How this works

Starting out

You make a fighter, pick a class, and are dropped into the arena with almost nothing. The first hour is about finding out what your character is good at; everything after that is about proving it against people.

There are two classes. Fighter hits things with steel; Mystic does it at a distance. The class you choose decides which skills are open to you and which weapons you can hold, and it cannot be changed afterwards.

Follow Garrick's quests. They exist to walk you through the parts of the game in the order they start to matter, and they pay well enough that skipping them is a waste.

Fighting

Fights resolve on their own. You do not press anything during a duel — everything you were going to decide, you decided before it started. Afterwards you get a full log of what happened, turn by turn.

Skirmish

A practice bout. No rating, small rewards, no consequences. Use it to see how a new build behaves. Skirmishes strip out actions and scrolls, so what you are testing is the character itself.

Challenge

The real thing. You call someone out; they accept or decline. Both sides choose what they bring — loadout, action set and scroll — and the challenger chooses when sending, the defender when answering.

Why the rewards dry up

You can only earn from the same opponent three times in a 12-hour window. After that the fights still happen, but they pay nothing. This stops one convenient opponent from becoming your whole income.

Your character

Every level gives you points to spend on six attributes. Nothing is wasted — but nothing is free either, and a character that puts a little into everything will lose to one that committed.

Attributes feed the numbers you see on your sheet — armour, dodge, block, critical chance and the rest. Gear feeds them too, and usually more.

Gear

Your character has a Power budget that grows with level. Every item costs Power to wear. You cannot exceed the budget, so gearing up is not about owning the best pieces — it is about which of them you can afford to have on at once.

A single enormous weapon may cost as much as half your armour. That is a real choice, and both answers are playable.

Slots open as you go

Items you cannot wear yet are still worth keeping. An empty slot costs nothing, and the piece will be there when the slot opens.

Loadouts

You can save three complete outfits and switch between them. One of them can be marked as preferred — that is the one other players see on your profile, and the one they fight when they skirmish you. It does not have to be the one you actually bring to a duel.

Packs

Packs are where gear comes from. You buy them with tokens and open them; what falls out is not up to you.

Each pack gives one item, with a small chance of a second. It also gives two scrolls, plus a one-in-ten chance of a third.

Skills & paths

Levelling gives skill points as well as attribute points. Skills sit in trees, arranged in three tiers — the deeper ones need ranks in the shallower ones first.

Openers

Some skills are openers: they only work if you have selected them as your active one, and you can only have one active at a time. An opener shapes the whole fight rather than a single turn, so switching it is a real decision, not a tweak.

Your High Path

At level 15 you choose a High Path. Fighters become Warrior or Assassin; Mystics become Mage or Druid. It opens a second skill tree and a set of actions that belong to nobody else.

Actions

From level 25 you can buy actions with gold and slot them into specific turns of a fight. This is the part of the game where you stop fighting and start planning.

• An action set holds up to six actions, placed on turns 1 to 10.
• Most actions have a cooldown, so the same one cannot sit on two turns close together.
• You can save several sets and pick which one to bring, per duel.
• NPCs never use actions. Skirmishes strip them out.

Actions are bought once and kept forever. The strongest of them are not the ones with the biggest numbers — they are the ones that answer what the other player was counting on. A trap that shuts down a fast opponent is worthless against a slow one, and decisive against the right target.

Scrolls

A scroll is a single-use insurance policy. You bring one into a duel, it fires on its own, and afterwards it is gone.

Unlike an action, you do not decide when a scroll goes off. Some trigger at the start of the fight; others wait until you are hurt. Choosing one is not asking what is my plan but what am I afraid of from this opponent.

They come out of packs, they are common, and none of them will win a fight on their own. The skill Scribe, on the Path of the Staff, makes them last longer.

Quests

Two people in the tavern have work for you. Garrick takes you from your first fight to level twenty; Veyra takes over from there.

Quests unlock in order and at set levels. They are worth doing on their own terms — the later ones pay in tokens and packs, which at that stage matter more than the experience.

The ladder

The ladder opens at level 40. It is the endgame: ranked duels against opponents near your rating, and a table that resets every month.

How a ranked match happens

• You enter the queue, and you choose your loadout, action set and scroll there — before you know who you will face.
• The system pairs you with someone near your rating. The longer you wait, the wider it looks.
• Both of you get 72 hours to change your mind. You can see the opponent's profile, but not what they are actually bringing.
• If you change nothing, you fight with what you queued with. Nobody loses by not answering.

A ranked match cannot be refused. That is the point — otherwise the ladder would be about who you avoid rather than who you beat. Ranked fights also pay 20% better than an ordinary challenge, win or lose.

Ranked or unranked

You appear on the table once you have played 10 ranked matches this month. Matches, not wins. The counter resets on the first of every month.

End of season

Gold & tokens

Two currencies, and they do not overlap.

Gold comes from fights and quests. It buys actions and pays the vendor. It is common, and it is meant to be spent.

Tokens buy packs, and packs are the only source of gear worth wearing. They arrive slowly — from challenges, quests and the end of a ladder season — so what you spend them on is the closest thing this game has to a long-term decision.

Anything you do not want can be sold to the vendor for gold.