Combat and Stats

Attack, Defense, Speed, Luck, Stamina, Magic Power, Critical Strike and Dodge. Every point comes from one of three places: your base character, the gear you have equipped, or a temporary buff. Gear and buffs are additive with your base, so a "derived" stat is simply the sum, and that sum is what fights and actions read.

• Attack: raw damage output, and a small contribution to the success chance of criminal actions.
• Defense: incoming damage reduction. In a fight, defense removes up to 50% of an attacker's damage before it lands.
• Speed: who lands blows first and how often, which compounds over a long fight.
• Luck: the widest-reaching stat: 0.5% added success chance per point, and a 1% better loot multiplier per point on top.
• Stamina: your maximum energy pool, which is the real limit on how much you can do per day.
• Magic Power: scales magical damage and the magic-flavoured actions.
• Critical Strike: your chance to land a critical hit, which deals 2x damage. Chance caps out at 300 Critical Strike; past that, more Critical Strike is never wasted, it raises how hard a crit hits instead, up to a 3x hit at 600.
• Dodge: your chance to avoid an incoming blow entirely, taking nothing from it.

Criminal actions do not simply succeed or fail on a whim. Each action has a base chance, your stats move it, and the result is then clamped: never below 5% and never above 95%. Both ends of that clamp matter. The floor means no action is ever truly hopeless, so a low-rank character attempting something ambitious still has a real chance. The ceiling means no amount of stacking ever makes an action free: there is always risk, and a fully geared character still fails about one attempt in 20. Two things move that ceiling: a Stronghold Library raises it, and so does every Ascension you complete, by 0.25% each, up to a hard limit of 99% that nothing in the game gets past.

Luck is the most efficient stat to raise for this purpose, at 0.5% per point, and it is doing double duty because the same points also improve what drops when you do succeed. If you are choosing where to spend, Luck is rarely the wrong answer.

A fight runs up to 20 rounds. Each round, the attacker's damage is computed from their stats, reduced by up to 50% by the defender's Defense, multiplied by 2x (or more, with Critical Strike past 300) if it crits, and cancelled entirely if the defender dodges. A small random jitter of about 15% down to 15% up is applied so two identical characters do not produce identical fights, and damage never lands below a floor of 1, so a heavily armoured opponent can still be worn down rather than becoming literally invulnerable.

You fight with your real health. The bar in the replay is the health you walked in with, and what comes off it is what your character actually pays, so a hard fight leaves you visibly hurt and a potion genuinely helps. No fight can kill you: a defeat leaves you on 1 health.

If neither fighter has fallen when the 20 round limit is reached, the fight goes to whoever has the larger share of their own health still standing, so a big health bar does not win on size alone. An exact tie goes to the attacker.

Arena and PvP fights are decided the moment you challenge, then played back as a scene: both fighters stand in an arena with a health bar each, damage numbers float up from every blow, crits, dodges and divine effects are called out, and a Victory or Defeat banner closes it. Skip jumps straight to the end, and the written log and tally follow underneath. The result, your rating and the health you lose are the same whether you watch or skip.

Fights are paced to last around 13 rounds whatever the matchup. That is deliberate. It makes a duel a contest of sustained output rather than a coin-flip on who lands the first critical hit, and it means Speed and Defense earn their keep over the course of a fight instead of being decided in one exchange. Turning up already wounded does not shorten the fight either: you take proportionally less damage per exchange, so you last just as long, you simply have less health to lose.

Gear has condition, from 1,000 down to zero, and it degrades as you take damage: roughly 0.1 points of condition per point of health lost. This is the most commonly missed mechanic in the game, because nothing stops you fighting with ruined equipment. It just quietly performs worse.

Only fights you start wear your gear. A failed action, a PvP attack you launch or an NPC fight all cost condition, but being attacked by another player does not, and Arena bouts and Duels never touch condition at all. Dungeon fights do wear your gear, but only at 25% of the rate of the same damage in a PvP attack.

The penalty is stepped, not smooth. Between 25% and 50% condition your gear's stats count for 90% of their value; below 25% they count for only 80%. A full set of legendary equipment at 20% condition is meaningfully weaker than a mid-tier set in good repair, and the character sheet will not shout about it. Repair at a Blacksmith before a serious fight, not after losing one.

The Training Grounds raise your base stats for gold and real time. You can train one stat, several, or all eight together, each on its own timer, and every finished session adds 1 point to that stat. Price and length depend on how many points you have already trained in that stat, never on the stat itself, so gear and buffs do not make training cheaper or faster.

Each stat can gain 100 points (the Discipline branch of the Ascension tree raises that cap). Cancelling a session refunds it in full. Every finished session rests its stat for 50% of the session's length, up to 4 hours, and Discipline can shorten rests by up to 50%. You can end a rest early for Shadowgems (the price is about 1 gem per 10 minutes left, at least 3).

The Training Grounds page also shows how many times you have trained in total and a bar for how far every stat is from its cap, with the number of sessions still needed to bring all of them to the maximum. A session that is still running counts once it finishes.

• Raise Luck first if you are unsure: it improves both whether you succeed and what you get for it.
• Do not chase the last few percent of success chance. The ceiling is 95% without a Library or Ascensions and 99% at most (a maxed Library, or +0.25% per Ascension), so past a point extra investment buys nothing on that axis and is better spent on Stamina for more attempts.
• Stamina is the quiet limiter on progress. More energy means more attempts per day, and more attempts beats a slightly better chance per attempt.
• Check your gear condition on a schedule, not on a hunch. It is the cheapest power increase available to a player who has been fighting for a while.