# v1.19.0 — The Numbers Get Friendlier

A balance pass, not a feature pass. Six small tunings that shift how the game *feels* without changing what you do. Loot ladder compresses so Rares and Epics matter again. Bosses come around weekly instead of monthly. Traps stay scary at every level instead of becoming irrelevant past level 30. Races stop having a single dominant pick. Death stops nuking your progress. Wizard's always-on signature gets dialed back; Warrior's gets loosened so it actually fires in normal play.

No new commands. No save migration. Open your terminal tomorrow and the world is just a little better-tuned.

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## 📜 Rarity Ladder Compresses

The Common → Legendary item-power gap was 160× — wildly outside industry convention (Diablo, Path of Exile, Borderlands all land around 5-10×). A single Legendary used to obsolete every other item for that slot, permanently.

Multipliers retuned from `5 / 10 / 20 / 40 / 100` to `5 / 8 / 13 / 22 / 35`. The Common→Legendary effective-power ratio drops from ~160× to ~56× — still a meaningful "wow" when a Legendary drops, but Rares and Epics now feel like real upgrades on the way there, not stepping stones to be discarded.

Prices and sell values across all tiers adjust accordingly. Your existing inventory keeps its items; their gold values just rebalance toward the new curve.

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## 🐉 Bosses Come Around More Often

Boss spawn rate doubled: `1/1000` → **`1/500`** per tick.

At a typical 100 ticks per active day, you'll see a boss roughly every 5 days instead of every 10. Combined with the existing 3% Legendary rate from boss-defeat loot, this brings the casual time-to-first-Legendary down from ~77 days to ~30 days. Bosses become a weekly-ish notable event instead of seasonal.

The roster, HP, damage, and rewards are unchanged. Just more chances to encounter them.

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## 🪤 Traps Stay Relevant

Traps used to deal a fixed 1-3 damage. At level 1 that's 10% of your max HP — genuinely threatening. At level 100 it's 0.5% — a rounding error you'd never notice. The mechanic forgot to grow with you.

Now traps deal **3-6% of your current max HP** (with a floor of 1). At every level a trap costs roughly the same fraction of your bar, so the "ouch, watch your typos" feeling persists from level 1 through level 150.

```
Level 1 Wizard-Goblin (30 HP):   trap dmg 1-2
Level 50 Orc-Warrior (305 HP):   trap dmg 9-18
Level 100 Wizard-Human (525 HP): trap dmg 16-32
```

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## ⚖️ Race Power Tightens

The race spread was wider than intended. Orc was `+4/+1/-1` (4-stat budget) and Goblin was `-1/+3/+1` (3-stat budget) — Orc dominated the survivability axis, and Goblin was strictly worse than Elf for INT builds.

- **Orc**: `+4/+1/-1` → **`+3/+1/-1`**. Loses one STR. Still the heaviest hitter, no longer runaway.
- **Goblin**: `-1/+3/+1` → **`0/+3/+1`**. Loses the STR penalty. Now a viable Wizard or Rogue race.

No max single-stat bonus exceeds +3 in any race. The two-tier budget design (Human/Orc at 3, Elf/Dwarf/Goblin at 4) is preserved but the spread is fair.

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## 🩹 Death is a Setback Not a Wipe

Normal-mode death used to zero your in-progress XP for the current level. At level 100, you'd lose up to ~8,200 XP — potentially hours of grinding — for a single bad fight.

Death now **halves** your in-progress XP instead of wiping it.

```
L1 death:    25 XP → 12 XP  (was 25 → 0)
L50 death: 1240 XP → 620 XP (was 1240 → 0)
L100 death: 8200 XP → 4100 XP (was 8200 → 0)
```

You still pay the -15% gold and drop to half HP. Death matters. It just doesn't erase a session.

Permadeath mode is unchanged — you opted into hardcore, you get hardcore.

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## ✨ Class Identity Sharpens

Two signature retuning passes:

**Wizard — arcane burn dialed back.** The Wizard's always-on bonus damage was `+INT/4`. At INT 80 that's a +20 damage tax on every successful hit, with no downside. Now `+INT/5` — still strong, still always-on, but no longer outshines the conditional signatures that only fire situationally.

**Warrior — battle frenzy actually fires now.** The Warrior's bonus required HP below **33%** of max — basically near-death, which is suicide in a passive game without on-the-spot healing. Now triggers at **HP below 60%**: when you're wounded, not when you're dying. Battle Frenzy fires in normal fights instead of being a "yeah right, can't trigger that" perk.

**Ranger's "mark prey" and Rogue's "shadow strike"** are unchanged in this release — both need cleaner per-encounter state to retune properly, and that lands in v1.20.x when monsters get HP pools.

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## ⚙ Compatibility

**Saves are unchanged. No migration. No new fields. No CLI changes.** Old saves load identically; the new tuning just applies to gameplay going forward.

If you bought items before the rarity rebalance, their listed power is unchanged. Only their gold value (buy / sell prices) adjusts to the new curve. Equipped Legendaries are still Legendaries — just no longer 160× the power of your starter Common.

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**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/duysqubix/shellquest/compare/v1.18.0...v1.19.0
