Lock On

A cast aimed at somebody follows them

A charged spell used to be anchored to the TILE it was committed on, so a target who stepped aside during the wind-up — or a caster who self-buffed and then used their still-open move slot — turned the whole charge into "WHIFFS — nothing at (x,y)". One playtest log has it four times in one match: Float twice, Protect and Cure, all cast at a unit that had simply walked, three of them the caster itself. Joe's rule now applies: a cast committed on a unit locks on and resolves wherever that unit is standing when it lands (AoE splash recentres with it); a cast committed on open ground still resolves on that tile, so placing an AoE where the enemy WILL be is still a play — and walking into a telegraphed tile still hurts. If the locked target leaves the board entirely (crystallizes), the cast falls back to the committed tile. The battle log now telegraphs the difference too: "begins charging Odin at Eidolon Caller" versus "…at (3,3)".

Power on the ability menu

Each row of the in-battle ability menu now prints the ability's Pow beside its MP and CT costs. It only lived in the hover tooltip before, so comparing two strikes meant hovering both. Pure buffs and status arts (power 0) print nothing, the same rule the spec lines follow everywhere else.

The fates roll on one row per team

A 3v3's sixth card used to wrap alone onto a second row, where its rolls revealed below the fold — you watched five loadouts turn over and took the Red Orator's on faith. The reveal now lays out explicit rows: everyone on one row when six or fewer units fit, and one row per team above that (5v5 puts all five blue on the top row, all five red beneath). Card width is computed from the longest row so a row can never wrap, and each gear item's grey stat line moved under the item's name — it was the one long line on the card, and beside the name it dictated how thin a card could go. Tall cards past the fold can finally be wheel-scrolled, and clicking anywhere still skips.

Shadows stopped crawling

The scratchy hatching on grass tiles that writhed whenever the camera zoomed or rotated was Godot's stochastic soft-shadow filtering — a screen-anchored noise pattern that crawls across the ground as the view moves. Shadow filtering is now hard (crisp stable edges, the right look for this art style anyway), the directional shadow fits a 60-unit range instead of the default 100 (the boards are ~15), and 4× MSAA smooths the geometry edges. Verified by re-rendering the same board and reading the screenshots: the stipple fringe on every shadow boundary is gone.

Move and attack highlights sit on the ground

The blue move tiles and red target tiles floated a full height-step above any raised ground — the placement added the tile's height on top of a position that already included it, so the higher the terrain the worse the float, and at some camera angles you couldn't tell which tile a highlight belonged to. The range highlights, the AoE preview, and the keyboard cursor all sit flush on the tile surface now.