Characters:
- Every character in the game will start over as a Level 1 Mortal in the new world without their prior XP, skills, spells, Ranks or boosts to maximum AP, MP and HP. Achievement stats that determine eligibility for Ranks will be retained but you will have to level back up to be eligible for them.
- Returning characters from B5 will get the same option to choose a starter skill (and the same starter kits) as newly created characters, or get 10 CP and no items.
- You will have an option to either zero out your MO or keep it as whatever it is currently.
- Career stats are retained but Breath stats will be lost, allowing for a new scramble for the Breath leaderboards. Breath 6 has a whole new set of Breath stat badge names.
Items:
- All items except clothing will be lost. Clothing will be retained whether you're wearing it or not, and clothing in faction safes and footlockers will be retained. Any enchanted clothing will lose its enchantments, but remain as an item.
Credit purchases:
- Renamed non-clothing items will be replaced with a "Memory of a Past Life". There will be locations in the Breath 6 world you can go to spend these to apply the same rename text to a new item later on. The Breath launch changelog will say what these locations are.
- The creators of custom spells will have a hidden Memory item that will likewise let them apply their spell customization to a new spell at a few choice locations in the B6 world. For instance, my Dark Oppressor has a custom Firegout variant called Dragonfire Blast; he'll be able to pick any one spell (not necessarily Firegout) that he's learned in B6 for it to be a variant of. Only the custom spell creator will get this Memory item, which means that spell customizations will be lost if their creators don't choose to proliferate them in Breath 6.
- All other forms of character customization - avatars, custom aspects, aspect locks, prefixes, suffixes and titles - will be retained.
Lore:
- You'll retain any Lore your character knows, but will need to reach a high level to re-receive its benefits.
Factions:
- All Renown will be zeroed. All Renown purchases besides safes, footlockers and bulletin boards will be lost. All held flags will cease to exist.
- All characters will retain their Faction membership and rank.
- During the first few days of the game, the faction level required to receive newly created characters will be 6 instead of the normal 8. This means that at the absolute start at level 1, a faction will need at least eight active members to receive newly created characters.
- Creating Strongholds will be disabled at first, leaving everyone in an open hunting environment. The dev team will determine when to turn this back on.
Alchemy:
- Breath changeovers, unlike character resets, do blank accumulated Alchemy knowledge. Like in the B5 launch, we're taking advantage of the briefly simpler environment to roll out some new Alchemy content.
Dark Pacts:
- Anyone in Pact Debt when the Breath ends will no longer be in Pact Debt when Breath 6 begins, and we are substantially shaking up how this mechanic works.
Status Effects:
- All Status Effects will be lost, including permanent character toggles like Passive pet, blessing or gem regeneration. This does not apply to Character Settings accessible on the screen of the same name; these will be where you left them.
Endgames and Miscellanea:
- The Conduit Source won't initially be attuned to anything at Breath launch.
- Pocket Space Portals won't initially be anywhere on the map. It's possible that we may make this mechanic go somewhere new when we turn it back on, but initially the feature won't be there.
- The Council of Keys will have no members at the Breath launch and the current thing the Weave of Magic is set to is set that way for plot reasons, so it'll be set to something as a placeholder at Breath launch.
- The Unholy Grail will lose any Dark Power it contains at the Breath switchover.
- Breath 6 is starting without any NPCs. The point of NPCs is to provide combat targets for characters leveling in the target-poor environment of a Breath where most people are max-level and holed up in Strongholds. That doesn't describe Breath 6 at launch and probably won't for a while. In practice, NPCs in the current game environment have mainly been used for mega-farming by already-maxed characters, a use case that really wasn't intended at all, and we'll likely be revisiting their behavior to attempt to address this before reintroducing them.
- There will not be a dev-provided world Map at Breath launch as we hope you enjoy exploring the new world yourself. Plscks has pioneered an exciting new map environment that we will be using eventually.
- XP caps will be back at a lower early-breath level and we intend to gradually tick them back up over time.
- Under the hood, there is a level cap of 3 at the Breath launch. While some factions in the past have come up with elaborate plans to have everyone pile together to spend all their AP power-leveling some lucky member to a high level immediately, in practice (and from our past observations) this isn't really fun for much of anyone. The level cap will tick up by one every daily tick until it hits Level 30, so most players will never hit this.