Combat

Physical vs magical attacks

A physical attack — melee or archery — first rolls to hit: your accuracy against the target's defence. When it lands, damage comes from your weapon and Strength, and the target's armour absorbs part of it. A magical attack instead measures your magical accuracy against the target's resistance, and what lands is reduced by their magical and elemental absorption. The two paths share almost nothing, so a build that shrugs off swords can still melt to spells.

Landing a physical hit

Whether a blow connects is your accuracy measured against the target's defence. Dexterity pushes both sides: yours raises your accuracy, theirs raises their defence — so hitting a nimble opponent is genuinely harder. Your weapon skill adds accuracy on top, and bows lose accuracy in rain and storms.

Attacking from behind wrecks the target's defence. If you can get around an opponent — or catch one who is running — your chance to land goes up sharply. Nothing is ever guaranteed in either direction: a perfect setup can still miss, and a badly outmatched attacker still connects sometimes.

Critical attacks and dashes

Spending a Critical Point turns your next swing into a critical attack: it reaches about three tiles and hits far harder than a normal blow. A dash reaches about two tiles and carries you into the target as you strike.

The critical attack now scales with your level and your mastery of the weapon you are holding. Previously it performed about the same whoever swung it; today a low-level character, or one swinging a weapon they have barely trained, lands criticals noticeably less often, while a high-level, well-trained character lands them noticeably more. Each weapon has its own profile, so mastering the weapon you actually fight with is worth real accuracy.

Chaining hits

Landing blows back to back builds a small damage bonus, so staying on a target beats trading hits and backing off. Every weapon now uses the same progression — the chain rewards aggression the same way whether you are holding an axe or a rapier, instead of each weapon having its own hidden ramp.

Weapon upgrades

The upgrade level (+N) of your weapon now counts for considerably more than it used to. Its contribution is amplified when you spend a Critical Point and again inside the war zones, so a heavily upgraded weapon out-performs a plain one by a much wider margin than before. If you were treating upgrades as a cosmetic nicety, they are now a real part of your damage.

What a +N run costs in shards and attempts is priced on the Upgrade Calculator.

Armour, shields and Vitality

When a physical hit lands, the game picks one piece of your armour at random — your torso is the most likely to be struck — and it is that piece's absorption which reduces the blow. A full set matters: one excellent piece surrounded by rags only helps you when the roll happens to pick it.

A shield gives you a chance to block, and that chance rises with your Shield skill. A successful block adds the shield's own absorption on top of your armour's.

Two more things sit between a hit and your health bar:

• Vitality reduces damage on its own, separately from anything you are wearing. A high-Vitality character takes less from every hit even in light armour.
• Durability. When you block, the shield now takes the bulk of the wear that used to be paid by your armour — expect to repair shields more often and body pieces less.

Crush

Every attack carries a chance to crush — a devastating hit that deals extra damage and paints its number in red. Luck is the attribute that raises how often you crush, at roughly 0.33% per point, and gear and talents can raise both how often it happens and how much extra it deals.

Stagger and interruption

A solid hit knocks you back and briefly locks you in place. A weaker hit can lock you too, but only sometimes — and how often depends on the weapon that struck you. Heavy weapons stagger far more; the dagger and bare-handed attacks no longer stagger on every hit, which used to make the two lightest attacks in the game the most disruptive ones.

Taking damage interrupts a spell you are casting. A caster with someone in melee range needs to break away, out-range them, or accept that the cast may not finish.

Landing a spell

Offensive magic contests your magical accuracy against the target's resistance. Magic pushes both sides: it raises your accuracy when you cast and their resistance when they are cast at.

The circle of the spell relative to your level also matters. Casting well above where your level sits carries a heavy penalty — high-circle spells are meant to be cast by characters who have grown into them. Rebirth levels now count towards this, so a reborn character handles the upper circles considerably better than one who has not rebirthed.

Magical and elemental absorption

Resistance to magic in general and resistance to a specific element are now added together under a single shared ceiling, instead of each being applied separately one after the other. In practice:

• Being resistant to both an element and to magic overall protects you more than it used to across the middle of the range.
• Being vulnerable to an element hurts more than it used to — an elemental weakness is now a real liability.
• As with physical damage, there is no ceiling high enough to zero out a spell.

Some weapons and item sets penetrate part of the target's absorption, and carrying several sources of penetration stacks them. Against a heavily warded opponent, penetration is often worth more than raw damage.

Other things magic does

• Freezing now depends on your Magic skill as well as the target's resistance to ice. A skilled caster freezes things a weak one cannot.
• Species specialisation — your training against a particular kind of creature — now adds to your magical damage as well as your physical damage.
• Area spells deal the same damage at the centre as at the edge. Where a target happens to stand inside the blast no longer changes what it takes.

Berserk buffs

Minor Berserk and Berserk are now genuinely different spells. They used to do the same thing under two names.

• Minor Berserk adds half again to your physical damage.
• Berserk doubles it.
• Both last the same amount of time, so Berserk is a straight upgrade when you can get it.
• Neither applies to a swing where you spend a Critical Point — the two do not combine.
• You cannot hold both. Whichever you have running must finish before the other will take, so cast the one you want and let it play out.

Recovering HP, MP and SP

Out of the swing, your three pools refill in batches rather than trickling continuously — you get a chunk back, then wait for the next one. The cadence is fixed; how big that chunk is depends on the attribute driving the pool.

Each pool's size comes from your attributes and level — see Character Development.