You audited my audit. Here is everything you caught, recounted.

I published the prestige piece - https://app.warera.io/article/6a843cc395022a9311a2f467 - and within the hour the comment section was doing to my numbers exactly what I had done to the game's. I have never been happier to be shot at.

This article is the errata sheet and the answers, in one place. Read the original with these numbers in hand and it all still holds three figures just got sharper.

Three of you were right. One of you asked the best question in this whole debate. And one number none of you asked for turned out to be the most interesting thing in the patch.

Everything below is recomputed and pinned in the same public artifacts as the piece itself.

Correction one: the login calendar. You were right.

https://app.warera.io/user/69e2b4ea75d82ea9ba19623d , https://app.warera.io/user/6990e15f0beef0f0c5c33899 and https://app.warera.io/user/686176844d05d7380240ca7b all pointed at the same hole: the new daily reward calendar pays +10 XP a day on top of the missions, 70 a week.

Confirmed. It is real, it resets at UTC midnight like everything else, and the article did not count it. Every clock moves:

the repeatable ceiling: 2,000 a week becomes 2,070 a week (295.71 a day) - fastest possible level 50: 298.9 days becomes 288.8 days - full-bank prestige cycle: 227.5 days becomes 219.8 days (31.4 weeks) - jump-on-sight first cycle: 151.7 days becomes 146.5 days (20.9 weeks)

https://app.warera.io/user/686176844d05d7380240ca7b worked the cycles out in the comments: 31.4 weeks banking, 20.9 jumping. I reran both against the full model. Correct to the decimal. That is the audit working, and I will take it every time.

One thing the correction does NOT touch: the calendar XP is NEW as of the v0.25.2 patch.

Correction two: my own closing paragraph. I was wrong.

The final section of the piece said "jump if you want the account you will have next year". That sentence survived from an earlier draft whose damage math was off by an order of magnitude, and it contradicts Part III of the same article. If your account fights, the answer is bank, and the closing line should have said so. My mistake, nobody else's.

The best question in the thread

https://app.warera.io/user/6975ccf9fa12e6923832d799 asked: going 50 to 47 costs far fewer skill points than 47 to 43 - so is there a point where prestiging early is damage-neutral but faster? And https://app.warera.io/user/68408081fb821d5f962bf207 asked the concrete version: bank 30,000 over the cap and land at level 38 - what does that cost?

This is the right way to think about it, and the answer has a shape. You do not have to choose between jump-at-25 and bank-to-the-full-151,600. There is a whole family in between: bank until the penalty would drop you exactly on level L, then press. Three years, war build, blue gear, corrected rate:

land at 25 (jump on sight) - 146.5 day cycle, 10 points - 632,459,602 damage behind full bank
land at 35 - 171.9 day cycle, 7 points - 202,574,619 behind
land at 38 ( https://app.warera.io/user/68408081fb821d5f962bf207 's case) - 180.4 day cycle, 6 points - 118,473,579 behind, about 4,617 to 12,084 gold
land at 42 - 192.8 day cycle, 6 points 54,184,499 behind
land at 45 - 202.9 day cycle, 5 points - 15,616,185 behind
land at 47 - 209.7 day cycle, 5 points - 4,270,119 behind
land at 49 216.4 day cycle, 5 points - DEAD EVEN with full bank full bank at 50 - 219.8 day cycle, 4 points

Read it bottom up. The entire damage cost of prestige lives below level 40, because that is where the build actually breaks. Down there you are missing whole skill tiers, up at 45-49 you are missing decoration. Landing anywhere from 45 up costs a rounding error, and landing at 49 squeezed its fifth prestige point in a whisker before the three-year mark while full bank sat on four, at zero damage cost. The structural fact underneath the lucky boundary: every landing level above 45 buys a faster point clock for essentially nothing.

So HampusTman's instinct is exactly right, and here is the practical rule it produces: bank until one press lands you at 45 or higher. Never eat the drop below 40 while you fight. The 25-landing exists for eco accounts and for nobody else.

The monthly missions ( https://app.warera.io/user/6990e15f0beef0f0c5c33899 , https://app.warera.io/user/68408081fb821d5f962bf207 )

Not live yet - the monthly tier exists in the game config and issues zero missions. Two candidate reward scales are floating around, so here is both:

A: config today (10x50+500 = 1,000/mo): +32.9 XP a day. Cap in 259.9 days, bank cycle 197.8, jump 131.9.

B: readers' figure (10x150+500 = 2,000/mo): +65.7 XP a day. Cap in 236.3 days, bank cycle 179.8, jump 119.9.

Either way the three-year damage race still ends roughly 632 million in the banker's favour. Faster XP shortens every cycle for both strategies at once; it does not change which one wins, because the loss was never about XP it is about the levels you are not holding while you climb. When the tier goes live I will recount within the day, on the numbers it actually ships with.

The number nobody asked for

https://app.warera.io/user/69fcf1eeec456458b3f81303 wrote that the update widens the gap - the strong get stronger and the low levels can never catch up. https://app.warera.io/user/6838a7320b77c3a92564bd8e called it an insult to the core players. Opposite corners, same question: who did this patch actually pay?

I can answer that exactly, because the retroactive grant is arithmetic: +50 percent of every XP point banked above the cap, credited once, on patch day. Across the living census it paid 1,723,335 XP to 433 accounts the median member of the cap club got 3,438, the biggest single grant was 9,793, and the total equals 5,828 player-days of mission calendar handed out in one patch note, every coin of it to the 2.8 percent standing at the cap.

So Duke is not imagining it: every compounding thing in v0.25.2 - the points, the multiplier, the grant is gated behind level 50. What I will put against it is the part that cuts the other way: the prestige button itself DROPS the strong. The heaviest hitters in the game are sitting at level 31 this morning because they pressed it. The level gap narrowed the day the patch landed; the permanent-power gap widens from here at about 57,000 damage a day per point. Both things are true, and which one you feel depends on which side of 50 you stand.

And to https://app.warera.io/user/6891f3d5571eacf47da99c95 with a week of tournament damage bonus: do not press it while the buff runs. The drop multiplies against your bonus damage for exactly as long as it lasts. Press the morning it expires.

The short version, since https://app.warera.io/user/69ccbce284328f0823e6796b asked

You fight: bank, and land at 45 plus - never eat the drop below 40. You trade: jump today. You are below 50: claim your 210 a day and this argument reaches you in 288.8 days. And the one line of yesterday's piece to strike from memory is the closing "jump if you want the account" - Part III of that same piece is the corrected verdict, and it says bank.

I am not a customer support desk, but today I answered tickets, and the customers were right.

Next time I am a coroner. For real this time.

https://app.warera.io/user/697b55e4bcecf3b37667e0d1