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I realize that there have been a lot of threads about the invisible elementals. Yes, I'm creating another one, to explain why it's such a big deal, and why it's game-breaking.

In Krokotopia, the invisible elementals bug isn't that big of a deal, as you know the general area where they patrol and can stay out of it by staying on the sidewalks. If you need to engage them in battle for a quest, you can see their general area on the map, and wander into it until you get attacked. In battle, you can attack them by clicking on their nametags at the top of the screen. It's a nuisance, but manageable.

In Mooshu, it's much, much worse. In Cave of Solitude, you have to traverse rather long areas where invisible elementals patrol, and have to go into the space where they patrol, rather than skirting around the edges. Getting through is something of a pain even when you can see them. It's harder than getting past mobs in any other area in the game up through the end of Mooshu--and yes, harder than Katzenstein's Lab, which gets a lot of complaints about the difficulty.

And that's when you can see the elementals; when they're invisible, you've got no chance. You get out of battle and try to move further, and get attacked again and sent right back to the same spot as in the previous battle. You can't get out of the way to go grab wisps to heal between battles, either. You can kind of make up for that by stopping to heal yourself a lot once a battle is well in hand, but at the expense of making the battle take twice as long while you store up pips to heal repeatedly.

Kishibe Village has the same problem to a much lesser degree. Shirataki Temple makes you cross the elemental paths over a very long range, and while it's not that hard to dodge them if you can see them, you've got no chance if they're invisible.

If you have to fight three times as much as you should have because you're constantly getting jumped by invisible monsters--and may have to start over if they kill you, as you can't heal between battles--that's pretty much unplayable. For those who have complained that Katzenstein's Lab is too hard, imagine if the mobs were invisible and you still had to dodge them. That's what some portions of Mooshu are like now.

I don't know if people at KingsIsle are running around like their hair is on fire. If not, then they should be. A game-breaking glitch like this isn't the sort of thing that can wait until the next big patch is ready, any more than you could put off dealing with a server that completely crashed about once per hour. This is the sort of thing that needs to be dealt with immediately, and given a hotfix as soon as the patch is ready, even if you have to take servers down during prime time to apply it. Everything else that is being coded can wait, as the game isn't playable until then.

Does that sound harsh? It's been at least six days with the game all but unplayable for those who are on certain areas of Mooshu. Maybe the bug is hard to track down, but at the very least, reverting to whatever code was in place before the bug was introduced would fix it in the meantime. This isn't just another run of the mill glitch that players can work around.

This issue is addressed with the March 26th update.
Thank you for all your information about the elementals and your patience while we chased down this bug.