The Digital Insider | Month: June 2024

Dragon Age 4’s New Name Is ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard,’ First Gameplay Look Next Week

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, the next game in the series, has a new name – Dragon Age: The Veilguard. BioWare first teased the game back in 2018, and we later learned it was called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in 2022. Now, BioWare has changed the name to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with a promise of a first look at its gameplay next week on Tuesday, June 11.

As for why, the team explains it’s about the characters that will make up the companions you meet in the game in a new blog post.

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“At BioWare, we create worlds of adventure, conflict and companionship, where you’re at the center of it all. As fans of our franchise know, every Dragon Age game has delivered a new standalone story. Set in the world of Thedas, these tales explore epic locales and threats, always thrusting you into a new conflict. Each game also introduces a new lead hero – The Warden, Hawke, The Inquisitor – that you can call your own. You can expect all that, and more, with the new game. And of course, much like your unique hero, it wouldn’t be a Dragon Age game without an amazing cast of companions – right?

Each of the seven unique characters that make up your companions will have deep and compelling storylines where the decisions you make will impact your relationships with them – as well as their lives. You’ll unite this team of unforgettable heroes as you take on a terrifying new threat unleashed on the world. Naturally, the Dread Wolf still has an important part in this tale, but you and your companions – not your enemies – are the heart of this new experience.

So, to capture what this game is all about, we changed the name as the original title didn’t show just how strongly we feel about our new heroes, their stories and how you’ll need to bring them together to save all of Thedas.”

Elsewhere in the announcement, BioWare seemingly confirms earlier reporting that this game – the fourth mainline Dragon Age entry in the series – was at one point being experimented on as a “multiplayer concept.” However, as time and experimentation went on, the team decided to re-focus on its roots with “an incredible single player game, with all the choices, characters, and world building you’d expect from us.”

There’s no release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard but BioWare said last year the game’s full reveal would be happening this summer – it sounds like that’s next week.

What do you think of the new name? Let us know in the comments below!

A New Report Details How A Troubled Development Led To Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s $200M Flop

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, the live-service multiplayer game from famed Batman: Arkham series developer Rocksteady Studios, hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC back in February to middling reviews and disappointment from players. Now, a new report from Bloomberg details the game’s behind-the-scenes troubles, including a culture of “toxic positivity,” shifting visions, and more, ultimately resulting in the game being a $200 million loss for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

Bloomberg reports that following the release of DC’s Suicide Squad in 2016, which made $750 million at the box office on a budget of $175 million, Warner Bros. wanted to build on that IP’s success. Warner Bros. Montreal, which developed 2022’s Gotham Knights, was working on a Suicide Squad game that Bloomberg says was struggling to come together. Notably, Warner Bros. Montreal’s 2013 game Batman: Arkham Origins ended with a tease about an in-universe Suicide Squad. As a result, Warner Bros. looked to Rocksteady to capitalize on the Suicide Squad name instead.

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At the time, following the 2015 release of Batman: Arkham Knight, studio co-founders Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill were working on “a prototype of an original multiplayer puzzle-solving game, codnamed Stones,” Bloomberg writes. But around the end of 2016, Walker and Hill told Rocksteady staff they were switching gears to develop a Suicide Squad game with plans to release it in 2019 or 2020. This game would be a live-service multiplayer title, or a games-as-a-service as titles in the genre are sometimes referred to, aiming to capture the seasonal excitement (and money) of games like Destiny 2, Fortnite, and others.

With no experience in multiplayer games, Rocksteady’s staff ballooned from roughy 160 employees to more than 250, according to Bloomberg. As the team developed Suicide Squad, employees under Walker and Hill questioned decisions like making Captain Boomerang, one of the four playable characters who traditionally fights with a boomerang in comics, a shotgun user, or attempting to add a vehicle system in a game where each of the four playable characters already has their own unique traversal system to get around Metropolis.

Rocksteady revealed Suicide Squad in 2020 with a 2022 release year, and in an effort to hit this deadline, Bloomberg reports engineers focused on short-term fixes that actually became “hindrances” as the game’s release was eventually delayed to 2024. Elsewhere in the studio, employees waited weeks or months for Hill to review their work, slowing overall development. Hill scrapped large parts of the script and struggled to convey his ideas, according to Bloomberg, and the studio grew into a culture of “toxic positivity” where employees felt criticism was discouraged.

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Throughout the game’s troubled development, leadership reportedly showed no signs of worry about the game’s live-service multiplayer ambitions, even as others in the genre struggled to find success. Even Rocksteady fans felt worried about the game, just from seeing trailers and gameplay previews. Then, years into development, Walker and Hill left Rocksteady to form Hundred Star Games, further putting into question Suicide Squad’s future.

In early February of this year, Suicide Squad finally hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and the tea leaves were almost immediately clear: the game was a disappointment. Though Rocksteady is still supporting it today with updates, like adding a playable Joker character, the conversation around the game has shifted to fans of the studio wondering if Warner Bros. will layoff employees there to cut costs. Bloomberg reports, however, that during a Warner Bros. Games meeting in February, Warner Bros. Discovery head of games David Haddad said job cuts at Rocksteady wouldn’t make sense as the company’s gaming division is already understaffed.

According to Bloomberg, many of Rocksteady’s employees are helping to develop a “Director’s Cut” of the 2023 Harry Potter game, Hogwarts Legacy, the best-selling game of the year. The studio is also working to pitch a new single-player game.

[Source: Bloomberg]

Have you played Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League? Let us know in the comments below what you think of it!

Concord Preorders Confirm $40 Price Tag, Post-Launch Content Like Characters And Maps Will Be Free

We got our first look at Firewalk Studios’ upcoming 5v5 first-person shooter Concord last week during a PlayStation State of Play, which is where we also learned it will launch simultaneously on PlayStation 5 and PC on August 23 after a beta this July. Now, thanks to a new PlayStation Blog post detailing the game’s preorder contents, we know it will cost $39.99.

That same blog post says Concord will launch with 16 playable characters known as Freerunners, 12 unique maps set on various in-universe worlds, and six distinct team-based modes. And that content will “expand shortly after launch with regular, post-launch updates” for all players at no additional cost.

Here’s a look at the Concord box art:

Concord Firewalk Studios Box Art Preorder Information Beta Price PC PS5 PlayStation 5

Alongside the standard $39.99 edition of the game, PlayStation and Firewalk are releasing a Digital Deluxe Edition for $59.99 that includes additional cosmetics to customize your Freegunners and 72-hours early access to the game’s August launch. Preordering the game, regardless of edition, also gets you (and up to four friends) beta access and the Monarch cosmetics pack.

Here’s a look at the Concord Digital Deluxe Edition:

“Seeing Vale and other Freegunners in action in gameplay footage is one thing, but there’s no substitute for experiencing the game for yourself,” the blog post reads. “That’s why we’re hosting a pre-launch beta, simultaneously on PS5 and PC with cross-play support. Those that pre-order will have an opportunity to be among the first to play Concord.”

That beta is set to happen this July before Concord launches on PS5 and PC on August 23.

For more, watch the Concord reveal here.

How do you feel about Concord’s price point? Let us know in the comments below!

Researchers demonstrate the first chip-based 3D printer

Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. The tiny device could enable a user to rapidly create customized, low-cost objects on the go, like a fastener to repair a wobbly bicycle wheel or a component for a critical medical operation.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Texas at Austin took a major step toward making this idea a reality by demonstrating the first chip-based 3D printer. Their proof-of-concept device consists of a single, millimeter-scale photonic chip that emits reconfigurable beams of light into a well of resin that cures into a solid shape when light strikes it.

The prototype chip has no moving parts, instead relying on an array of tiny optical antennas to steer a beam of light. The beam projects up into a liquid resin that has been designed to rapidly cure when exposed to the beam’s wavelength of visible light.

By combining silicon photonics and photochemistry, the interdisciplinary research team was able to demonstrate a chip that can steer light beams to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional patterns, including the letters M-I-T. Shapes can be fully formed in a matter of seconds.

In the long run, they envision a system where a photonic chip sits at the bottom of a well of resin and emits a 3D hologram of visible light, rapidly curing an entire object in a single step.

This type of portable 3D printer could have many applications, such as enabling clinicians to create tailor-made medical device components or allowing engineers to make rapid prototypes at a job site.

“This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change,” says senior author Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Joining Notaros on the paper are Sabrina Corsetti, lead author and EECS graduate student; Milica Notaros PhD ’23; Tal Sneh, an EECS graduate student; Alex Safford, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin; and Zak Page, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin. The research appears today in Nature Light Science and Applications.

Printing with a chip

Experts in silicon photonics, the Notaros group previously developed integrated optical-phased-array systems that steer beams of light using a series of microscale antennas fabricated on a chip using semiconductor manufacturing processes. By speeding up or delaying the optical signal on either side of the antenna array, they can move the beam of emitted light in a certain direction.

Such systems are key for lidar sensors, which map their surroundings by emitting infrared light beams that bounce off nearby objects. Recently, the group has focused on systems that emit and steer visible light for augmented-reality applications.

They wondered if such a device could be used for a chip-based 3D printer.

At about the same time they started brainstorming, the Page Group at UT Austin demonstrated specialized resins that can be rapidly cured using wavelengths of visible light for the first time. This was the missing piece that pushed the chip-based 3D printer into reality.

“With photocurable resins, it is very hard to get them to cure all the way up at infrared wavelengths, which is where integrated optical-phased-array systems were operating in the past for lidar,” Corsetti says. “Here, we are meeting in the middle between standard photochemistry and silicon photonics by using visible-light-curable resins and visible-light-emitting chips to create this chip-based 3D printer. You have this merging of two technologies into a completely new idea.”

Their prototype consists of a single photonic chip containing an array of 160-nanometer-thick optical antennas. (A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.) The entire chip fits onto a U.S. quarter.

When powered by an off-chip laser, the antennas emit a steerable beam of visible light into the well of photocurable resin. The chip sits below a clear slide, like those used in microscopes, which contains a shallow indentation that holds the resin. The researchers use electrical signals to nonmechanically steer the light beam, causing the resin to solidify wherever the beam strikes it.

A collaborative approach

But effectively modulating visible-wavelength light, which involves modifying its amplitude and phase, is especially tricky. One common method requires heating the chip, but this is inefficient and takes a large amount of physical space.

Instead, the researchers used liquid crystal to fashion compact modulators they integrate onto the chip. The material’s unique optical properties enable the modulators to be extremely efficient and only about 20 microns in length.

A single waveguide on the chip holds the light from the off-chip laser. Running along the waveguide are tiny taps which tap off a little bit of light to each of the antennas.

The researchers actively tune the modulators using an electric field, which reorients the liquid crystal molecules in a certain direction. In this way, they can precisely control the amplitude and phase of light being routed to the antennas.

But forming and steering the beam is only half the battle. Interfacing with a novel photocurable resin was a completely different challenge.

The Page Group at UT Austin worked closely with the Notaros Group at MIT, carefully adjusting the chemical combinations and concentrations to zero-in on a formula that provided a long shelf-life and rapid curing.

In the end, the group used their prototype to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional shapes within seconds.

Building off this prototype, they want to move toward developing a system like the one they originally conceptualized — a chip that emits a hologram of visible light in a resin well to enable volumetric 3D printing in only one step.

“To be able to do that, we need a completely new silicon-photonics chip design. We already laid out a lot of what that final system would look like in this paper. And, now, we are excited to continue working towards this ultimate demonstration,” Jelena Notaros says.

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the MIT Rolf G. Locher Endowed Fellowship, and the MIT Frederick and Barbara Cronin Fellowship.

Octopath Traveler II Now Available On Xbox And Game Pass, First Game Finally On PlayStation

Last year’s Octopath Traveler II is now available on Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Square Enix has announced. Plus, Square Enix has released the first Octopath Traveler on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, meaning both mainline Octopath Traveler games are now playable on all console platforms.

If you’re on Xbox, Octopath Traveler II is also available on Xbox and PC Game Pass alongside the first game. If you’ve been waiting to jump into this series – whether on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, or PC – now is the best time. And both games are great; read why in Game Informer’s Octopath Traveler review and Game Informer’s Octopath Traveler II review.

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To celebrate the series being available on all current platforms and PC (via Steam and Windows), developer Team Asano has released a free update to Octopath Traveler II that includes an “Extra Battle” mode that becomes available after defeating the game’s final boss. In this mode, players can test their skills against newly added extra-tough opponents – including the main characters from the first game. This mode has been available on Xbox consoles since launch but is now available on PlayStation, Switch, and PC.

“Since its launch in 2018 with Octopath Traveler, the Octopath Traveler series has sold over four million copies worldwide, popularizing the unique HD-2D art style: a striking blend of 2D character designs in beautiful 3D worlds,” a press release reads. “Both games are a standalone experience set in different worlds with eight distinct protagonists, each with their own stories to explore and Path Actions to use. Players will embark on a grand adventure and steer their own journey, depending on whom they choose to play as.”

Are you going to check out the series on a new platform? Let us know in the comments below!

Edge 402: UC Berkeley’s Large World Model Can Understand Really Long Videos

One of the most impressive research in generative video of the last year….

High-End Raiding Overview of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Job Changes

Introduction

Are you familiar with terms like 2-minute meta, homogenization, or even transpose lines? If you are, then this article might be up your alley. New expansions are always a fun time, especially for high-end raiders who will be getting shiny new buttons to press, and with that comes new rotations. After approximately 8,000 hours of playing Final Fantasy XIV and clearing The Omega Protocol on release, I think I’m able to provide some insight about the new weaponskills, spells, and abilities (and their implications for rotations, openers, and general play) I saw at a recent preview event for its upcoming Dawntrail expansion. I am not an expert at every job, and I could not test each job to its limit, so feel free to point out mistakes on my part.

Unless it is pertinent to the rotation flow, potencies from damaging abilities are purposefully left off since many balance changes could come before the game launches. And just a heads up: don’t use this overview to find your job’s perfect rotation at launch – I will leave that to the mentors in The Balance.

Before we hop in, here is a critical reminder: Everything here was seen on an in-development build and is subject to change. Not just potencies but abilities may be changed or removed, and new ones we didn’t even see might be in the game at launch. As a little black birdie once said: We just don’t know.

Overview

Some high-level things:

Multiple jobs get additional mitigation or upgrades to existing mitigation. This makes me wonder how much damage the combat developers plan for us to take. In some instances, like in The Omega Protocol, tanks must have a healer mitigation to live through the damage. Are the mitigation changes to enable every tank to handle a buster by itself, or will they still need external mitigation in high-end content? We will have to wait and see.
Creative Studio III has standardized raid buffs to 20 seconds in Dawntrail. Even Searing Light is 20 seconds and now increases damage by 5%. I don’t have screenshots to confirm CSIII has changed every 15-second raid buff, but it would be strange if several did get changed and some did not.
As mentioned in the 81st Live Letter, some actions will now have the ability to be consolidated into one button if it’s part of a combo. 1-2-3 combos for every job released before Dawntrail have remained untouched and cannot be combined into one button. Viper and Pictomancer do have this implemented into what I view as their 1-2-3, though it is not optional. I was surprised at how little this new feature is utilized; every instance of it felt warranted.
Jobs play very similar to their Endwalker versions. From what FFXIV director and producer Naoki Yoshida, lovingly referred to as Yoshi-P in the community, has said and what we see now with the new information, Dawntrail will not be the expansion where we see extensive job changes. Yoshi-P has mentioned that the changes some players would like to see could happen in 8.0, but we have no specific information on that now, and plans could change by the time the next expansion comes around.

Tanks

All tanks receive the following:

Lv. 94: Enhanced Rampart – Adds an additional effect to Rampart that increases HP recovery via healing action on self by 15%.
Lv. 96: Melee Mastery II – Potency upgrades to various weaponskills.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Reprisal – Extends the duration of Reprisal to 15 seconds.

Paladin

Lv. 76: Supplication, Sepulcher – New Atonement combo actions.
Lv. 92: Guardian – Reduces damage taken by 40%. Gives a shield equivalent to a heal of 1,000 potency.
Lv. 96: Imperator – Upgraded AoE Requiescat.
Lv. 100: Blade of Honor – oGCD combo action off Blade of Valor.

The magical sword-and-board tank that headlined the previous expansion isn’t seeing any adjustments that fundamentally change the rotation. You will hit the same button for Atonement, Supplication, and Sepulcher. There’s no trait upgrading the old Atonement stacks into the new combo – you will have all three as soon as you unlock Atonement. All Atonement combo actions preserve your 1-2-3 combo, and the potency is less than a Divine Might Holy Spirit, so it won’t change any functionality or general priority in your burst. Blade of Honor is an oGCD and won’t be pushing anything out of your burst, either. Goring Blade is only available during Fight or Flight, which feels strange, but it will not matter in most cases. And yes, Shield Bash and Cover are still there.

Warrior

Lv. 92: Damnation – Reduces damage taken by 40%. Grants a 400 potency heal-over-time for 15 seconds after the effect of Damnation expires.
Lv. 96: Primal Wrath – oGCD combo action off Inner Release that is able to be spent after using Fell Cleave three times while in Inner Release.
Lv. 100: Primal Ruination – GCD combo action off Primal Rend. Guaranteed critical direct hit.

Warrior’s shiniest additions are both tied to Inner Release. There are two new buttons to press every 60 seconds, but Warrior has plenty of space for more buttons in its burst, so there’s little to ponder here. Damnation’s heal-over-time effect triggers as soon as the damage mitigation effect ends, so you could Shake It Off early to get the regen before waiting for Damnation to expire at the probable cost of being grossly inefficient. Warrior and Paladin keep their damaging gap closers, which may be confusing since Dark Knight and Gunbreaker lost theirs, but pragmatically, it makes sense as their burst windows can afford the space.

Dark Knight

Lv. 54: Shadowstride – New non-damaging gapcloser that teleports you to enemy target. Replaces Plunge.
Lv. 68: Delirium – Upgraded Blood Weapon. Combines the effects of old Blood Weapon and Delirium.
Lv. 92: Shadowed Vigil – Reduces damage taken by 40%. 1,200 potency heal after dropping below 50% HP or after 20 seconds.
Lv. 96: Scarlet Delirium, Comeuppance, Torcleaver – GCD Combo actions that replace Bloodspiller during Delirium.
Lv. 96: Impalement – GCD combo action that replaces Quietus during Delirium.
Lv. 100: Disesteem – GCD combo action off Living Shadow.

Dark Knight is the first entry on the list where the opener may change beyond pressing the new buttons. In the standard opener, you would pop Blood Weapon about four seconds before pulling. Now, Blood Weapon is combined with Delirium, and the stacks only last 15 seconds, so you would lose one or two of the Delirium stacks waiting for raid buffs to come out if you kept the old Blood Weapon timing. Living Shadow no longer costs a gauge, so you can summon Esteem earlier to get more of his big hits under buffs. I don’t anticipate either of these changes to cause too much hassle, but they are changes nonetheless. The new gap closer is a nice change to reduce the amount of weaving necessary during burst windows, and you can still reduce its cooldown with Enhanced Unmend if you want to – although if this article makes sense to you, then you almost certainly won’t be. Shadowed Vigil providing an Excogitation-like effect could save you during Walking Dead. It wouldn’t be efficient to use a 40% mitigation on top of Living Dead, but if it keeps you out of the grave, it keeps you out of the grave.

Gunbreaker

Lv. 56: Trajectory – New non-damaging gapcloser that dashes you to enemy target. Replaces Rough Divide.
Lv. 92: Great Nebula – Reduces damage taken by 40%. Increases maximum HP by 20% and restores the amount increased.
Lv. 96: Fated Brand – AoE Continuation for Fated Circle.
Lv. 100: Reign of Beasts, Noble Blood, Lion Heart – GCD combo actions off Bloodfest.

This is still Thancred. An AoE Continuation for Fated Circle is nice for high mob count situations, although I don’t anticipate seeing those in high-end raiding. The new Bloodfest combo is an interesting, high-damage replacement for other GCDs in the opener. With either 2.5 or <= 2.47 second GCD recasts, there are three very obvious candidates to be replaced by the new combo in the opener, and it allows for holding more cartridges coming out of your burst. This may help alleviate the awkwardness of two cartridge windows; Kronk will have to check the timeline. At Media Tour, the Bloodfest combos did break the Gnashing Fang combo. This is a good candidate for changing when it goes live or even in future patches. Having three GCDs that don’t have Continuation procs during burst would be an enormous quality of life benefit for popping mitigation or moving the boss.

Healers

All healers receive the following:

Lv. 94: Enhanced Swiftcast – Reduces cooldown of Swiftcast to 40 seconds.
Lv. 94: White Magic/Tactician’s/Magick Mastery – Potency upgrades to various spells.

White Mage

Lv. 40: Aetherial Shift – 15 yalm dash in the direction you are facing. 60-second cooldown.
Lv. 92: Glare IV – Instant-cast GCD combo action off Presence of Mind. 3 stacks.
Lv. 96: Medica III – Upgraded Medica II.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Tetragrammaton – Two stacks of Tetragrammaton.
Lv. 100: Divine Caress – oGCD combo action off Temperance. 400 potency barrier to party. members within 15 yalm radius. Grants Regen with 200 potency for 15 seconds after the barrier effect fades.

Glare mages stay glaring. Ever since the change to give all healers 1.5-second casts on their primary damaging skill, I don’t think movement has been problematic for White Mages. Still, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have three instant casts every two minutes and a lengthy dash every 60 seconds. The dash is not tied to Temperance or any other ability and unlocks very early. There are many potential uses, such as adjusting at the last second or moving for Defamation-like mechanics. Medica III didn’t upgrade the initial heal but did boost the regen to 175 potency for a total of 875 potency over its 15-second duration. Divine Caress is a powerful tool, and as you will see with the rest of the healers, the capstone abilities of healers in Dawntrail are strong.

Scholar

Lv. 92: Baneful Impaction – oGCD combo action off Chain Stratagem. Deals damage over time for 15 seconds and is able to be stacked with Biolysis.
Lv. 96: Concitation – Upgraded Succor.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Recitation – Reduces cooldown of Recitation to 60 seconds.
Lv. 100: Seraphism – 100 potency heal over time for party members within 50 yalms. Changes Adloquium to Manifestation and Concitation to Accession. Resets Emergency Tactics recast timer and reduces its recast timer to one second. Lasts for 20 seconds. Effect cannot be stacked with Dissipation. Three-minute cooldown.
Lv. 100: Manifestation, Accession – Upgraded instant-cast Adloquium and Concitation. Can only be used while under Seraphism.

A new damage-over-time ability, upgraded Succor with 180% shielding (the heal is the same), and reduced cooldown of Recitation is nice, but the real eye-catcher is Seraphism. Instant-cast Manifestation or Accession with Emergency Tactics on every cast for 20 seconds is a lot of healing throughput. Manifestation ups the healing to 240 potency with no change to the shield, and Accession ups the healing to 240 potency with a 180% shield. Even though you can’t pair it with the increased healing effect of Dissipation, you can use it with Fey Illumination and whatever other increased healing effects your party brings. One interesting bit is that it does provide a heal over time, but its duration is not neatly divisible by three to account for the server tick like most over-time effects in the game are – aside from Flamethrower on Machinist. We will have to wait and see if there is anything to that or if the timer will be changed at launch.

Astrologian

Lv. 30: Astral Draw – Draws the Balance, the Arrow, the Spire, and the Lord of Crowns (At Lv. 70 and beyond). Changes to and shares a recast timer with Umbral Draw after using.
Lv. 30: Umbral Draw – Draws the Spear, the Bole, the Ewer, and the Lady of Crowns (At Lv. 70 and beyond). Changes to and shares a recast timer with Astral Draw after using.
Lv. 30: Play I – Plays either the Balance or the Spear.
Lv. 30: Play II – Plays either the Arrow or the Bole.
Lv. 30: Play III – Plays either the Spire or the Ewer.
Lv. 30: The Balance – Increase damage by 6% if target is melee, 3% if ranged.
Lv. 30: The Arrow – Increase HP recovery via healing by 10%.
Lv. 30: The Spire – 400 potency shield.
Lv. 30: The Spear – Increase damage by 6% if target is ranged, 3% if melee.
Lv. 30: The Bole – Reduces damage taken by 10%.
Lv. 30: The Ewer – 200 potency healing over time for 15 seconds.
Lv. 92: Oracle – oGCD combo action off Divination.
Lv. 96: Helios Conjunction – Upgraded Aspected Helios.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Essential Dignity II – Three charges of Essential Dignity.
Lv. 100: Sun Sign – oGCD combo action off Neutral Sect. 10% damage mitigation for party members within 30 yalms for 15 seconds.

That may look like many changes, but it is less overwhelming than you think. Starting with the post-90 additions, Oracle is a simple damaging oGCD you press after Divination. Helios Conjunction matches Medica III’s update: no change to initial heal but an increase to the heal over time effect to 175 potency, totaling 875 potency over its entire duration. Neutral Sect gets a follow-up in Sun Sign that gives the party another 10% mitigation, which is a less exciting capstone than White Mage and Scholar’s. Even so, party mitigation is strong and always welcome.

The card rework feels intuitive. You will get three cards for each draw: one for damage, one for mitigation, and one for healing. If you want to quibble about increased healing not being a mitigation and a shield not being a heal, then fair enough, but it’s a good heuristic. There are now three play buttons – four if you count Minor Arcana – which eats up precious hotbar space. We lose Astrodyne, Redraw, and Undraw to compensate, though many Astrologian players don’t even have Undraw on their hotbar. The final result of the rework is slightly less rDPS that will probably be made up in raw potency, fewer cards to play for burst, and more utility.

Sage

Lv. 82: Eukrasian Dyskrasia – AoE damage over time effect. Augmented from Dyskrasia after pressing Eukrasia. Does not stack with Eukrasian Dosis.
Lv. 92: Psyche – Damaging oGCD. 60-second cooldown.
Lv. 96: Eukrasian Prognosis II – Upgraded Eukrasian Prognosis.
Lv. 100: Philosophia – Increase healing magic potency by 20% for 20 seconds. Grants party members in 20 yalm radius Eudaimonia, which gives a 150 potency heal every time you land a spell for 20 seconds.

Expectedly, Sage and Reaper didn’t receive any massive changes, seeing as they were the latest jobs added to the game. Having an AoE damage over time is nice, especially when it doesn’t take up more space on the hotbar. Eukrasian Prognosis II increases the shield to 360%. Psyche plays into the idea of Sage being the healer who does the most damage by doing damage. That’s all it does: no healing, not tied to anything, just damage. We get Pankardia, except it’s not called Pankardia. 20% increased healing is substantial, equal to Scholar’s Dissipation. The fact that Philosophia is duration-based and not stacked-based could mean a late weave with higher spell speed comfortably squeezes out some extra healing potency, but I don’t think that will be a factor in determining the ideal spell speed.

Melee DPS

All melee DPS receive the following:

Lv. 94: Enhanced Second Wind – Increased potency to 800.
Lv. 94: Melee Mastery – Potency upgrades to various weaponskills and abilities. Various jobs have different names for this, but the idea of the trait is the same.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Feint – Extends the duration of Feint to 15 seconds.

Monk

Lv. 64: Earth’s Reply – oGCD combo action off Riddle of Earth. Heals self and party. There are two potencies attached to Earth’s Reply: “Cure Potency: 300” and “Earth’s Resolve Potency: 500.” I did not take enough screenshots to confirm if Earth’s Resolve replaces the function of the Earth’s Reply that is currently in the game; apologies.
Lv. 92: Leaping Opo – Upgraded Bootshine.
Lv. 92: Rising Raptor – Upgraded True Strike.
Lv. 92: Pouncing Coeurl – Upgraded Snap Punch.
Lv. 92: Elixir Burst – Upgraded Elixir Field. 900 potency.
Lv. 96: Wind’s Reply – GCD combo action off Riddle of Wind. 900 potency.
Lv. 100: Fire’s Reply – GCD combo action off Riddle of Fire. Grants Formless Fist after using. 1,300 potency.

At this point, we should expect Monk to change every expansion. This rework does change the core of the job while still keeping the flow. Instead of managing a buff and damage over time debuff, you build stacks in each form with one weaponskill and spend them with another. The rate at which you switch GCDs is different while still feeling somewhat familiar. Brotherhood allows you to hold ten Chakra, which will help prevent overcapping. Keen eyes will notice this is the first entry that lists potencies. There are some implications: I’m not smart enough to math it out myself, but let’s look.

In the preview event build, opening the Lunar Nadi was stronger than opening Solar. Wind’s Reply and Fire’s Reply are very powerful, and on the GCD, it makes me wonder if setting up Perfect Balance windows earlier, like in Double Solar or Solar Lunar, will become standard. Fire’s Reply granting Formless Fist and Wind’s Reply not granting it will probably affect where the optimal placement will be. Landing Demolish under buffs is now less important, so Monks will have more flexibility when entering burst windows. I could be cooking a little too hard and be completely wrong about everything. All I know for sure is that Monk is still fast, and the most hardcore Monk players will still lock their frames to avoid Riddle of Fire drift.

Dragoon

Lv. 45: Winged Glide – Non-damaging gapcloser. Effectively replaces Spineshatter Dive.
Lv. 60: Geirskogul – Grants Life of the Dragon for 20 seconds. 60-second cooldown.
Lv. 64: Drakesbane – Upgraded Wheeling Thrust or Fang and Claw.
Lv. 68: Mirage Dive – oGCD combo action off Jump/High Jump.
Lv. 70: Nastrond – Replaces Geirskogul while in Life of the Dragon. Stack-based with two-second recast timer instead of 10-second recast.
Lv. 92: Rise of the Dragon – oGCD combo action off Dragonfire Dive.
Lv. 96: Lance Barrage – Upgraded Vorpal Thrust.
Lv. 96: Spiral Blow – Upgraded Disembowel.
Lv. 100: Starcross – oGCD combo action off Stardiver.

As stated in the 81st Live Letter and the subsequent Live Letter Digest, Dragoon did not receive the planned extensive overhaul once the developers decided on their vision for combat in 7.0. If you were a fan of Endwalker Dragoon, then I think you will be happy with this rework. The seven-part GCD combo stays intact with the last GCD before Raiden Thrust losing its positional. Dragonfire Dive, High Jump, and Stardiver now have follow-up oGCD combos. Even with the loss of Dragon Sight and Spineshatter Dive, the burst window is still relatively busy and less prone to drifting.

Life of the Dragon is still around with a few adjustments: Life only lasts 20 seconds, eyes are gone (so pressing Geirskogul immediately puts you into Life), Nastrond has three stacks instead of having a 10-second cooldown, and there’s a 15% damage increase while in Life that I don’t think is currently in the game (Note: I don’t have footage to confirm Nastrond always has three stacks, perhaps there is a condition or is tied to a trait). Players will no longer accidentally let their Life window drift because they forgot that Geirskogul will be off cooldown as soon as Life ends. They still might be tanking the floor, though.

Ninja

Lv. 26: Aeolian Edge – Increased potency when spending Kazematoi.
Lv. 45: Increase Attack Speed – Huton gauge is gone and the increased attack speed now a trait.
Lv. 45: Huton – AoE version of Suiton.
Lv. 54: Armor Crush – No longer extends Huton. Grants two stacks of Kazematoi.
Lv. 66: Dokumori – Upgraded Mug.
Lv. 92: Kunai’s Bane – Upgraded AoE Trick Attack.
Lv. 96: Deathfrog Medium – Upgraded Hellfrog Medium after using Dokumori.
Lv. 96: Zesho Meppo – Upgraded Bhavacakra after using Dokumori.
Lv. 100: Tenri Jindo – oGCD combo action off Ten Chi Jin.

Sasuke has some shiny tools beyond Chidori in this expansion. None of them should change the rotation in a meaningful way. The most noticeable change is the removal of the Huton gauge and Huraijin. Armor Crush will be generating stacks of Kazematoi instead of extending Huton, and Aeolian Edge will be spending those stacks. Ninja players, myself included, don’t play Ninja for the filler; we play for the big burst windows, so that change isn’t too impactful, aside from not needing to refill the Huton gauge after long periods of downtime. Kunai’s Bane is a nice visual upgrade to Trick Attack, and being AoE is great. A fancier spender of Ninki is a nice little bonus every two minutes. Tenri Jindo is the main attraction, and while it has a lot of potency, it isn’t as much as Hyosho Ranryu and thus won’t feel as bad when it doesn’t crit.

Samurai

Lv. 82: Tengetsu – Upgraded Third Eye. 500 potency heal after eight seconds.
Lv. 92: Gyofu – Upgraded Hakaze.
Lv. 94: Enhanced Hissatsu – Reduces Hissatsu: Guren and Hissatsu: Senei cooldown to 60 seconds.
Lv. 96: Zanshin – oGCD combo action of Ikishoten.
Lv. 100: Tendo Goken – Upgraded Tenka Goken after using Meikyo Shisui.
Lv. 100: Tendo Setsugekka – Upgraded Midare Setsugekka after using Meikyo Shisui.
Lv. 100: Tendo Kaeshi Goken – Tsubame-gaeshi combo for Tendo Goken.
Lv. 100: Tendo Kaeshi Setsugekka – Tsubame-gaeshi combo for Tendo Setsugekka.

If you have ever read or watched a Samurai guide to become sufficient at playing Samurai, you will almost certainly remain sufficient. Not being able to Tsubame-gaeshi without first pressing Meikyo Shisui feels a bit strange. It probably won’t matter much in Savage, but it might be more relevant in Ultimates, where looping isn’t a thing. Tendo Goken and Tendo Setsugekka are nice upgrades that won’t change the rotation. Zanshin being an oGCD makes it a comfy weave in burst windows. Third Eye getting an unexpected upgrade is a nice bonus. You won’t be griefing your healers quite as much if you decide to take avoidable damage to gain Kenki. You wouldn’t think about doing that, though, right? Right?

Reaper

Lv. 92: Sacrificium – oGCD that replaces Gluttony when Enshrouded.
Lv. 96: Executioner’s Gibbet – Upgraded Gibbet after using Gluttony.
Lv. 96: Executioner’s Gallows – Upgraded Gallows after using Gluttony.
Lv. 96: Executioner’s Guillotine – Upgraded Guillotine after using Gluttony.
Lv. 100: Perfectio – Ranged GCD combo action off Communio after using Plentiful Harvest.

Just like Sage, there are just a few notable changes here. Plentiful Harvest allowing a use of Enshroud instead of giving gauge is nice to prevent overcapping. I don’t think it prevents Reaper from being resource negative over two minutes – the change makes no difference to net gauge. Sacrificium is another Enshroud weave that has three potential slots to slide into. Gluttony will enhance your Gibbet and Gallows combo or Guillotine. Perfectio has a range of 25 yalms, which is ten more than Hell’s Egress or Hell’s Ingress will take you, so you will almost always be in range to cast it. I’m guessing Early Enshroud will still be the default opener over Early Gluttony. Perfectio taking up a GCD might result in rearranging double Enshroud windows to ensure both Perfectio’s land in buffs.

Viper

This is where I put my hands up and give credit to people who craft openers and rotations. I cannot, in good conscience, give you an idea of what the opener will look like or how the rotation will flow. The staff at the preview event even gave us documents to help explain the kit, but I’m still lost. If you frequent The Balance Discord server, your understanding of the job will probably be as good as mine. You will have to go elsewhere to get a comprehensive breakdown of the new job. Here’s what I can say about Viper:

You will do your 1-2-3 combo primarily with a sword in each hand. The dual sword icon indicates which combo route you should pick with separate routes providing one of two buffs: Swiftscaled (15% attack speed) or Hunter’s Instinct (10% damage increase). You have an alternative combo starter to your 1-2-3 that applies Noxious Gnash: a debuff on the target, which increases your damage against said target by 10% at the cost of less damage. A separate combo chain will apply both buffs and the debuff called Dreadwinder. Dreadwinder has two stacks and a 40-second cooldown.

The red gems below the dual sword icon are your Vipersight gauge, which allows you to use a ranged combo. The blue gauge is called either Serpents Offering or Serpents Ire – I am not sure which it should be called as both were referenced, and I may be misunderstanding it. This will allow you to use your big burst, called Reawaken, where your GCD recast timer speeds up, and you do some hefty damage. I don’t believe it’s a fixed speed – with our preview gear that provided 952 skill speed, the GCD recast after receiving the Swiftscaled buff was 2.07. The Reawaken GCD recast was 1.65 seconds, approximately 20% more haste after the 15% buff. Or, perhaps the dev team decided they always want the GCD to be 1.65 seconds while you are Reawakened.

Viper feels like a mix of Samurai, Reaper, Gunbreaker, and Monk. Samurai in the sense that it doesn’t have a raid buff, and you’re maintaining two buffs that you won’t ever need to think about during optimal play – they should just naturally refresh and aren’t in any danger of falling off. Reaper in the sense that you’re maintaining a debuff on your target, and the Reawaken window feels very similar to the Enshroud window. Gunbreaker in the sense that there are lots of oGCD weaves. And Monk in the sense you feel like you’re playing fast. Is it bad that Viper feels like a mix of all these jobs? If it takes four, I think it stands out enough to have its own identity. There are lots of contextual combo choices that, at face value, make it seem engaging. High-end raiders don’t know what that means; we only know the optimal choice.

Physical Ranged DPS

All physical ranged DPS receive the following:

Lv. 94: Enhanced Second Wind – Increased potency to 800.
Lv. 94: Ranged/Marksman’s Mastery, Dynamic Dancer – Potency upgrades to various weaponskills and abilities.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Troubadour/Tactician/Shield Samba – Increase damage mitigation to 15%.

Bard

Lv. 30: Mage’s Ballad – No longer requires a target to use. Must be in combat.
Lv. 40: Army’s Paeon – No longer requires a target to use. Must be in combat.
Lv. 52: The Wanderer’s Minuet – No longer requires a target to use. Must be in combat.
Lv 92: Heartbreak Shot – Upgraded Bloodletter. 160 potency.
Lv. 96: Resonant Arrow – GCD combo action off Barrage.
Lv. 100: Radiant Encore – GCD combo action off Radiant Finale. Does damage based on the number of Coda used in Radiant Finale.

Bard mains are rejoicing around the world now that their songs no longer require a target. While finessing your rotation to account for downtime might have been fun optimization for some, I think many more would much rather have the ability to use downtime to cycle your songs. I can only imagine what the backstage must have looked like when planning songs during Trio mechanics in Endwalker and all the previous expansions. We have another featured potency, and for good reason. In Endwalker, Army’s Paeon was only slightly better than Mage’s Ballad, so with the addition of Heartbreak Shot, perhaps the song order will change to accommodate. Someone else will have to do the math to confirm, though. Bard’s more priority-based rotation means slotting in Resonant Arrow and Radiant Encore should be straightforward.

Machinist

Lv. 92: Double Check – Upgraded Gauss Round. Now AoE.
Lv. 92: Checkmate – Upgraded Richochet. Still AoE.
Lv. 94: Enhanced Multiweapon – Two charges of Drill or Bioblaster.
Lv. 96: Excavator – GCD combo action off Chain Saw. Increases Battery Gauge by 20.
Lv. 100: Full Metal Field – GCD combo action off Barrel Stabilizer. Guaranteed critical direct hit.

Machinists get some really neat tools. Heh. Double Check and Checkmate are nice upgrades, mostly for improved visuals that will make Hypercharge windows more fun to look at. Full Metal Field is a sweet-looking ability, and not having to spend a Reassemble on it is great. Two charges of Drill and the addition of Excavator could shake up the opener a bit. You could still opt for the Delayed Tools opener and save Excavator, Full Metal Field, and the extra Drill for after Hypercharge. However, waiting for more qualified individuals to speak on that matter is a good idea. The Heat and Battery economy has changed, which will be reflected in Queen timings. In full uptime, you’re sending Queen at 80-100 Battery and using Hypercharges to delay Battery generation, if needed. In Dawntrail, you will have 40 more battery from Excavator every two minutes and three less Heat generating GCDs due to Excavator and Full Metal Field. Maybe we will see 100 Battery Queens every minute now?

Dancer

Lv. 92: Last Dance – New GCD. Can only be used after Standard Finish or Finishing Move.
Lv. 96: Finishing Move – Upgraded Standard Step after using Flourish.
Lv. 100: Dance of the Dawn – Upgraded Saber dance after using Technical Finish.

Despite its reputation for being the easiest job to play amongst the physical ranged DPS, Dancer has a lot of abilities to cram into burst windows. Thankfully, the new additions are all GCDs, so you won’t have to manage any more weaves on top of all your feathers. Last Dance is a simple follow-up to Standard Finish without any frills. Flourish changes Standard Step to Finishing Move, which removes the need to do any steps before using. I did not test if you could Standard Finish, pop Flourish, and then Finishing Move, but I would imagine Standard Step and Finishing Move share a recast timer – if they didn’t, that’d be awesome. Dance of the Dawn is effectively a buffed Saber Dance every two minutes that still costs 50 Espirit – again, nice and straightforward additions.

Magical Ranged DPS

All magical ranged DPS receive the following:

Lv. 94: Enhanced Swiftcast – Reduces the cooldown of Swiftcast to 40 seconds.
Lv. 94: Arcane/Enchanted Blade/Pictomancy Mastery – Potency upgrades to various spells and abilities (Black Mage’s equivalent, Enhanced Enochian is at Lv. 96).
Lv. 98: Enhanced Addle – Extends the duration of Addle to 15 seconds.

Black Mage

Lv. 90: Paradox – Always grants Firestarter. Only available when swapping from ice to fire or from Manafont.
Lv. 92: High Thunder – Upgraded Thunder III. Can only be used while under the effect of Thunderhead.
Lv 92: High Thunder II – Upgraded Thunder IV. Can only be used while under the effect of Thunderhead.
Lv. 96: Retrace – Moves Leylines to your current location.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Polyglot II – Three stacks of Polyglot.
Lv. 100: Flare Star – New GCD. Can only be used with six stacks of Astral Soul.

There’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s start with the simple changes: Leylines is moveable with Retrace, Polyglot now stacks up to three, Flare Star is the new “finisher” after filling the Astral Gauge. Swapping to ice will reset the Astral gauge. Manafont will grant full mana, Paradox, and three Umbral Hearts. Sharpcast is gone, and to compensate, you will be given a Thunderhead (functions the same as Thundercloud) proc every time you swap from ice to fire, vice versa, or from unaspected to either. Your Thunder spells can only be cast with that proc. Also, Paradox will always give you a Firestarter proc, but you only get Paradox when swapping from ice to fire. If I understand correctly, Black Mage will have more instant casts to use for movement with less flexibility on when you receive them.

I’ve only ever played standard line Black Mage, and even I know the Black Mage iceberg goes deep. There is one very impactful change here that will affect non-standard lines. We learned in the Live Letter that mana regeneration will now be based on spells casted while in ice. Only ice-based spells will trigger the increased mana regen, and the amount of mana restored is based on how many stacks of Umbral Ice you have. Three stacks of Umbral Ice will restore 10,000 mana, and one stack of Umbral Ice will restore 2,500 mana. I did not test how much mana is restored with two stacks of Umbral Ice; apologies. In an optimal scenario, your ice phase will now be Blizzard III, then Blizzard IV, and then you’re done.

Seasoned Black Mage players will need to confirm, but I see transpose lines losing a lot of relative value. Transposing to ice gives you one stack of Umbral Ice, which will make your ice phase extra painful as you can’t wait for mana ticks. Umbral Soul will restore mana based on how many stacks of Umbral Ice you have, so maybe there’s something to investigate there. Transposing back to fire will not grant Paradox, which is how it works in Endwalker, but now you will lose your only chance at Paradox if Manafont isn’t off cooldown. The opportunity cost of transposing is more significant – especially since the ice phase of the standard line will now just be two spells, though this doesn’t mean it can’t work in some lines.

There could be some fun optimization in this new version of Black Mage. I don’t play the job enough to know what that might look like, but I remain hopeful that the job will still be fun. The doomposting has already begun, and I don’t think there’s any stopping it. Maybe I’m crazy, but I have a good feeling about this one.

Summoner

Lv. 92: Necrotize – Upgraded Fester.
Lv. 96: Searing Flash – oGCD combo action off Searing Light.
Lv. 100: Summon Solar Bahamut – Summons Solar Bahamut.
Lv. 100: Umbral Impulse – Replaces Ruin III while Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100 Umbral Flare – Replaces Tri-disaster while Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100: Sunflare – Replaces Astral Flow when Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100: Enkindle Solar Bahamut – Orders Solar Bahamut to execute Exodus.
Lv. 100: Lux Solaris – New oGCD. Heals party members within 15 yalms for 500 potency. Can only be used after summing Solar Bahamut.

Despite having a decent number of new abilities written out, Summoner hasn’t changed very much. Necrotize replaces Fester, and Searing Flash will help you do a little more damage every two minutes after pressing Searing Light. Solar Bahamut is a cool addition, though many people aren’t too thrilled, given the number of other Primals in the game. It doesn’t change anything about the rotation, but there is a new oGCD that gives a heal to the party every Solar Bahamut summon, which is a nice bit of utility. Solar Bahamut is your first summon and should be in your burst every two minutes, with Bahamut and Phoenix alternating the odd-minute windows. Demi-summons were untouched, aside from some potency upgrades.

Red Mage

Lv. 92: Vice of Thorns – oGCD combo action off Embolden.
Lv. 96: Grand Impact – Upgraded Jolt/Impact after using Acceleration.
Lv. 100: Cineration – oGCD combo action off Manafication. Granted after consuming all stacks of Manafication.

Red Mages didn’t get a new finisher. Vice of Thorns and Cineration are oGCDs that will most likely slot between the current finishers instead of extending your melee combo. Manafication granting a use of your melee combo instead of giving Black and White Mana is nice, although it still cancels your combo. Acceleration being used on Jolt or Impact instead of Veraero or Verthunder will be different. That does mean fewer procs of Verstone and Verfire, but I do not know if that will affect your Black and White Mana generation in a meaningful way. Even though it’s already possible, it might be easier to prevent your Fleche and Contre Sixte from drifting with the reduced Swiftcast cooldown.

Pictomancer

Pictomaner

For our grand finale, I will refrain from going too in-depth again. I spent more time on Viper than Pictomancer, so my limited understanding of the new jobs might be even more apparent here. Your favorite content creator or The Balance will certainly have more to say, but here’s what I learned:

Pictomancer has two systems to manage: Palette Gauge and Canvas. The Palette Gauge is filled by the finisher in your 1-2-3 combo and grants you one stack of White Paint, which you can use on your default spender: Holy in White. Once you have 50 gauge, you can use Subtractive Palette to spend the gauge, which upgrades your 1-2-3. After a certain level, Subtractive Palette will also convert one stack of White Paint to Black Paint, which is used on the Black Paint spender: Comet in Black.

The Canvas holds three motifs: Creature, Weapon, and Landscape. These motifs operate on a 40 second cooldown with three stacks, a 60-second cooldown, and a two-minute cooldown, respectively. Landscape holds your raid buff, Starry Muse, an area of effect in which you and party members must stand to receive the buffs. These buffs include a 5% damage increase for the whole party, reduced cast times for only the Pictomancer, and augmentation of certain Pictomaner spells. You receive many buffs whose effects weren’t directly stated in this preview build, so I may be missing something.

The Weapon Canvas holds Weapon motifs, providing an instant-cast ranged combo where each step is a guaranteed critical direct hit. You can slot four motifs into the Creature Canvas, and rendering them to life will deal damage. Every two Motifs rendered will create a Depiction, either a Moogle or a Madeen, that will execute their attack when brought to life.

I struggle to think of a job in the game comparable to Pictomancer. While it is unique, it does take up a caster slot without providing a raise, which might make it less attractive in a progression setting for some groups. Running double caster is always an option; there have been very, very few encounters in the game that require groups to run double melee, if any. If your group is having trouble with damage deep into progression, it is probably a skill issue – and by skill issue, I mean you’re not critting enough.

7 advanced persistent threats (APTs) to know about right now – CyberTalk

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

An unseen adversary could stealthily lurk within your networks for months or even years. Methodically reconnoitering, establishing footholds, mapping out critical assets – this is the modus operandi of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

These sophisticated, well-resourced actors don’t just strike and disappear. Rather, they entrench themselves within systems while obfuscating their presence as they move towards their ultimate objective; a devastating cyber attack. By the time that a given organization detects an APT, the damage might have already been done.

Believe it or not, 80% of organizations have contended with downtime due to APT incidents.

Develop a stronger understanding of the APT landscape and the adversaries that are targeting your industry. Beyond that, learn about mitigation techniques that can strengthen your security and fortify your resilience capabilities. Get the details below.

7 advanced persistent threats to know about right now

1. The US-CERT has released a technical alert regarding two malware strains; Joanap and Brambul, deployed by the North Korean APT group known as Hidden Cobra.

The alert, issued in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), explains that Hidden Cobra has been using these malware variants since at least 2009. Targets have included organizations in the media, aerospace, finance and critical infrastructure space.

Joanap is a remote access trojan (RAT) that allows Hidden Cobra operatives to remotely issue commands to infected systems via a command and control server. It usually infiltrates systems as a payload dropped by other Hidden Cobra malware, which people inadvertently download through compromised ads or attachments.

In contrast, Brambul is a brute-force authentication worm that propagates through SMB shares by using a list of hard-coded login credentials to perform password attacks; thereby gaining access to victims’ networks.

To mitigate the risks associated with these threats, US-CERT advises organizations to keep systems updated with the latest patches and antivirus software, to enforce the principle of least privilege for user permissions and to deploy effective email security software that can scan and block suspicious attachments.

In addition, disabling Microsoft’s File and Printer Sharing connection requests can prevent this type of malware from spreading within networks.

2. A new advanced persistent threat group, dubbed LilacSquid, engages in data exfiltration attacks across various industry sectors in both the U.S. and the E.U. The tactics employed by the threat group are similar to those of the North Korean threat group known as Andariel, a sub-cluster of the Lazarus group.

LilacSquid’s initial compromise methods include exploitation of known vulnerabilities in internet-facing application servers and use of stolen RDP credentials. After infiltrating a system, LilacSquid leverages a series of open-source tools, including MeshAgent, which allows for remote management, and InkLoader, which allows for decrypting and loading malicious content.

To mitigate the threat posed by LilacSquid, organizations are advised to focus on ensuring that software systems are up-to-date with the latest security patches. It is also suggested that organizations implement strong password policies and multi-factor authentication. Further, organizations should monitor network traffic and deploy advanced threat detection tools.

3. In Southeast Asia, a trio of state-aligned threat actors are executing Operation Crimson Palace, which is currently impacting a high-profile government group. Attackers have exfiltrated sensitive military and political secrets, including strategic documents related to the contested South China Sea.

The operation weaponizes advanced malware tools, involves over 15 DLL sideloading efforts, and innovative evasion techniques.

The operation’s first phase, in March of 2022, involved the deployment of the “Nupakage” data exfiltration tool by Mustang Panda. This was followed by covert backdoor deployments in December of that year. In early 2023, the main campaign began.

To mitigate this type of threat, organizations may wish to implement comprehensive cyber security measures. These include robust network segmentation, regular system updates and advanced threat protection systems that can identify novel malware and backdoor techniques. Also, consider investing in security solutions that use AI.

4. To infiltrate European diplomatic agencies, nation-state backed hackers (attribution unclear) have recently leveraged two new backdoors, known as LunarWeb and LunarMail. The hackers breached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs belonging to an undisclosed European country – one with diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

The attack chain initiates with spear-phishing emails that contain Word documents embedded with malicious macros, which deploy the LunarMail backdoor. This backdoor establishes persistence by creating an Outlook add-in, which activates anytime that the email client is launched.

The attack also exploits misconfigured Zabbix network monitoring tools to deliver the LunarWeb payload. LunarWeb persists by masquerading as legitimate traffic, utilizing techniques such as the creation of Group Policy extensions, replacing system DDLs, and embedding in legitimate software. Both backdoors are decrypted and activated by a component named ‘LunarLoader’ using RC4 and AES-256 ciphers, ensuring that they run exclusively within the targeted environment.

To prevent these types of threats, organizations should install robust email security protocols. Using advanced threat prevention and detection systems is also a must when it comes to enhancing APT resilience.

5. State-backed hacking group APT24 has recently employed advanced social engineering approaches to disrupt networks and to access cloud data across a variety of sectors. The group targets organizations in Western and Middle Eastern NGOs, media organizations, academia, legal services and activists.

The group’s tactics involve posing as journalists and event organizers. This strategy enables APT42 to harvest credentials and gain initial access to cloud environments, from which the group can exfiltrate attractive data.

To counteract these types of threats, take the time to learn about the latest social engineering tactics. Threat intelligence can also enhance an organization’s abilities to contend with such sophisticated campaigns.

6. The advanced persistent threat (APT) operation known as HellHounds has been deploying the Windows version of Decoy Dog malware against telecommunications, IT, government and space industry entities across Russia. At least 48 different organizations have been affected thus far.

To maintain a presence within Russian organizations and to evade malware defenses, the HellHounds group has modified open-source tools. The HellHounds toolkit, though primarily based on open-source projects, has been optimized to ensure prolonged covert operations within compromised environments.

To mitigate this threat, organizations are advised to implement robust multi-factor authentication, regularly update and patch systems, and to employ advanced threat prevention and defense solutions.

7. APT28 is targeting European networks using HeadLace malware and credential harvesting techniques. Operating with stealth, APT28 employes legitimate internet service (LIS) and living off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) to hide their malicious activities within the stream of regular network traffic, significantly complicating detection efforts.

To mitigate the threat, cyber security professionals are advised to block spear phishing attempts, implement comprehensive email security services, and apply multi-factor authentication.

For more insights into the latest malware threats, please see CyberTalk.org’s past coverage. Lastly, to receive cyber security thought leadership articles, groundbreaking research and emerging threat analyses each week, subscribe to the CyberTalk.org newsletter.

The unexpected origins of a modern finance tool

In the early 1600s, the officials running Durham Cathedral, in England, had serious financial problems. Soaring prices had raised expenses. Most cathedral income came from renting land to tenant farmers, who had long leases so officials could not easily raise the rent. Instead, church leaders started charging periodic fees, but these often made tenants furious. And the 1600s, a time of religious schism, was not the moment to alienate church members.

But in 1626, Durham officials found a formula for fees that tenants would accept. If tenant farmers paid a fee equal to one year’s net value of the land, it earned them a seven-year lease. A fee equal to 7.75 years of net value earned a 21-year lease.

This was a form of discounting, the now-common technique for evaluating the present and future value of money by assuming a certain rate of return on that money. The Durham officials likely got their numbers from new books of discounting tables. Volumes like this had never existed before, but suddenly local church officials were applying the technique up and down England.

As financial innovation stories go, this one is unusual. Normally, avant-garde financial tools might come from, well, the financial avant-garde — bankers, merchants, and investors hunting for short-term profits, not clergymen.

“Most people have assumed these very sophisticated calculations would have been implemented by hard-nosed capitalists, because really powerful calculations would allow you to get an economic edge and increase profits,” says MIT historian William Deringer, an expert in the deployment of quantitative reasoning in public life. “But that was not the primary or only driver in this situation.”

Deringer has published a new research article about this episode, “Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside,” appearing in the current issue of the Journal of Modern History. In it, he uses archival research to explore how the English clergy started using discounting, and where. And one other question: Why?

Enter inflation

Today, discounting is a pervasive tool. A dollar in the present is worth more than a dollar a decade from now, since one can earn money investing it in the meantime. This concept heavily informs investment markets, corporate finance, and even the NFL draft (where trading this year’s picks yields a greater haul of future picks). As the historian William N. Goetzmann has written, the related idea of net present value “is the most important tool in modern finance.” But while discounting was known as far back as the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (often called Fibonacci) in the 1200s, why were English clergy some of its most enthusiastic early adopters?

The answer involves a global change in the 1500s: the “price revolution,” in which things began costing more, after a long period when prices had been constant. That is, inflation hit the world.

“People up to that point lived with the expectation that prices would stay the same,” Deringer says. “The idea that prices changed in a systematic way was shocking.”

For Durham Cathedral, inflation meant the organization had to pay more for goods while three-quarters of its revenues came from tenant rents, which were hard to alter. Many leases were complex, and some were locked in for a tenant’s lifetime. The Durham leaders did levy intermittent fees on tenants, but that led to angry responses and court cases.

Meanwhile, tenants had additional leverage against the Church of England: religious competition following the Reformation. England’s political and religious schisms would lead it to a midcentury civil war. Maybe some private landholders could drastically increase fees, but the church did not want to lose followers that way.

“Some individual landowners could be ruthlessly economic, but the church couldn’t, because it’s in the midst of incredible political and religious turmoil after the Reformation,” Deringer says. “The Church of England is in this precarious position. They’re walking a line between Catholics who don’t think there should have been a Reformation, and Puritans who don’t think there should be bishops. If they’re perceived to be hurting their flock, it would have real consequences. The church is trying to make the finances work but in a way that’s just barely tolerable to the tenants.”

Enter the books of discounting tables, which allowed local church leaders to finesse the finances. Essentially, discounting more carefully calibrated the upfront fees tenants would periodically pay. Church leaders could simply plug in the numbers as compromise solutions.

In this period, England’s first prominent discounting book with tables was published in 1613; its most enduring, Ambrose Acroyd’s “Table of Leasses and Interest,” dated to 1628-29. Acroyd was the bursar at Trinity College at Cambridge University, which as a landholder (and church-affiliated institution) faced the same issues concerning inflation and rent. Durham Cathedral began using off-the-shelf discounting formulas in 1626, resolving decades of localized disagreement as well.

Performing fairness

The discounting tables from books did not only work because the price was right. Once circulating clergy had popularized the notion throughout England, local leaders could justify using the books because others were doing it. The clergy were “performing fairness,” as Deringer puts it.

“Strict calculative rules assured tenants and courts that fines were reasonable, limiting landlords’ ability to maximize revenues,” Deringer writes in the new article.

To be sure, local church leaders in England were using discounting for their own economic self-interest. It just wasn’t the largest short-term economic self-interest possible. And it was a sound strategy.

“In Durham they would fight with tenants every 20 years [in the 1500s] and come to a new deal, but eventually that evolves into these sophisticated mechanisms, the discounting tables,” Deringer adds. “And you get standardization. By about 1700, it seems like these procedures are used everywhere.”

Thus, as Deringer writes, “mathematical tables for setting fines were not so much instruments of a capitalist transformation as the linchpin holding together what remained of an older system of customary obligations stretched nearly to breaking by macroeconomic forces.”

Once discounting was widely introduced, it never went away. Deringer’s Journal of Modern History article is part of a larger book project he is currently pursuing, about discounting in many facets of modern life.

Deringer was able to piece together the history of discounting in 17th-century England thanks in part to archival clues. For instance, Durham University owns a 1686 discounting book self-described as an update to Acroyd’s work; that copy was owned by a Durham Cathedral administrator in the 1700s. Of the 11 existing copies of Acroyd’s work, two are at Canterbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral.

Hints like that helped Deringer recognize that church leaders were very interested in discounting; his further research helped him see that this chapter in the history of discounting is not merely about finance; it also opens a new window into the turbulent 1600s.

“I never expected to be researching church finances, I didn’t expect it to have anything to do with the countryside, landlord-tenant relationships, and tenant law,” Deringer says. “I was seeing this as an interesting example of a story about bottom-line economic calculation, and it wound up being more about this effort to use calculation to resolve social tensions.”

Exotic black holes could be a byproduct of dark matter

For every kilogram of matter that we can see — from the computer on your desk to distant stars and galaxies — there are 5 kilograms of invisible matter that suffuse our surroundings. This “dark matter” is a mysterious entity that evades all forms of direct observation yet makes its presence felt through its invisible pull on visible objects.

Fifty years ago, physicist Stephen Hawking offered one idea for what dark matter might be: a population of black holes, which might have formed very soon after the Big Bang. Such “primordial” black holes would not have been the goliaths that we detect today, but rather microscopic regions of ultradense matter that would have formed in the first quintillionth of a second following the Big Bang and then collapsed and scattered across the cosmos, tugging on surrounding space-time in ways that could explain the dark matter that we know today.

Now, MIT physicists have found that this primordial process also would have produced some unexpected companions: even smaller black holes with unprecedented amounts of a nuclear-physics property known as “color charge.”

These smallest, “super-charged” black holes would have been an entirely new state of matter, which likely evaporated a fraction of a second after they spawned. Yet they could still have influenced a key cosmological transition: the time when the first atomic nuclei were forged. The physicists postulate that the color-charged black holes could have affected the balance of fusing nuclei, in a way that astronomers might someday detect with future measurements. Such an observation would point convincingly to primordial black holes as the root of all dark matter today.

“Even though these short-lived, exotic creatures are not around today, they could have affected cosmic history in ways that could show up in subtle signals today,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. “Within the idea that all dark matter could be accounted for by black holes, this gives us new things to look for.”

Kaiser and his co-author, MIT graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve, have published their study today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A time before stars

The black holes that we know and detect today are the product of stellar collapse, when the center of a massive star caves in on itself to form a region so dense that it can bend space-time such that anything — even light — gets trapped within. Such “astrophysical” black holes can be anywhere from a few times as massive as the sun to many billions of times more massive.

“Primordial” black holes, in contrast, can be much smaller and are thought to have formed in a time before stars. Before the universe had even cooked up the basic elements, let alone stars, scientists believe that pockets of ultradense, primordial matter could have accumulated and collapsed to form microscopic black holes that could have been so dense as to squeeze the mass of an asteroid into a region as small as a single atom. The gravitational pull from these tiny, invisible objects scattered throughout the universe could explain all the dark matter that we can’t see today.

If that were the case, then what would these primordial black holes have been made from? That’s the question Kaiser and Alonso-Monsalve took on with their new study.

“People have studied what the distribution of black hole masses would be during this early-universe production but never tied it to what kinds of stuff would have fallen into those black holes at the time when they were forming,” Kaiser explains.

Super-charged rhinos

The MIT physicists looked first through existing theories for the likely distribution of black hole masses as they were first forming in the early universe.

“Our realization was, there’s a direct correlation between when a primordial black hole forms and what mass it forms with,” Alonso-Monsalve says. “And that window of time is absurdly early.”

She and Kaiser calculated that primordial black holes must have formed within the first quintillionth of a second following the Big Bang. This flash of time would have produced “typical” microscopic black holes that were as massive as an asteroid and as small as an atom. It would have also yielded a small fraction of exponentially smaller black holes, with the mass of a rhino and a size much smaller than a single proton.

What would these primordial black holes have been made from? For that, they looked to studies exploring the composition of the early universe, and specifically, to the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) — the study of how quarks and gluons interact.

Quarks and gluons are the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons — elementary particles that combined to forge the basic elements of the periodic table. Immediately following the Big Bang, physicists estimate, based on QCD, that the universe was an immensely hot plasma of quarks and gluons that then quickly cooled and combined to produce protons and neutrons.

The researchers found that, within the first quintillionth of a second, the universe would still have been a soup of free quarks and gluons that had yet to combine. Any black holes that formed in this time would have swallowed up the untethered particles, along with an exotic property known as “color charge” — a state of charge that only uncombined quarks and gluons carry.

“Once we figured out that these black holes form in a quark-gluon plasma, the most important thing we had to figure out was, how much color charge is contained in the blob of matter that will end up in a primordial black hole?” Alonso-Monsalve says.

Using QCD theory, they worked out the distribution of color charge that should have existed throughout the hot, early plasma. Then they compared that to the size of a region that would collapse to form a black hole in the first quintillionth of a second. It turns out there wouldn’t have been much color charge in most typical black holes at the time, as they would have formed by absorbing a huge number of regions that had a mix of charges, which would have ultimately added up to a “neutral” charge.

But the smallest black holes would have been packed with color charge. In fact, they would have contained the maximum amount of any type of charge allowed for a black hole, according to the fundamental laws of physics. Whereas such “extremal” black holes have been hypothesized for decades, until now no one had discovered a realistic process by which such oddities actually could have formed in our universe.

The super-charged black holes would have quickly evaporated, but possibly only after the time when the first atomic nuclei began to form. Scientists estimate that this process started around one second after the Big Bang, which would have given extremal black holes plenty of time to disrupt the equilibrium conditions that would have prevailed when the first nuclei began to form. Such disturbances could potentially affect how those earliest nuclei formed, in ways that might some day be observed.

“These objects might have left some exciting observational imprints,” Alonso-Monsalve muses. “They could have changed the balance of this versus that, and that’s the kind of thing that one can begin to wonder about.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy. Alonso-Monsalve is also supported by a fellowship from the MIT Department of Physics.