How are world zone fights decided in Valiant?

Each encounter compares your time-to-kill (how fast you drop the enemy) against your time-to-fall (how fast it drops you). If you kill faster than you fall, you win. It resolves in a single pass from your stats - there are no rounds and no dice on the fight itself.

Why did my character flee?

If the engine projects that continuing would kill you, your character flees instead of dying. You keep everything already banked but forfeit the rest of that tick. Fleeing also fully restores your health and endurance, so it is a safety net rather than a punishment.

Do I get more experience for killing rarer enemies?

No. Experience in world zones is flat and time-based - you earn it per tick regardless of what you fight, multiplied only by XP Rate gear. Enemy rarity affects gold and loot quality, not experience.

World Zone Combat

Expedition combat is a single-pass duel: your time-to-kill against your time-to-fall. Each 15-minute tick rolls 3 to 5 encounters, and the fight itself is fully deterministic — the same stats against the same enemy always give the same result.

The core check

For every encounter the engine works out two clocks:

Time-to-kill (TTK) — the enemy's health divided by your damage output (including elemental damage, crits, and any splash across a pack).
Time-to-fall (TTF) — your effective health divided by the damage getting through your armor, resists, and block.

You win if TTK is at or below TTF. That is the whole fight. This is why both halves of your sheet matter: raising damage shortens TTK, raising defense lengthens TTF, and either one can flip a losing encounter.

What a tick throws at you

Thing	Value
Encounters per tick (solo)	3 to 5
Encounters per tick (group of N)	N+1 to N+3
Chance a common spawns as a pack	20% (packs of 2-3)
Rares and world bosses	Always spawn alone

Packs hit harder than a single enemy but reward splash and area talents, which read the enemy count directly. Enemy health and damage scale with the zone's difficulty tier and the enemy's rarity — a world boss has many times the health and damage of a common in the same zone.

Threat grading: how dangerous is this?

Before engaging, your Combat Score is measured against the enemy's difficulty to grade the encounter. Against a catastrophically overpowered world boss your character refuses the fight outright rather than throwing away the run.

Fleeing and the phase cascade

Damage is sticky. About 10% of the damage you take carries into the next encounter as lingering harm, reduced by your Phase Mitigation. That accumulation is what eventually ends a run:

Flee — if the projection says the next fight kills you, your character disengages, forfeits the rest of the tick, and fully restores health and endurance.
Win but withdraw — if you win a fight but are too battered to continue, the kill still counts and the tick ends early.

Tip

Frequent fleeing means the zone is above your gear. Either drop a tier, raise Phase Mitigation to blunt the carryover, or raise raw defense.

Fighting in a group

When several characters share a zone they resolve as a formation, which changes the math in your favor:

Group effect	Detail
Cohesion damage reduction	10% at 2, 20% at 3, 30% at 4+
Damage distribution	Split by each member's Threat share
More encounters	Baseline scales with party size
Shared victory	If anyone wins, everyone banks the kill
Boss scaling	Rares and bosses gain health and damage per member

A high-Threat tank soaks the majority of incoming damage so fragile allies are spared — see Threat & Aggro. Healers in the party redirect heals to whoever is hurt worst.

Rewards

Experience is flat and time-based: you earn a set amount per tick for your level, multiplied by XP Rate gear. It does not depend on what you kill.
Gold scales with enemy rarity and zone tier, and is boosted by Gold Gain.
Loot rolls per drop on the rarity table — see Loot & Magic Find.

Note

You arrive fully rested on every deploy, so each new expedition starts with a full endurance pool.