack that heals the most without wasting any. Its red ring is your health, draining as you take damage.

The attack button is round now too, with its XP ring around the edge, and Foraging has a new, easier to see sunflower icon.

Bows and staffs

Bows and staffs no longer keep telling you "No target in range". Archery and Magic used to find only monsters in front of you, so anything beside or behind you, or something you were backing away from, couldn't be hit until you walked toward it. They now find monsters all around you and turn you to face the one you shoot, with monsters in front of you still picked first. Bows also reach further, 5 tiles instead of 3.5.

Auto-attack no longer gives up when your target walks out of range, such as a boss going after someone else in a group fight. It waits and fires again as soon as the target is back in range. Moving, the target dying or 10 seconds out of combat ends it, and pressing attack while it waits picks a new target.

A better start

• More bolts. By a Thread gives 10 times the bolts: Elara hands you 1,000 Bronze Bolts with her Birch Bow for the slime test, and finishing the quest gives another 1,000 alongside the 1,000 Feathers (both up from 100).
• Food to heal with. Your first quests now send you off with cooked Shrimp: 100 for finishing First Steps in Taria, 250 from By a Thread and 500 from A Place for Puddle. By a Thread and A Place for Puddle send them to your bank if your backpack is full.
• Cheaper basics. Shrimp now costs 1 gold instead of 5. The Combat Instructor's shop never runs out of Shrimp or Bronze Bolts, which are now 1 gold each too (down from 2), and its Birch Bow costs 8 gold instead of 40.

Fixes

• Saved when your connection drops. If your connection drops and the world goes down before you get back in, you no longer lose everything you did since you logged in: the world now saves you the moment your connection drops. A trade also ends as soon as either player's connection drops, instead of a little later. And a save left waiting on a world that went down can no longer roll back progress you've made since, however long it waited.
• Guild invites work again. Accept and Decline in the Guild window used to say you had no pending invite even right after one arrived, and the window showed "Not in a guild" instead of the invite. It now shows "Invite:" with the guild's name until you answer it.
• On the Pets window's Abilities tab, Equip and Remove now tell you to visit a bank when you're away from one, instead of doing nothing.