City Bosses

Bosses come in 4 difficulties, and the gap between them is not cosmetic: Ancient carries 2.2x the health of Lesser and 4.8x the attack, alongside a far better reward.

Every difficulty has 2 different bosses, and which one turns up is picked at random when a boss spawns. It is a matter of name and looks only: the bosses of one difficulty have exactly the same health, attack, rewards and drops, so neither is the better target.

• Lesser: The Dread Captain or The Hollow Tollkeeper
• Greater: The Shadow Weaver or The Bone Cantor
• Elder: The Behemoth or The Iron Reliquary
• Ancient: The Void Primordial or The Hollow Crown

• Lesser: 432,000 health, 25 attack, 20 defense, a gold pool of 90,000 to 150,000 gold, and a 12-shadowgem pool, both shared out among the fighters.
• Greater: 702,000 health, 45 attack, 35 defense, a gold pool of 225,000 to 375,000 gold, and a 48-shadowgem pool, both shared out among the fighters.
• Elder: 864,000 health, 75 attack, 55 defense, a gold pool of 525,000 to 900,000 gold, and a 84-shadowgem pool, both shared out among the fighters.
• Ancient: 945,000 health, 120 attack, 80 defense, a gold pool of 1,275,000 to 2,100,000 gold, and a 144-shadowgem pool, both shared out among the fighters.

No fighter may deal a boss's whole health on their own. At the start of a boss you may deal up to 40% of its health, and that limit rises steadily until it is the whole bar 12 hours in. A swing that would take you past your limit is cut short, and once you have reached it further attacks are refused until the limit rises.

The "?" on the fight screen tells you how much more damage you can do to this boss, a warning appears as you near the limit (including when only a few of your own hits are left), and the result of each strike shows a bar of how much of your limit is used. Every boss has its own limit.

A boss stays up for 24 hours. If it is not killed in that time it force-expires and the city is sacked. The window is sized around an assumed turnout of about 20 participants. The higher tiers are genuinely not beatable by a handful of players on natural energy regeneration, and they are not meant to be.

A sacked city carries a gold penalty on its residents and stays sacked for 24 hours, so ignoring a boss has a real cost even for players who never intended to fight it.

The fight screen keeps everything you press directly under the scenery, so nothing covers the boss: the Attack button with your health and mana potion buttons beside it, then the Parry, Charge and Arcane Bolt moves. If you are not in the boss's city, that same spot shows a Travel button instead, and travelling opens the usual travel confirmation with its cooldown and toll.

Each attack costs 10% of your maximum energy rather than a flat amount, so the cost scales with your character instead of penalising small pools. Above 50 maximum energy only 5% is charged on the rest, so a deep pool still costs more per swing than a shallow one, just not in proportion. Every landed hit also pays a flat 300 XP regardless of outcome, which makes participation worthwhile even when your damage contribution is modest.

How your damage is worked out: a swing at a boss uses the same fight maths as a hit in a player fight. It depends on your Attack against 50% of the boss's Defense, on how your overall power compares with the boss (a stronger fighter hits harder), and on whether the swing is a critical hit, which your Critical Strike stat makes more likely and which multiplies the hit by 2 or more. A small random jitter is applied too, so the exact figure varies from swing to swing and cannot be worked out precisely from the stats alone. The boss never dodges, so a swing always lands. The result is then multiplied by 5 because the boss has a raid-sized health bar. A Charge multiplies the swing by a further 2.5, and an Arcane Bolt by a factor that starts at 1.4 and approaches 2.5 as your Magic Power rises. Finally, a swing is cut short when it would take you past your damage limit.

The boss hits back. Your own Defense and Dodge apply to its retaliation, so a durable character can sustain far more attacks per session than a glass-cannon build, which matters more here than in any other fight in the game.

The three mana moves from the dungeons work against a city boss too, each priced as a share of your mana pool (Parry 10%, Charge 8%, Arcane Bolt 12%). Parry blocks the boss's next counter at you completely, deals no damage and does not wait on the attack cooldown. Charge is one swing for 2.5 times the damage. Arcane Bolt is one swing that scales with your Magic Power.

Each move has its own wait: Parry 5 seconds, Arcane Bolt 4 seconds and Charge 60 seconds. Unlike in a dungeon there is no limit on how many times you may use them in one fight, so mana is the only brake. Charge and Arcane Bolt count as attacks: they cost the same energy, share the 3 seconds attack cooldown, count towards the same damage cap and the boss hits back as usual.

An HP potion button and a mana potion button sit on either side of the Attack button, so you can drink mid-fight without leaving the scene. They fade out while that pool is already full, and open the Potion Shop when you hold no potion that fits.

Because the moves raise how much damage a fighter lands per swing, every boss tier carries nine times the health it had before they arrived. The health figures in the tier list above are the current ones.

Every boss carries two pools, one of gold and one of shadowgems, and both are split the same way. 50% of each pool is shared out EVENLY among every fighter, and the rest is shared out by damage dealt. Landing fewer than 3 hits still earns a share of both pools, just a smaller one: your cut scales with hits landed, up to the full share at 3 hits or more.

No single fighter can take more than 25% of a pool, so it takes at least 4 fighters to claim a boss outright, and anything a capped fighter would have taken above the ceiling goes to the rest of the raid instead.

Gear and material drops work differently: they are rolled per fighter, with a higher damage share improving your odds, and the same hits-landed scaling applied on top. Bosses use their own dedicated drop tables rather than borrowing an action's, so what a boss drops is tuned to the boss rather than inherited from somewhere else.

Elder and Ancient bosses carry one more thing: a Godshard, the single divine crafting material, on a flat 11% roll for each qualifying fighter. This is the main way a Godshard enters the game. The roll is NOT improved by Luck or by any drop-rate bonus, and it is capped per EVENT rather than per player: at most 3 leaves a boss no matter how many fighters roll for it. Gold, gems and gear are paid out in damage order, but the shard is rolled in a RANDOM order drawn fresh for it, so the biggest hitter has no more claim on it than anyone else who qualified. A bigger raid therefore does not mint more shards, it lowers each fighter's odds of being one of the few who get one. The two easier tiers never drop one. See Crafting Materials for every other route to one.

The practical read: turn up early and keep hitting. Qualifying at all already earns a real, predictable share of both pools, and damage on top of that is what decides whether you take an average slice or the largest one.