Skills & Combat

Each class fights with its own kit — melee combos, ranged volleys, area magic and support. You learn
skills as you level, and execution matters: positioning, timing and target priority decide fights
as much as raw stats. Combat is resolved on the server, never your client — damage, effects and
ranges are all validated server-side, which is what keeps a competitive scene clean.

Weapon arts — nothing to press

A weapon art is a passive, not a spell in your Skill list. It fires on its own while you swing,
and only while you hold the weapon it belongs to. Carry a Glaive and WideStrike sweeps; put the
Glaive away and nothing happens.

Warriors and Trojans choose their first art at Birth Village. KnowItAll hands you one art and
the weapon that carries it. The choice is exclusive — he will not teach a second — so pick the
weapon you want to grow into.

Stun and Strike work from the moment you hold the halbert; the other three sit dormant until level
30, so you carry the weapon and grow into it. Twin City's masters teach these later at their own
gates — the Birth Village pick is the early route, not the only one.

What a stun actually does here. A stunned target cannot attack or cast. It does not root
them — a stunned player can still walk, and will usually walk away from you. Against a monster it is
a full stop, because a monster that cannot attack has nothing else to do. Stuns also carry a short
immunity afterwards, so a fast weapon cannot chain them into a permanent lock. The same applies to
Binding, Boom, Icy Arrow, Freezing Arrow and Earthquake — one shared mechanic.

Scatter comes early

Archers learn Scatter at level 15 (retail made you wait until 23) — the class-defining fan of
arrows, handed over while it still shapes how you learn to play.

• You need arrows. Scatter is a bow skill: no arrows in the quiver and it simply doesn't fire —
  no message, no effect.
• It hits up to 24 targets, nearest first. A volley has a finite number of arrows; area spells
  like Inferno have no such limit and hit everything in their area.

The XP bar — your ultimate

Under your health and mana sits a third gauge: the XP bar, 0 to 100. Fill it and you can cast an
XP skill — the big one, the kind you save for the moment that decides a fight. Around twenty
skills are XP skills, among them Cyclone, Superman, SpeedLightning, Arrow Rain,
Roar, Volcano and Revive. Which ones you can learn depends on your class and your
trainers; a skill that needs the bar simply will not fire until the bar is full.

Killing is how you charge it. An even-level monster is worth 5 points, so roughly 20 kills
fills the bar — a minute or two of real hunting. Standing still also fills it, at 1 point every 3
seconds, but that is a five-minute wait and it is meant to be the slow way.

How hard the fight was decides the rate, and the monster's name colour tells you which rate
you're on before you swing:

Elites and bosses pay triple, up to a ceiling of 25 points from any single kill. So farming
green trash is the worst way to charge the bar even though it dies fastest — the bar rewards
fighting things that can actually hurt you.

A full bar holds for 20 seconds. That's your window: cast the XP skill and it spends the bar back
to empty, or let the window pass and the bar empties on its own and starts filling again. Dying also
empties it.

A charged bar hits harder even before you spend it. Your critical-hit chance scales with the bar —
up to 10% at full — and a critical lands 50% extra damage. So a bar you're holding is already
working for you.

How a skill grows with rank

Every skill has ranks, and a rank is not just "more damage" — three separate things move, and they
move on different schedules.

Damage is a multiplier on your attack, not a flat bonus. A rank-0 WideStrike deals 90% of a
normal hit; at rank 9 it deals 180%. That is why a skill is weak when you first learn it and
becomes your main source of damage later — you are multiplying a number that is also growing as you
gear up. Two skills at the same rank can multiply very differently: Scatter runs 50% → 70%,
because it hits a crowd instead of one target.

Reach grows in steps, and it stops before the damage does. WideStrike's arc widens at ranks 2, 4
and 6 and then stays put while the damage keeps climbing. Scatter is the opposite shape — it keeps
buying distance all the way to rank 5 (15 → 20 tiles), which is most of what you are paying for.

The art itself changes. Each rank of a wave or cone skill is drawn from its own artwork, so the
visible sweep really is bigger at higher rank — what you see is what the skill is doing.

Ranking up costs level, not silver. Each rank names a minimum character level; the last rank has
no level gate because by then you have long since passed it.

Weapon arts follow your weapon's speed

A weapon art fires on its own while you swing, so the weapon in your hands sets the pace. A slow
two-hander casts its art slowly; a fast blade casts it quickly. Swapping to a faster weapon of the
same family is a real increase in how often the art goes off.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Swapping weapons stops the art immediately. Put the sword away mid-fight and ScentSword stops —
  you cannot carry one weapon's art into another weapon.
• An art can never outrun the swing it replaces. The art is the swing, so it fires at most once
  per swing no matter what.

Skills build weapon proficiency

Proficiency is the long grind that unlocks the better weapons. It grows from ordinary swings, from
weapon arts when they proc, and from casting a weapon skill such as Scatter — so playing your
class the way it is designed no longer trains you slower than standing still and auto-attacking.

The award is once per cast, never per target: a Scatter that catches ten monsters trains exactly
as much as one that catches a single monster.

See Classes for how each class plays, and PK & PvP for where and how to
fight other players.