How does combat work in Valiant?

Combat is resolved from your character sheet, not from reflexes. Your attributes, gear, talents, and companion aggregate into a stat block, and the game resolves fights from those numbers. Valiant has three combat modes - world zone expeditions, the Descent dungeon, and 20-player raids - and each resolves fights with a different engine, though they all share the same underlying stats and caps.

What are the resistance caps in Valiant?

Fire, cold, poison, and elemental resistance each cap at 75%. Corruption resistance caps at 65%. Physical damage is not resisted - it is reduced by your armor instead, though at least 25% of any physical hit always lands no matter how much armor you stack.

Does more Skill Potency always mean more damage?

It helps, but with diminishing returns. Skill Potency runs through a bounded amplifier that approaches a maximum of +75%, so the first few hundred points matter far more than the next thousand. Stacking it infinitely is not a viable strategy.

Combat Fundamentals

Valiant has three combat modes, and each resolves fights with its own engine. But they all read the same character sheet and obey the same caps. This page covers the shared rules; the mode pages cover what makes each fight different.

The three modes at a glance

Mode	How a fight is decided	Party
World Zone	Time-to-kill vs time-to-fall, resolved in one pass per encounter	Solo or up to 5-6
The Descent	Your party's combined power vs a wave threshold	Exactly 5 seats
Raids	Round-by-round simulation with World Sense skill checks	20 seats, 15 minimum

Read World Zone Combat, Descent Combat, and Raid Combat for each engine in detail.

Damage types & resistances

There are six damage types. Physical is reduced by armor; the other five are reduced by their matching resistance, each with a hard cap.

Damage type	Reduced by	Cap
Physical	Armor / Mitigation	75% absorbed (see below)
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 in the game to resist and shows up on the nastiest content, including the final raid boss. If you are pushing endgame, corruption resist is worth a dedicated slot.

Armor and the 25% floor

Each point of armor absorbs a slice of incoming physical damage, but at least 25% of every physical hit always lands, no matter how much armor you stack. You cannot armor your way to invulnerability. Armor is excellent, with a ceiling.

Crit and block

Mechanic	Scaling	Cap
Critical hits	Crit stat; deals double damage	50% chance
Block	Block stat; requires a shield	60% chance

Block is shield-only — no shield means zero block, which is a large part of why shield tanks are so durable.

Skill Potency: bounded, not infinite

Skill Potency amplifies your talents and your critical damage, but it runs through a bounded amplifier that approaches +75%. The first few hundred points are enormously valuable; the thousandth point does very little. Build breadth once potency starts flattening.

Endurance scales everything

Your current endurance sets a multiplier on your offense and defense, sliding from full power at a brimming pool down to a 50% floor when empty. It is the quietest big lever in the game — see Endurance.

Where your numbers come from

Every mode builds your stat block the same way: your six attributes, your equipped gear and inscriptions, your talents, your deployed companion, and any active provisions (food and drink) are aggregated into one sheet. Improve the sheet and you improve in all three modes at once.

Note

One exception worth knowing: raids freeze your stat snapshot when the run begins. Swapping gear mid-raid does nothing until the next run.