How combat works
The shape of a fight
A fight is decided in full the moment you start it, round by round, until one side reaches nothing. What you watch afterwards is the recording. Gear you put on once a fight has started does not affect it, and neither does drinking by hand — the fight already happened.
The side with the higher accuracy swings first each round. A fight is capped at 150 rounds. If both of you are still standing then, the clock has run out: the fight pays nothing and you keep the health you are on. It takes a boss you are well under-dressed for to get there.
What your gear does
- Accuracy
- How often you land a hit. It does nothing to how hard you hit.
- Damage
- How hard a landed hit can be — it sets your maximum, not your average.
- Armour
- How often you are hit. Armour never reduces damage. A blow that lands hits just as hard through plate as through nothing.
- Health
- What you can take, on top of what your combat level gives you.
Your combat level is worth a little on its own; the rest is what you are carrying. A character with nothing equipped cannot fight content built for their combat level, however high it is.
Landing a hit
Two rolls, one against the other. Both scale with combat level and with equipment.
your roll = (your combat level + 8) × (your accuracy + 12) their roll = (their combat level + 8) × (their armour × triangle + 12) if your roll > their roll chance = 1 − (their roll + 2) ÷ (2 × (your roll + 1)) else chance = your roll ÷ (2 × (their roll + 1))
The result is clamped between 5% and 95%, so nothing is ever certain in either direction and every fight resolves. Two evenly matched rolls come out near 50%, and it falls away steeply from there rather than in a straight line — being under-equipped is a wall, not a tax.
Damage
max hit = (your combat level + 8) × (your damage + 12) ÷ 22 damage = a flat roll from 1 to max hit
Every number from 1 to your maximum is equally likely, so rolling your max hit is the moment worth having. There are no critical hits, and there is no damage floor — armour is dealt with entirely by the roll above.
The weapon triangle
melee beats ranged beats magic beats melee. Your weapon says which side you attack from; your armour says which side you defend from, so the answer to a monster is a matched set rather than a matched weapon.
It is worth 12% either way, and it applies to the armour roll only — once, not twice. A good matchup makes the defender's armour worth 12% less; a bad one makes it worth that much more. It is an edge, never a decider.
How long it takes
2 seconds a round, clamped between 6 and 300 seconds. The round count is the clock, so killing something faster genuinely finishes sooner — gear and combat levels buy throughput, not only a better win rate.
Potions
Your character drinks on their own, during a fight as well as on the way into one, whenever health falls below 50% of maximum. They drink the strongest first, and keep drinking until back above the threshold or the bag is empty.
Nothing is drunk on the blow that kills you. Running out is your problem — there is no auto-stop and no auto-flee. You can drink one yourself from the bag between fights, but not at full health. Every potion you carry costs a slot of the 30 you have, so it is a piece of loot that will not fit.
Bandages
A bandage is healing a vendor sells and nobody makes. It heals what the potion of its rung heals, evenly over 20 seconds, as a task of its own, and a fight never uses one. Use it from your bag, or queue it between fights, where it lands wherever you put it — a potion is drunk when it is needed; a bandage is not.
It is used up when it starts. Stopped part-way, you keep what it had healed so far. One whose turn comes at full health is skipped and stays in your bag, and healing past your maximum is lost. Each costs a slot, as a potion does.
What a win pays
XP is 0.2 per point of the monster's health, so a kill is worth what it took to kill. The monster's combat level does not enter it. Losing pays nothing and costs you the time.
Loot you have no room for is lost. Coins always arrive; items need a free slot, and anything that does not fit is gone. The summary on the finished task names what it was, so you can see what a full bag cost you.
Dying
You wake at your tavern with 1 health. Everything still queued is cancelled, which is what makes a long queue a real bet. You keep every item and every coin.
A weakness of 20% is applied to every stat — health included — for 8 minutes. Nothing clears it early: not potions, not coins, not resting. Health regenerates at 1.5% of your maximum a minute whatever you are doing.
Fleeing
You can leave a fight at any time. You keep the wounds already shown in the log, and if those have already brought you to nothing you die on the way out. Anything you were carrying that the log has not poured yet stays yours.
Leaving takes the rest of the queue with it, exactly as dying does — there is no way to abandon one fight and carry on. It also leaves you shaken: 20% off every stat for 2 minutes, the same weakness dying applies for a shorter time. Fleeing again restarts that clock rather than deepening it.