The storage switch is the first stutter fix written in the past tense
Under Critical Fixes, one line: non-CN servers were switched from AWS EFS to EBS, "successfully resolving rare instances of prolonged hitching/stuttering (lasting over 5 seconds) caused by log I/O disk-write bottlenecks". Set it against what came before. On 4 August stuttering was under investigation; on 7 August the in-stage causes were complex and worked case by case; on 15 August the cause was cloud server CPU hyper-threading; on 19 August it was chime and treasure-chest refreshes, to be resolved in upcoming updates; on 27 August two rubberbanding cases were reduced without touching either. Five statements, five game-layer or config-layer causes, and no past tense among them. This one is below the game entirely — a filesystem choice — and it is the first that says the word resolved.
- Scope, before anyone reads it as a general fix: non-CN servers, hitches over five seconds, one named cause. CN servers are not mentioned, ordinary micro-stutter is not mentioned, and no before-or-after figures are published.
- It does not close the wider latency question, and the same patch says so implicitly by shipping three more position-desync fixes alongside it.
- If your symptom was a freeze of five seconds or more on an International, Oceania or North America server, this is the one case a patch note now claims to have fixed — retest on the post-15-September build, and a reproduction after it is worth more as a report than another general lag thread.
- The client-side stutter pattern is untouched and unrelated: shader compilation over the first matches on a build happens on your machine, where a server storage change cannot reach it.
The fifth balance pass names every class, and moves almost nothing by a stated amount
All six classes appear, which no pass before this managed — 19 August left Blackarrow out, 3 September left Seer out. What arrives with that breadth is not weight: the majority of the lines are bug fixes, and every numeric change is written as slightly increased or slightly reduced, with no figure for any of them. The one class with a legible direction is Withered Knight, pulled off Execution pressure and pushed toward its spear.
- Withered Knight: Heavy Strike damage down including its forward-dodge branch, delayed and consecutive Execution damage down, Sacred Bulwark cooldown down, Spear Barrage damage up. Four lines, one direction.
- Execute no longer triggers the [Smiting] affix, and Blackarrow’s [Blood Infection] explosion now does. The same affix corrected both ways in one patch, which means any Smiting reading taken before today was measuring one fault or the other.
- Blackarrow is the only class with an unambiguous nerf: [Spore Arrow] cooldown up. Against it, uncharged [Featherlight Arrow] damage up and two fixes.
- Shadowstrix gets an audio cue for [Flurry Strike] charge phases — a direct answer to 3 September, which made that charge cost Energy continuously. A cost you cannot hear is a cost you cannot budget.
- Seer, absent from the previous pass, gets two improvements: [Shelter Rune] cooldown down and [Blinding Rune] no longer interrupted by jumping. Mercenary gets a cheaper [Stonebreaker Slash] and two fixes to it.
- Outside the classes: the [Revealing Bulb] series loses its dodge-energy reduction and Exposed can no longer be re-applied to the same target, and the [Fervor] gem affix damage boost is reduced. The affix layer is where this week’s meta actually moved.
Four season tasks are named and recut, twelve days after the grind was called reduced
The 28 August update eased Season and Contract Tasks by category — fewer kills, defeats instead of executions, rarity instead of value — and the 3 September post referred back to it as having "reduced the progression grind", in the past tense. This patch is a second pass on the same thing, and it is the first to name individual tasks in brackets and quote what they now ask. What it does not touch is the count: DevNote #8’s 152 tasks for every end-game reward is unchanged, and no Season 1 end date has been published.
- [Soul Hunt] now completes on "Complete 1 Soul Harvest while staying alive" — the task the season is named after, cut to a single ritual with a survival condition.
- [All or Nothing] now completes on "Defeat 1 Gyldhunter". It is also the task the 3 September patch fixed for being uncompletable, so this is its second appearance in two patches.
- [Battle-Tested] and [Preserving the Truth] lose the "complete all objectives within a single session, or all progress will be reset" restriction. The objectives stand; the reset is what made them punishing.
- [Polishing the Story] displayed requirements that did not match what it checked, and [Show Your Edge] calculated completion incorrectly. Both fixed — if either refused to tick while you did what it asked, it was the task.
- Stackable items in Pip’s Pouch now stack instead of taking a fresh slot each time. Not a task change, but it is the same loop: pouch space is what a task run spends.
Five input locks are now fixed, and the soft-lock row still does not close
Two more lock-outs are fixed here: bringing up the Item Wheel, and interacting with Soekja, each described as locking the player out of all actions. That makes five since 12 August — executing an enemy, looting, being hit while accepting a task, and now these two. The raid soft-lock reports this site tracks are still not sourced to any of them, so the row stays open, and this is the point at which that starts to feel uncomfortable rather than cautious. The standard has not changed: what closes it is a retest on the current client, not a sixth patch note of the right shape.
- Also fixed, and all of them run-affecting rather than cosmetic: in-match tasks failing to count on the Fate Chart, the per-match Path of Glory cap displayed wrongly on the results screen, and the Collection Pedestal disappearing after a camp preview.
- Map and marker work on both maps: terrain collision in parts of Hallowgrove and Brandrgarde, abnormal minimap markers at Brandrgarde’s Sealed Grounds, and the minimap icon after picking up a Soul Cocoon during a Soul Harvest.
- Chat: recruitment messages could display as garbled text. The 3 September update had just added region server details to those same messages.
- Cosmetic and console: Gyldjar and Bell skins displaying abnormally in the in-match inventory, and on PS5 a character-creation voice type that played no audio preview — a choice made blind until now.