Instanced Raids¶

Raids are private, group-only boss encounters. Your party gets its own copy of the fight - no one outside the group can wander in, pull the boss, or grief your run. They're built hard enough that you have to actually talk to each other to win, and they reset every week so no one farms them on a loop. The first raid is the Warden of the Vault.

Entering¶

Hollow Saint playtest¶

The Hollow Saint is the Warden of the oath Seal, the first of the four Seals to fail, and the only raid open at present. The Chronicle tells why it is there. It is an open prototype for parties of one to ten. Group up, have your party leader double-click the Saint's threshold stone (or type [raid hollow-saint), and the whole party is carried into the Hollow Sanctuary with the Saint waiting. Everyone must be alive, online, on an up-to-date client and within 25 tiles of the leader. The room takes one group at a time: the stone says whose party is inside and how many minutes they have been at it, and it opens again the moment they win, give up or all leave. The leader who opened the raid can end it with [raid stop or restart the attempt with [raid reset. It uses your Pale Cathedral talents. Fallen players wait for the attempt to end instead of returning during combat. A wipe restores the boss to 100% health and returns the party to the recovery area with full health, mana, stamina and equipment. The encounter has an eight-minute limit. This playtest has no loot or weekly lockout. Pets and summons may come in: followers standing near you at entry travel with you, and they are brought along on every wipe and on the way out. Mounts stay at the door.

Players can die normally inside the Hollow Sanctuary even while general playtest death protection is enabled elsewhere. Enter through the threshold with your party for protected gear and group recovery; merely visiting the room does not register you for those protections, and the Saint is only there for a party that entered properly.

Bring at least two players to complete its mechanics. Staff can enter alone to preview the room, but the paired seals cannot be completed solo.

Holding the Saint is a job. The Saint hits hard now (50 to 70 a swing) and fixes its Gaze on whoever tops its threat table. Threat is the damage you have dealt it, and it fades at 3% a second, so a tank has to keep earning it and the party can plan hand-offs. Everyone sees where the Gaze is: the Saint announces it, the target is told, a crimson arrow hangs over that player's head on every party member's screen, and the party panel shows a live THREAT bar for each member with a GAZE tag on the one it is fixed on, ordered top-down by threat. Your own affinity slots are sealed from the moment the raid starts until it ends.

Scourge: from 12 seconds in and every 20 seconds after, the Saint winds up for 1.5 seconds and strikes the Gaze from up to 18 tiles. It never lands during a seal phase and waits 6 seconds after one clears. Movement does not avoid it. Each strike leaves a stack of Penance (30% more damage taken from everything, 40 seconds, refreshed by each stack) and the Saint's Mark (bandages on you take twice as long and heal half as much, 15 seconds). The first strike takes about half your health, the fourth is fatal, so the Gaze has to be handed off with Taunt before then, and the player holding it needs spell healing, not bandages. Penance, the Mark and the Gaze each show on your status bar, and every step is written to the combat journal with its cause.
Party size: the Saint has 28,000 health for up to five players and gains 12% per extra member, so a full group of eight faces about 38,000.
Pets and summons: welcome, but never first class. Everything a pet or summon does to the Saint counts as its owner's threat, so a tamer whose pet is working hard draws the Gaze and the Scourge, not the pet. The Saint never swings at pets and never fixes its Gaze on them. Every room mechanic still burns them where they stand: the Procession arcs, Scattered Censure circles and Consecration fire all hit pets caught in them, so keep them moving with you. A tamed pet can also be marked with the Cinderbrand as readily as a player, and its owner has to walk it through a cleansing pool in time; a pet that dies or leaves the floor carrying it ends the attempt like a player would. Summons are never given the bomb. Pets do not hold Penance or the Saint's Mark and never appear on the party panel's threat list.
Saint's Procession: three consecutive sweeping arcs. Watch where each warning points.
Cinderbrand: a bomb attaches to one player for 8.5 seconds, marked by flames and a countdown. Cleansing pools emerge at random nearby positions when the mark appears; run into one to extinguish it. They disappear after the cleanse. Expiry, death or disconnect of the marked player triggers Final Judgment.
Consecration: one narrow green wedge of the room is safe, about half its earlier width. Move inside during the 3.4-second warning before the rest of the room ignites for five seconds. The safe wedge rotates clockwise, with a fresh warning before each move. Stay with the group.
Oathbound penitents: timed waves join the fight. Kill them before they overwhelm the group; the seals clear surviving adds.
Scattered Censure: circles appear where players stand. Spread their placement, then move out before they strike. Overlapping circles deal multiple hits' worth of damage.
Sanctuary seals: at 75%, 50% and 25% health, the Saint becomes shielded. Two different players must stand inside the two gold circles for two seconds. An inner circle shows attunement progress; no clicking is required. Both seals must finish before five seconds have passed from the first player stepping in, and both players must remain inside. Leaving, dying, disconnecting or missing that deadline resets both circles with a short chuckle. The shield phase has a 30-second limit.
Final Judgment: failed seals, an unresolved bomb or the eight-minute enrage cause a two-second buildup, a lethal holy burst, then a full attempt reset. Defensive immunity cannot preserve progress.

The Saint has custom stone-and-bronze artwork with a hovering idle and a raised-arm casting pose and short encounter voice cues. Its warnings, damage and interactions remain server-controlled. The combat journal names each damaging ability and the cause of Final Judgment. Failed objectives have a short sinister chuckle; Final Judgment warns across the whole room before it strikes. Successful seals and Judgment impacts visibly lift and settle the floor without changing where players can walk.

The normal raid rules below describe the Warden of the Vault.

Form a party and make sure everyone is standing together near the raid portal.
The party leader double-clicks the raid portal (or runs [raid <name>).
The whole party is pulled into a fresh private copy of the encounter.

[raid on its own lists the available raids and how many copies are free.

Entry is checked for the whole group at once. If anyone is offline, too far away, already in a raid, or locked out for the week (below), the leader is told who - and nobody moves.

Player cap¶

Each raid has a minimum and maximum party size. The Warden of the Vault allows 1-8 players. You can enter solo, but it's tuned for a group.

The weekly lockout¶

The first time you step into a group's copy of a raid, you're saved to that copy for the rest of the week. You can leave and come back to the same copy freely, but you cannot enter a different group's copy of the same raid until the weekly reset - win or lose.

The lock commits the moment you zone in. Wiping does not free you - you're still inside, trying again.
If your whole group leaves or disconnects before finishing (the instance is abandoned), the lock is released so you can try again later - an early bail or a dropped connection doesn't burn your week.
The reset is weekly. [raid and the lockout message tell you when the next reset lands.

This is what stops a raid from being farmed: one group, one clear, per week.

No gear loss - wipe and re-engage¶

Inside a raid all of your gear is protected. You never drop anything:

On death your gear stays equipped and everything you carry stays in your pack. Your corpse is empty. This covers every item at every depth, including consumables tucked inside a pouch or an organizer bag.
Loot you take off the boss is protected too, from the moment you pick it up until you leave. It reverts to an ordinary item on the way out, so a sword you looted will drop normally if you die later in the open world. Anything that was already blessed before you entered stays blessed: the raid only undoes its own protection, never yours.
When your whole party falls (a wipe), everyone is pulled back to the start healer and resurrected at full health, mana, and stamina, all gear still on, ready to charge back in.
A single death while teammates are still up sends just you to the healer and revives you there after a few seconds, so one mistake isn't the end of the run.

Kill the boss and you get a short window - about a minute and a half - to loot its corpse right where it fell, then the party is sent home automatically. Loot you pick up is yours; carry it home and split it with the Spoils Coffer.

Travel magic (recall, gate, mark, teleport) is sealed inside a raid - the only way out is to win, wipe out completely and leave, or have the whole group log off.

Reading the fight - re-rolled every pull¶

The Warden's attacks re-roll every time, so there's no script to memorise - you read the telegraph and call it out live. Each one gives you about 3 seconds to react. The first mistake is survivable; it's the repeated ones that out-pace your healers and wipe the group.

Telegraph	The call	What to do
"the vault crushes inward - HUDDLE to me!"	STACK	Get close to the boss. Anyone caught out alone takes a heavy hit.
"the vault splinters outward - SCATTER!"	SPREAD	Get away from everyone. If two or more of you are clumped near the boss, all of you get hit (worse the more of you stacked).
"winds up a sweeping blow - get out of the arc!"	Sweeping cone	The boss turns to face a random direction and sweeps a wide arc that way. Step out of the arc.
"the ground erupts at range - HUG the boss!"	Ring (inner-safe)	Danger is the outer ring. Get in close to the boss.
"it slams the ground around it - get to the EDGE!"	Ring (outer-safe)	Danger is right around the boss. Run to the edge.

Because STACK-vs-SPREAD is a coin flip and the cone/ring safe-zone moves every time, a group that can't communicate quickly will eat hit after hit. A group on voice (or fast in chat) clears it.

After the fight¶

[bossresults opens the post-fight scoreboard - every player's damage, healing, damage taken, deaths, and DPS. (It works for normal open-world bosses too. See Boss Encounters.)
Take the loot home and split it with the Spoils Coffer: [stamproster stamps the coffer with your fight's party, then [spoilsroster splits everything among exactly those players - even the ones who already logged off.

Boss Encounters - the [bossresults scoreboard and the shared fight history.
Spoils Coffer - one-click fair loot splitting, roster-locked to your fight.
Party panel - live group health and meters during the fight.