Ranked Combat
2v2 Arenas
Two fighters against two, in a closed arena, with a rating on the line and nothing else. No experience is lost, no items drop and no enemy kills are awarded — which is exactly why a pair from Aresden can be matched against another pair from Aresden. Bring a partner, queue up, and find out where you really stand.
Getting in
Form a party of exactly two — not one, not three — then open your character sheet with F5 and press the 2v2 Arena button. The button is always visible; it is simply greyed out until your party is the right size, so you can see why you cannot queue instead of guessing. From the panel that opens you queue, watch your team rating and record, and leave the queue whenever you like.
- Team size
- 2 A party of exactly two
- Minimum level
- 90 Effective: level + rebirths
- Brackets
- 2 90–139 and 140+
- Bracket rule
- Average Of both effective levels
- Arenas
- 6 Six matches can run at once
The gate is effective level 90, where effective level means your level plus your rebirths — a level 87 character with three rebirths is in. There are two brackets, 90–139 and 140+, and your team's bracket is the average of both partners' effective levels, so a mixed pair lands wherever that average falls. Everybody waits in a single queue; the bracket is applied at the moment two teams are matched, and the six arenas are handed out in order of arrival, so as one frees up the next team goes in.
The matchmaker starts by looking for opponents close to your rating and widens its search the longer you wait, until it will accept anybody. On a quiet evening that means you will get a match — it just may not be a fair one.
The 30-second invitation
When a match is found, all four players get a card with a 30-second countdown and a Confirm button. The card shows up even if you are in the middle of a fight — but confirming does not: you can only accept once you have been out of combat for 15 seconds and standing still for 10. While either condition is missing, the button tells you which one and how many seconds are left.
The clock
A match is a minute of preparation and fifteen minutes of fighting, and the second number does not start until the cages open.
| Phase | Lasts | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Invitation | 30 s | All four confirm, out of combat and standing still. |
| Preparation | 1:00 | Locked in your cage. Buff up — this is the window for it. |
| Fight | 15:00 | The cages open and the clock starts. |
| Celebration | 5 s | The winners are lit up before everyone is sent home. |
You arrive inside a small cage on your side of the map, far enough from the other pair that you cannot see them, and every buff you cast beforehand is stripped on the way in. That is deliberate: the minute in the cage is your buffing window, and you pay for it in mana like everybody else. Casting during preparation is allowed. When the minute is up the cage doors disappear and the fight is on.
How a match ends
You win by putting both opponents on the ground. Nothing else counts — not damage dealt, not health remaining. If both teams still have someone standing at 0:00, the match is a draw and nobody's rating moves.
To keep the last minutes from turning into two healers refusing to die, healing and regeneration lose 20% of their power every three minutes of fighting. The match timer on your screen shows the figure you are currently getting.
| Fight time | Effectiveness |
|---|---|
| 0:00 – 3:00 | 100% |
| 3:00 – 6:00 | 80% |
| 6:00 – 9:00 | 60% |
| 9:00 – 12:00 | 40% |
| 12:00 – 15:00 | 20% |
When the last member of a team falls, the four of you are not yanked out instantly: the winners are lit up for five seconds where they stand, and only then does everyone go home. Anyone who died is revived on the way out.
What you cannot bring
The arena is deliberately stripped down. Consumables are gone, the two spells that would end matches by themselves are gone, and invisibility is rationed. Everything else you have earned — your gear, your talents, your charged wands — comes with you.
| Rule | Status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute Magic Protection | Forbidden | Forbidden. The spell is greyed out in your spell list. |
| Recall | Forbidden | Forbidden — the spell and the Recall Scroll both. |
| Detect Invisibility Scroll | Forbidden | Forbidden. |
| Detect Invisibility | Allowed | The spell is allowed, and it is your answer to the one above. |
| Invisibility | Limited | 3 uses per player, per match. The spell, the Invisibility Potion and the Invisibility Scroll all draw from the same three. |
| Potions and food | Forbidden | No consumables at all — no healing potions, no mana, no food, no Ogre Potion. |
| Zemstone of Rebirth | Forbidden | Forbidden. Nothing drops in here, so there is nothing to save. |
| Wands with charges | Allowed | Allowed. A charged wand casts its spell even if you never learned it. |
| Summoning pets | Forbidden | You fight this one with what you brought. |
| Trading items mid-match | Forbidden | You cannot hand anything to anybody, including your partner. |
Dying, and leaving
Death in the arena is free. You drop nothing, you lose no experience, your killer gains no enemy kill, and the death is not added to your record on the character sheet. There is no kill announcement to the server either — what happens in there stays between the four of you and the ladder.
Logging out is the one thing that costs you. Disconnecting disqualifies you, with 60 seconds of grace to get back — and while you are gone your partner is fighting two against one. Come back inside the minute and the match carries on as if nothing happened.
Rating and the ladder
Every player carries their own rating, calculated with Glicko-2 — the system does not only track a number, it tracks how sure it is about that number, so your first few matches move you a long way and later ones settle down. A team's rating is the average of its two players, which is also what the matchmaker uses to size you up against another pair.
We are in Season 1. The public ladder lists the top pairs with their ratings and records, and you can look yourself up on the Arena Rankings page — it reads straight from the live server.
The six arenas
Six arenas are in rotation, which means up to six matches can be running at the same time. You do not pick one — you are dropped into whichever is free — so it is worth knowing all six. Each one has its own shape, and the shape decides more than you would think: where you can be cornered, whether a mage gets room to work, and how long it takes for the two pairs to meet.
Both teams start on opposite sides of the map, out of each other's sight. The cages are only there for the first minute.