Spell Echo has never once gone off. Not in this build, not in any build that shipped it — the ability was wired to a delivery queue nothing emptied, so every echo was cast, paid for, and silently thrown away. Found by a thousand logged battles that could not cast it even once, which is its own lesson. Alongside it: mana is now spent when a spell GOES OFF rather than when its charge begins, so draining a caster mid-incantation takes the spell with it.

Spell Echo actually speaks

Spell Echo re-casts your last landed ability, as advertised. It rides the same deferred-delivery queue that gear procs use, and that queue was only ever emptied by instant abilities. Spell Echo charges for a turn, so it could never take that path — the echo went into the queue and stayed there. The same gap swallowed a proc weapon's spell whenever its wielder landed a charged art.
An ultimate is never echoed. Every ultimate is a one-shot, and the echo resolved past the check that enforces it — a spent showpiece could fire a second time at half power. It now declines by rarity, so the twentieth ultimate is covered the day it is written.
One resolution, one announcement. A landed proc or echo reported itself twice, which quietly discounted the next honest use of that ability in the reward tally and double-counted area, steal and revive credit.

Mana is spent when the spell goes off

A charged spell now pays at the moment it lands, not when you begin. Drain a caster below the cost during the wind-up and the spell fizzles, saying by how much it fell short. Charging still costs the turn; what it no longer does is buy the spell three turns in advance.
This is what the drains were missing. The Shadowblade's Steal Breath, Mana Leech and Absorb MP all become real answers to a summoner winding up — until now their mana was already spent and could not be taken.
A fizzle costs the turn and nothing else: no damage, no JP, and an ultimate keeps its charge, because the spell never happened.
A spell that never goes off is never paid for. Silence, Stun, Sleep and the rest already cancelled a charging spell; now they leave the caster's mana where it is. The disabler takes the spell and the turn, which was always the point of landing one.
You still cannot begin a cast you cannot pay for, and a second spell cannot spend mana the first one has already claimed.

Broken gear stays broken

A shattered weapon or armour is gone for the rest of the battle, and a cure cannot re-forge it. The Knight's Break arts do two things at once — a curable −30% penalty and the destruction of the item — and only the first of those is a debuff. Purify and Remedy lift the penalty and leave the wreckage. Dying and being raised does not hand it back either. This was already the behaviour; it is now pinned by tests that fail if anything rebuilds a unit from a loadout it no longer has.

The pointer tells you where you are standing

The tile under your cursor lights up, and it follows the mouse. A white frame marks the tile a click would land on — brightest thing on the board, breathing against the grain of the range tiles rolling out beneath it. It dims and goes still over a tile you cannot use, so "can I click here?" is answered before you click rather than after.
It works during a MOVE, which is where it was most missing. Picking a destination out of a field of blue used to be guesswork at the edges.
An area spell shows you what it will hit. Hovering paints the blast in orange over the range, and every unit standing in it takes a ring — so a four-tile blast with bodies scattered through it can be read at a glance instead of counted out by eye. Line sweeps light the whole ray, from wherever along it you point.
Casts in flight now mark everyone they cover. A charging spell used to ring a single target and only when it was aimed at one unit; an area cast winding up marked nobody at all. It marks every body in the circle now.

Line abilities look like line abilities

Sword Wind, Volley, Skewer and Fissure drew as diamonds in the shipped v1.4.14 build — highlight, hover preview and cast telegraph all showed a splash while the engine swept a line. The targeting highlight now draws the four rays a line ability actually reaches, and a sweep's footprint is stated by one author rather than two that disagreed.
Four portraits sat low in their bust frames and now sit correctly.

Impale pays for its pierce

Impale is 9 power, 4 MP and a one-turn charge, down from 11 power for free and instant. It still goes under the armour — that is the point of the art and it keeps it — but it no longer does so at no cost.
It had become the best free hit in the game and quietly outclassed the Dragoon's own paid alternative: 55.3 damage a blow against Jump Attack's 54.6, on roughly half the power, with no mana and no wind-up. Against the other physical skills in its power band it landed 22% above their average. It was the second most-cast damaging common in the game.
The charge is the real change. A Dragoon winding up can now be interrupted by killing it, which is counter-play a free instant strike never offered, and a mis-aimed Impale keeps its cost like every other charged spell.
Measured over 30,000 battles per team size against an otherwise identical build: the Dragoon lands 61.3% → 57.3% at 3v3, 57.0% → 54.3% at 5v5 and 53.5% → 51.9% at 8v8, and no other class moves a full point. Expect Impale to be a situational opener now rather than the Dragoon's every-turn button.

The Codex stopped contradicting itself

Impale's page said "mitigated by DEF" directly beneath its own description reading "ignoring DEF." The formula line was derived from the ability's TYPE alone, so it could not see either of the two flags that actually change the physical math. Skewer and Iaido Step read the same way, and the weapon-scaled sword arts — Stasis Sword, Blade Storm and Sword Wind — were promised a Brave bonus the game skips outright.
The line is now read from the same rules object the resolver itself uses, so a formula and the blow it describes cannot disagree, and a new art is described correctly the day it is written.

For developers

The balance simulator can measure damage per ability, banded by rarity — the missing third question beside "how often is this cast" and "did its owner win". Ranked by damage per cast, since totals mostly measure how often the AI reaches for something.
Its battle count is overridable with SC_BALANCE_BATTLES, so a deeper run needs no source edit.

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