How is combat decided in Valiant?

Each encounter compares your Time-To-Kill (how fast you kill the enemy) against your Time-To-Fall (how fast it would kill you). If you kill faster than you fall, you win. Combat is resolved from your stats — attributes, gear, talents, and companion — not from reflexes.

Why do I keep losing to a specific enemy?

Usually one of three things: the enemy's damage type beats your resistances, your damage output is too low to kill before your health runs out, or your endurance is drained from a long session. Check the enemy's damage type against your resists, raise your key offense stats, and make sure you're not fighting far above your level.

What are the resistance caps?

Elemental resistances (fire, cold, poison, elemental) cap at 75%. Corruption resistance caps at 65%. Physical damage isn't resisted — it's reduced by your mitigation (armor) instead, with no hard cap.

Combat & Damage

Valiant's combat is resolved by math, not reflexes. Each encounter compares your Time-To-Kill against your Time-To-Fall: if you kill the enemy before it kills you, you win. Your numbers come from your attributes, gear, talents, and companion — so "playing well" means building well.

How a fight is decided

For every encounter the engine computes two clocks: TTK (how many moments you need to kill the enemy) and TTF (how many moments the enemy needs to drop you). If TTK is at or below TTF, you win. This is why both offense and defense matter: raw damage shortens your TTK, while health, armor, and resists lengthen your TTF.

Damage types & resistances

There are six damage types. Physical is reduced by your mitigation (from armor); the five elemental-style types are reduced by their matching resistance, each with a cap.

Damage type	Reduced by	Cap
Physical	Mitigation (armor)	No hard cap
Fire	Fire resist	75%
Cold	Cold resist	75%
Poison	Poison resist	75%
Elemental	Elemental resist	75%
Corruption	Corruption resist	65%

Tip

Corruption is the hardest damage to resist (65% cap) and tends to appear on the nastiest foes. If a zone or boss deals corruption, stacking that specific resist pays off more than raw armor.

Crit & block

Critical hits scale from your crit stat up to a 50% chance, dealing 2× damage. Block requires a shield and scales up to a 60% chance to sharply reduce an incoming hit — one of the reasons shield tanks are so durable. No shield means no block.

Endurance

Endurance is your stamina across a session. It starts at 100 and scales both your offense and defense from 100% down to a 50% floor as it drains, so a fatigued character hits softer and takes more. Tougher enemies drain more per fight, and it regenerates about 5% per tick.

Enemy tier	Endurance drained per fight
Common	3
Rare	8
World boss	20

Phase cascade & fleeing

About 10% of each encounter's damage carries into the next as lingering harm (reduced by your phase-mitigation stat), so back-to-back tough fights compound. If the engine projects that the next hit would kill you, your character flees instead of dying — you keep everything already banked. Against a truly lethal boss (one far above your power) your character will refuse the fight up front rather than throw the run away.

Note

Enemies are graded relative to your power: trivial, risky, dangerous, or lethal. Fleeing is a safety net, not a failure — it protects the loot you've already earned.

Fighting as a group

When you group up, the party is resolved as a formation: damage is pooled for a shared kill time, tanks soak more of the incoming hits via threat, and the group gains bonuses for sticking together.

Group bonus	Value
Group XP bonus	+5% per extra member (up to +20% at 5)
Formation damage reduction	10% per extra member (cap 30%)

Combat Score & The Standing

Your overall power is summarized as a Combat Score, combining offense (level, damage, potency, crit) and defense (health, armor, resists). It ranks you on The Standing, the realm-wide leaderboard, and appears when other players inspect you. It's a quick gauge — the details underneath (the right stats for your build) are what actually win fights.