Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar v1.2.0.26 Patch and Other Updates

Golden Era Games' Cleve Blakemore has been busy posting a handful of updates over on the Steam page for Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, which bring word of a new v1.2.0.26-R maintenance patch, a sample of the orchestral revision of the game's soundtrack, and additional promises - backed up by a cover image - that the CRPG's official manual is coming soon. Let's go with what to expect from the patch:
This update was released before the official manual goes out just to address many issues fixed over the past two weeks.

Critical bugs that cause asserts and glitches involving items and monsters are repaired here as well as some bugs that just cause mildly aberrant behaviour.

Many issues with balance have been addressed in monster XP and in leveling up for players. Game exploits tapered down. I am not sure any of these were really bugs or unintended but feedback has resulted in them being modified somewhat resulting in many combats, particularly boss combats, becoming much harder to insta-kill and insta-win. Monster and player saving throws against all kinds of effects are more likely in the new tables and combat may be more difficult in general.