Vantage

(There is no v1.4.4 release. The critical-hit and damage-breakdown work was built under that number and ships here alongside the height pass, which was built as v1.4.5 — one release, and the code labels are left as they were written rather than rewritten to agree.)

High ground stops being a damage bonus and starts being a question of reach

Standing above someone used to pay +25% damage per level, invisibly — the number appeared on no screen until the battle log learned to show its working, and the AI could not read it at all. On a five-level board it reached ×2.25, half again bigger than a backstab, on the one multiplier nobody had ever measured.

It is gone. Height now decides who you can REACH, which is how Final Fantasy Tactics has always done it:

• A sword reaches one level up, and two down. A spear or a dancer's ribbon two up. A bow or a crossbow three. Nothing reaches past its class.
• You cannot hit the archer on the roof. You go around, and you come up level with them.
• An archer shooting downhill outranges everyone — a bow gains a tile of reach for every two levels it stands above its target.

Tiles you can reach but not climb to are drawn dimmed rather than left unlit, and the refusal names both numbers and tells you what to do about it — "too high: that tile is 3 levels up and this reaches 1. Get level with it, or send someone who shoots." A tile that silently fails to light up teaches you nothing.

Measured across all nineteen battlefields before a single number was chosen: a one-level step is 40% of every pair of adjacent tiles, and steeper than that only 7%. So the rule bites at cliffs and nowhere else — 10.5% of swings on Rivencut, and exactly 0% on the gentle temple maps, which are meant to be gentle. No board has a tile that nothing in the game can attack.

A hit that adds up

The battle log named three of the roughly twelve multipliers on a hit, so a damage number could not be checked against itself. It now names all of them, including the sharpened Brave term that the knight's swords, katana and bare fists have always collected and which had been invisible since it was written.

It also shows where the damage STARTED — the wielder's stat, the weapon power, and the ability's own power — so raw × every factor comes out at the number on screen. And it prints the hit chance on hits, not only on misses; landing a 31% haymaker and landing a 96% jab used to read identically.

Critical hits

Attacks can crit. A field for it had been sitting on the damage event for a year without anything ever writing to it. The thief's new Killer Instinct support sharpens the odds by 10%, with steel or with spellwork.

The Callings become feats

Each of the eighteen callings now has deeds attached to it that pay out when you earn them, rather than a laurel list that existed and could not be reached.

Worth knowing before your next match

Two of the above change felt damage noticeably — height leaving the multiplier chain, and the Brave-per-weapon term becoming visible — so the first battle log after this update will read quite differently from your last one. The numbers are not the ones you are used to, and they now explain themselves.