The Halls of Testing

A practice hall where nothing you do counts. Try a full gear set on, bind a spirit to your weapon, and then pull a lever and fight something that is exactly your own size — without spending a single drop, a single sigil, or a single hour of grinding first.

It exists so you can find out what a build becomes before you commit to it.

Nothing you make here leaves with meaning

The gear the quartermaster hands out is real gear and works exactly like the real thing — but the practice goblins award no experience, no loot and no place on the kill board. The hall is a place to measure, not to farm. Nothing you build here leaves the hall, and neither do you: a test character is returned here every time it logs in or dies.

The hub

You arrive in the central chamber. Everything that hands things out is here, so you can gear up without walking anywhere.

Vell, Quartermaster	Full six-piece gear sets, any set in the game
Emrin Vosk, Spiritwright	Binds spirits to weapons
Combat dummies	Hit one to measure damage, DPS and attacks per round. Click a dummy to reset its counters between tests — for example before and after equipping a set.
Training merchant	The existing shop

Four fighting rooms open off the hub. Each one has its own arena lever and its own rest brazier, and each runs independently — a wave you start in one room will not be disturbed by someone pulling a lever in another.

The Armoury

Vell fits you a complete six-piece set of anything in the game, on request and as often as you like.

• Class sets — all ten: Bloodfury, Stalwart, Armor of Divinity, Wildheart, Deadfall, Nightshade, Iron Lotus, Sunwarden, Astralweave, Dragonsoul.
• Ability sets — Titan's, Zephyr's, Ironheart, Archivist's, Oracle's, Sovereign's.
• The Aegis — the armour-class set.

He will also take it all back, destroying every set piece you are carrying or wearing, so you can swap without your pack filling up.

Things worth knowing

• A set counts what you have equipped, not what you are carrying. Two pieces wakes it up; five has it at full strength.
• A class set needs 15 levels in its own class before it grants anything. Vell tells you outright if you are short, rather than letting you wear six pieces and wonder why nothing happened.
• Every piece rolls its properties through the same functions the drop tables use. The set bonus is fixed; everything else is luck, so the same set twice is not the same rack twice.

See Gear Sets for what each set actually does.

The Spirit Forge

Emrin Vosk binds a spirit to a melee weapon — or to a pair of gloves — and can push it up the ranks that would otherwise take you thousands of kills.

• Bind a spirit — choose from all eleven: Cairnbreaker, Cinderbrand, Skysunder, Hallowmaul, Blightmaw, Dawnpeal, Threadcutter, Graveblade, Bramblebind, Rimeshroud, Prismrend.
• Push its rank — to 18, 30, 45 or the maximum of 57.
• Socket an element — any of the eleven damage types, one to a socket, six sockets to a weapon.
• Wipe it back to a blank, and remove the soulbinding with it.
• Take a blank off the rack — a blade, or a blank pair of gloves.

He works on whatever is in your main hand first, then your off hand, and then your arms slot — so a monk with empty hands gets their gloves worked on, and a monk carrying a sword gets the sword.

Before you hand him your sword

The binding is permanent, and it overwrites the blade's name

Emrin can wipe a spirit weapon back to a blank and unbind it. What he cannot do is give back the name the weapon arrived with — the binding writes over it and there is nothing underneath to read.

If the weapon means something to you, ask him for a blank blade off the rack instead and leave yours in your pack.

• Melee weapons and gloves only. A bow or a thrown weapon cannot carry a spirit, and neither can bracers — there is nowhere on a pair of bracers for an attack or damage bonus to sit.
• It goes soulbound — you cannot drop or sell it until Emrin unbinds it.
• He will refuse a gear-set piece, or anything with gems socketed into it. The binding would overwrite exactly what makes those what they are.
• Existing enchantment stays on the blade. Emrin lays the spirit's work on top rather than scraping the weapon first — so a converted +5 sword measures as both together. For a clean reading of what the spirit alone is worth, use a blank.

Gloves work differently

A pair of spirit gloves runs the same ranks, sockets, spirits and strike as a blade. Three things change:

• The enhancement track pays out as attack and bludgeoning damage instead, because gloves cannot hold an enhancement bonus.
• There is no keen edge; rank 12 gives a further point of attack in its place.
• Bludgeoning cannot be socketed into gloves. That damage type is already where the enhancement went, and the socket would replace it rather than add to it. Emrin will refuse, and say why.

They also only answer while your hands are empty — draw anything and they go quiet, which is worth remembering before you wonder why the dummies are reading low.

Socket before you buy ranks

A rank-up improves one thing at random: the enhancement bonus, or one element you already have socketed. A weapon with no sockets has nowhere to put a rank except enhancement — so seat your elements first, then buy the ranks.

A spirit weapon does not fire its attack at all until rank 18.

The fighting rooms

There are four, each with a lever and a brazier. Pull the lever and four to six goblins appear in that room, levelled to match you.

They are not CR 3 goblins with a bigger number attached. Each one is given real hit dice up to your own level, then has its attack bonus, armour class, hit points, damage and saving throws set to the band its role calls for:

	Attack	Armour	Hit points	Damage
Warrior	High	Standard	Standard	Low
Archer	High	Low	Low	Low
Shaman	Low	Standard	Low	Low
Chieftain (one per wave)	High	High	Standard	Standard

Damage sits low across the board on purpose. You fight these four to six at a time, so what matters is what the room hits for, not what one goblin hits for — a single step up on the damage band is that step multiplied by every goblin and every one of their attacks. The difference between the roles is carried by how often they hit you, how hard they are to hit, and how long they take to put down.

Real hit dice matter more than they sound: a creature left at its blueprint level goes down to a first-level Sleep no matter how much health it has been given. These do not.

• Each pull clears the last wave first — but only in that room, so leftovers never pile up and you never wipe someone else's fight. That is also how you get rid of a wave you are done with: pull the lever again.
• They cannot leave their room. Stray too far from where the wave formed and a goblin is removed on the spot, so you can walk away from a fight you no longer want. A wave left standing in an empty room clears itself after about ten minutes — never while anyone is in the room with it, and never mid-fight.
• There is a short cooldown between pulls. The handle stays thrown for as long as it lasts and springs back up when the lever is ready again.
• No experience, no loot, no corpses, and no credit on the kill board. A wave matched to your own level would otherwise be the best experience and the best loot in the game from one lever indoors — and the kill board is server-wide, so it is the one thing here that would be seen outside.
• They do feed a spirit weapon. That is the exception, because a spirit weapon cannot leave either: it is soulbound to the character that bound it, and that character never leaves the hall. Bind one at the forge and you can grow it the honest way to see how a rank actually feels, shapeshifted or not, instead of only buying ranks outright.

The rest brazier

Every fighting room has one. Use it and you come straight back to full — hit points, spells, feat uses, special abilities and item charges.

It is not a rest: there is no animation, no waiting, and no cooldown. Pull, fight, rest, change one thing, pull again. That is the loop the room exists for.

Why a wave and not one target

The dummies already measure single-target damage. What they cannot show you is anything shaped — cleaves, a spirit weapon's scattered impacts, chains, and lingering clouds. Four to six bodies is the smallest group those read against properly.