Sharing a bit more details about today's patch v1248:

The first series of major changes are impacting the refinement of gold items that roll up into (gold) combo’s.
 

Super Combo

Having gold items and Watdorn armor sets both connected to the Viol’s Eye+1 (V+1) item, led to an overflow of V+1’s in the game. Back in Jan/ Feb, upon reviewing community feedback we buffed the Watdorn droprate and this has made V+1’s too common. With this patch we are removing the V+1’s item from the Watdorn armor refinement requirement and have replaced these with new items. We have restored V+1 drop chances to OG values for all tables in the game.

Another overflow issue we’ve seen are Cubes. The ease of obtaining Cubes in Watdorn and at Ruins Rats made it too easy to gather this crucual refinement component. With this patch we have reduced the drop rate significantly.

Lastly, the amount of Hai’s in game became problematic. This was caused by us adding  too many lottery drops across the board when it comes to bossing, back in Jan/ Feb upon community feedback. As a solution we have reduced the amount of drops and rework the drop tables for multiple bosses.

Beast Combo

What we have seen is that it’s too easy to obtain and make the required materials needed to craft +3 gold items. The refinement success chances are guaranteed and therefore, there is no healthy item flow (items entering and leaving the game). With this patch we have removed the guaranteed success chances, and moved the refinement from Danduki to Nus (thus no Hai ring enablement).

A few other things…

No more Drop Debuff for Monsters

This means we will no longer nerf the drop rate when your character level is above the monster level. This provides higher level players to farm lower level monsters for materials (Cubes etc.)

Item Rarity

We have also made other key items more rare. With key items we mean items that should be harder to obtain to progress items beyond a certain refinement level. e.g. Mir Crystals, Soul’s Wind and Hangug Shard. We are monitoring a couple more key items.

Hai-rings

We are going to revamp the Hai-system and connect Hai-rings to item levels. f.e., we want level 1+0/1/2 Hai-rings to be used for items level <10. This should provide more usage of different Hai-ring levels and boost the circulation within the economy. This won’t be pushed today, but in the near future. We will also change the way Hai-rings work, and recode the system for a different setup (not too different, but a 9+2 giving a 88% success chance means it’s not a challenge. It opts for short term gratification.