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Combat

How a battle plays out, from the first strike to the loot.

How fights start

• Random encounters while you travel. See Encounters.
• Bounty markers from the Bounty Board: walk up to one. See Quests.
• A conversation that turns violent: the character takes it to the battle screen. See Fights with characters.

Turns

The faster side acts first. Then you take turns, and party members act after you.

On your turn, choose one:

• Strike: attack with your weapon. Landing a hit builds Focus, and it's the attack that triggers your weapon's enchantment.
• Brace: spend Focus to steady yourself. The next hit you take is halved, and its effect doesn't land.
• Items: use a healing item. It costs no Focus but uses your turn.
• Flee: try to escape. Speed decides your odds: at equal speed you get away about two times in three. A failed attempt uses your turn. You can't flee a fight with a character.

You start each fight with a little Focus and build more by landing hits.

The timing gauge

When you attack, a dot sweeps across a bar. Stop it inside the marked zone to hit, and in the small zone inside that to land a critical. Miss the zone and the attack misses.

Prefer to leave it to chance? Turn on Classic combat (random rolls) in Atlas → Settings. Your attacks then hit, miss or crit at random. The setting is saved in this browser.

Reading the enemy

The enemy's card shows:

• what it's about to do next, and how hard it could hit
• the effects its attacks can inflict, and the odds
• its weaknesses and resistances
• any effects currently on it. Hover or tap one to see what it does.

See Status effects.

Damage, in short

Attack against defense, with a little randomness. Criticals hit half again as hard. Your weapon adds to your attack and your armor to your defense. Enemies grow stronger as you out-level them. See Encounters.

Your party

Party members fight alongside you against enemies (not against characters). They act on their own after you, and they're only ever knocked out, never killed. Each companion makes the enemy tougher to wear down. If you fall while they're still standing, the fight goes on, and you're back on your feet if they win.

Winning and losing against enemies

Win and you earn XP and the enemy's loot, and the fight counts toward any bounty on it. Enough XP raises your level. Your HP stays where it ended. See Levels and XP.

Lose and you lose a tenth of your XP (never enough to drop a level) and some of your money. You wake up with full HP.

Fights with characters

A character can take a real confrontation to the battle screen, but only physical violence, not a heated argument.

• There's no fleeing.
• Win, and choose to Spare or Kill them. You can describe how. A spared character is left hurt but warms to you a little. A killed character dies, and is archived as Deceased. Anyone who sees it turns against you, and remembers.
• Lose, and you're knocked out and wake up hurt. The character thinks a little less of you.
• Fights with characters give no XP and no loot.

Afterward, the conversation picks up with how it ended.

To keep confrontations in the conversation, turn on Disable NPC combat in Atlas → Settings.