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Wiki Systems Combat

Combat

How fights are timed, how attacks land, and how damage is worked out from the swing to the wound.

Fighting in Rogue is resolved in fixed two-second rounds. You do not type an attack each time you want to swing: once a fight has started, everyone in the room who is engaged swings automatically on every round until one side dies, flees or is otherwise taken out of the fight. What you do type are the skills, spells and manoeuvres that go on top of that steady rhythm.

Rounds are run per room, not per character. When the first blow is struck the room starts a round timer, and every combatant in that room resolves inside the same tick. This is why a fight that spills across a doorway feels like two separate fights: each room keeps its own clock.

Starting a fight#

attack <target> begins combat. kill, hit, waste and gank all do the same thing. A few situations stop you before you swing:

If you want to know what you are walking into, consider <target> gives you a plain reading of the gap between your level and theirs, and states their level outright. It is honest about hopeless fights.

The shape of a round#

Each round works through a fixed order, which is why combat output always reads the same way regardless of who is in the room.

  1. Queued skills and spells fire. Anything you triggered since the last round resolves here, before any weapon swings.
  2. Players and ridden heroes take their auto-attacks.
  3. Bonus attacks resolve, such as rogue and bard ripostes.
  4. Warriors gain adrenaline, 4 points per round to a ceiling of 100.
  5. Your own attack lines are printed, followed by your health line. Your swing always appears last in your own output, immediately above your vitals, no matter what order the room was processed in.
  6. NPCs take their auto-attacks, which is why hostile blows appear below your health line.
  7. Defensive reactions such as parries and blocks are flushed.
  8. Damage-over-time and heal-over-time effects tick once.
  9. Anything that died during the round is finally removed, so every skill and spell message appears above the death message.

A character who is stunned is skipped entirely in the attack passes. A character who is knocked down or petrified cannot attack either, though a knocked-down or stunned player still gives their target a free counter-swing.

Landing a blow#

The base chance to hit is 90 percent against a target of your own level, moving by roughly 2 percent for each level of difference between you. That figure is capped at 95 percent and floored at 5 percent, so no fight is ever a certainty in either direction.

On top of that there is a flat 5 percent chance to miss outright, applied before anything else, that no amount of level advantage removes. Two-handed weapons carry a further 5 percent miss chance, reflecting the heavier swing. Neither of these applies against level 0 training dummies, so newcomers are not taught that the game is capricious.

Many effects then move the number. Blindness and blinding flashes halve your chance. Being mocked, deafened or afflicted with a dirge shaves 10, 15 and 5 percent off it respectively. Blessings, bardic finales and accuracy runes push it back up. A handful of themed enemies described as rarely missing are allowed to exceed the normal 95 percent ceiling, up to 99 percent.

Working out damage#

Damage starts from the weapon. A weapon's class sets the width of its damage band, from roughly 2 to 12 at the bottom of the range to 18 to 70 for the very best. Your level decides where inside that band you tend to land: a high-level character with a modest weapon still rolls near the top of its band, which is why an old favourite stays serviceable far longer than its numbers suggest.

From there the swing is modified in order:

Step Effect
Luck Biases where in the band you land, worth about 20 percent on average at Luck 50. It can never push a weapon past its own maximum.
Strength 1 percent per point above 10, so 40 percent at the cap of 50. Applies to the whole band, so critical hits inherit it.
Two-handed Plus 33 percent, paying for the lost shield and the extra miss chance.
Off-hand swing One third damage.
Weapon condition Up to 60 percent less from a ruined weapon. See durability.
Mage melee Minus 15 percent. Mages are meant to cast.
Runes Might runes add a flat percentage.

Critical hits come next. The base chance is 5 percent, plus one point for every 4 points of Agility above 10, so 15 percent at the Agility cap. Various effects add more. A critical does not multiply your roll: it replaces it with the maximum that attack was capable of, so a critical is always a full-power blow rather than a small roll made slightly larger.

Getting hit#

Incoming damage passes through several layers, and they are not interchangeable.

Shields. If you have a shield equipped and the Shield Mastery passive, an attack can be blocked outright before anything else happens. A block stops the whole swing. The chance is capped at 95 percent.

Level gap. For every level a defender is above their attacker, the attacker deals 2 percent less damage, capped at 50 percent. An attacker of equal or higher level is completely unaffected, so this never distorts fights between equals. It applies to players and NPCs alike.

Active defences. Parry, evasion, dancing and the bardic dances are avoidance defences, and only one of them can fire per attack. If none fires, the passive shields and wards are tried in turn, and again only one may take effect. Aura of Sanctum is the exception: its flat 10 percent reduction does not use up the slot.

Parry is available from level 40, procs between 50 and 90 percent of the time across levels 40 to 100, and reduces damage by 10 to 30 percent over the same range. It costs 1 endurance per proc, and it stops if you run dry. Evasion runs from level 30 with a 20 to 40 percent reduction, and dancing from level 14 with a 20 to 60 percent reduction. Agility adds one percentage point to all of these proc chances for every 4 points above 10.

Fighting in social attire disables every defence you have. You take full damage.

Armour. Armour is the last layer and the most predictable one. Every point of armour class is worth a flat 0.2 percent damage reduction, so armour class 125 is 25 percent and armour class 250 is 50 percent. There is no class floor and no class ceiling: an unarmoured warrior mitigates nothing, and armour never stops counting. What separates a warrior from a mage is which categories of armour each is permitted to wear, covered in gear, rather than a hidden cap on mitigation. A full set of the best content available lands near armour class 250. An absolute ceiling of 75 percent exists purely to stop stacked effects reaching total immunity, and armour alone would need armour class 375 to reach it.

Your armour class is the sum of the armour rating on every worn piece, reduced by each piece's condition, plus rune bonuses, plus any completed-set bonus, plus one point for every point of Constitution above 10. NPCs use a different and older mitigation profile tuned against their difficulty tiers.

Endurance and exhaustion#

Every real weapon swing costs endurance: 2 points normally, or 5 while using a fighting style. A miss costs the same as a hit, and each strike of a multi-hit flurry pays separately. If you cannot afford the cost the swing is aborted and you are told you are too exhausted to strike effectively. See vitals for how endurance recovers.

Leaving a fight#

flee sends you through a random open exit. It fails if you are held by an effect that forbids flight, or if your leg is wounded. Fear can force the same flight on you against your will.

You cannot quit while anything hostile is in the room with you, and that applies whether you have swung back or not. There is no timer on this: the moment nothing in the room has you on its enemy list, quitting works again. Dropping your connection is not an escape either. See death for what happens to a body left behind.