Combat BasicsTargeting, crits, elements, monster ranks, and the rules that shape every fight.

Combat in Skybound is click-to-fight with two skill buttons. Under the hood it’s fully server-resolved: damage, hit chance and crits are all decided by the server, so nothing you see is faked. Here’s how to fight well.

Targeting & attacking

• Select, then engage. Left-click a monster to select it (a cyan reticle). Click the selected target again to engage; your hero walks into range and auto-attacks (a red reticle). Press Tab to grab the nearest monster within 80 units.
• Skills: keys 1 and 2 (or left-click while engaged) fire your two combat skills.
• Reach comes from your weapon. A bow strikes from 22 units, wand/staff from 18, yo-yo 5, and all melee from 2.8. That reach, not your class, sets how far your auto-attack lands.

Hit, miss & critical hits

Hit chance is a contest of your hit rating, which is your DEX, against the monster’s evasion, which rises with its level. On top of that sits your Hit Bonus: every Hit Rate line on your gear and the Oracle’s Accuracy buff are added straight to the result, so +20% really is twenty more points of hit chance. Against a monster the whole thing is held between 40% and 96%, so you always land some blows however you built your character, and buying accuracy always buys it. A monster swinging at you, and a duel, use a floor of 20% instead. Your character window's Detail tab prints the answer for you: Hit Chance (vs same lv) is what you land against a monster of your own level, with your Hit Bonus already counted, and the Dodge Chance and Block Chance rows lower down answer the same question for blows coming the other way. Critical hits come from DEX: 1% base + 0.4% per point of DEX above 15, capped at 50%. A crit deals ×1.5 damage and has a 30% chance to knock the monster back.

Only ordinary attacks crit. No skill does. A critical belongs to the blow you throw by attacking: swings, shots and a caster's wand hits all crit, at the full ×1.5. Nothing you cast from a skill button ever does, and that holds for both kinds of skill: a Channeler's spell and a sword skill alike land for their own number every time. It is why a skill's damage reads steadier than an auto-attack's. Critical chance and Critical Damage on your gear are therefore worth exactly what your ordinary attacks are worth, whatever class you play; they buy nothing on a cast.

Damage scales with your level, gear and attack stat. Auto-attacks and power skills grow +8% per level; learnable skills grow +5% per level of the character, and each skill also gains power as you rank it up.

The five-element wheel

Every weapon and most monsters carry an element. Hitting a foe with the element it’s weak to deals extra damage; hitting into a resistance deals less. The wheel: each element beats the next:

So Fire beats Wind, Wind beats Earth, Earth beats Electricity, Electricity beats Water, and Water beats Fire. Weapons can be element-upgraded up to +10, and Channelers can simply choose the right elemental spell for the foe; a real damage lever once you learn each zone’s creatures (listed in the Bestiary).

The wheel cuts both ways: resistance

A creature’s element is also what its blows are made of, so a Fire monster bites you with fire. Armor can answer that. Some rare armor carries Fire, Water, Earth or Electric Defense, and those are percentages straight off any blow of that element: the level 50 to 53 rare sets put one on all four pieces, so wearing the full set takes 34% off everything that hits you with it. They stack, and no amount of them helps against a blow with no element at all. Two things worth knowing before you buy for it: those sets resist four elements and never Wind, and resistance is capped well short of making you immune, so an elemental attack can always hurt you.

The attacking side of the same coin is Mastery. A few staves, wands and bows carry a Fire Mastery or All Element Mastery line, which is a straight percentage on your own spells of that element. A Stormcaller’s Mastery buffs add to the weapon’s rather than replacing it. A third line, Element Atk., is not damage at all: it adds element levels, so +5 of it on a +3 Fire sword swings as a +8 Fire sword. It does nothing on a weapon you have not element-upgraded yet, it stops at +10, and it counts only on ordinary attacks.

And resistance can be taken away from you. A Channeler’s level 40 spells each tear a hole in one element, always the one that beats their own: Fire Strike opens you up to water, Water Well to electricity, Lightning Shock to earth, Rock Crash to wind, Wind Cutter to fire. The five chain in a circle, which is why they are a team’s combo rather than five bigger nukes. It comes straight off your resistance, so your armor still counts: strip 20 from someone wearing 34 and they are on 14, while stripping someone with none puts them below zero and they take extra. You can see it on your own status row while it lasts.

Monster ranks

Any species can appear at one of five ranks. Higher ranks are tougher and far more rewarding, but only Giants and Bosses hit back harder or have real defense; the rest are just bigger XP.

The level-gap rule

To keep you hunting at-level, monsters below your level pay reduced XP. At or above your level, you get full XP; the further below, the steeper the cut; down to a 20% floor:

Fighting up has two limits, and neither is a taper. A monster 16 or more levels above you grants nothing at all: no XP, no drops. In a party that gap is measured from the highest-level attacker, so one low member never costs the group its rewards. And a single kill more than 4 levels above you is capped, so one lucky pull cannot hand you a level: the cap is the larger of a twentieth of your level bar and eight ordinary at-level kills, whichever is more generous at your level.

The gap changes how hard it hits you, too, in both directions. A monster below your level hits softer: the first 4 levels of your advantage change nothing, then it loses 5% a level, down to a 30% floor. An ordinary monster above your level hits harder: the first 2 levels change nothing, then it gains 15% a level, up to a ceiling of two and a half times. So nine levels up roughly doubles a blow, and luring a crowd of them is no longer something you can stand in. Giants and bosses are left out of that half, because their rank already hits for several times an ordinary blow; out-levelling one still softens it, as it always did.

And the gap changes how hard you hit it. Out-levelling an ordinary monster raises the damage you deal against it: the first 4 levels of your advantage change nothing, then you gain 20% a level, up to a ceiling of three times. That ceiling is reached at 14 levels of advantage, which is the deepest you are allowed to strike at all, so an old field stops being a wall the moment you have genuinely grown out of it. Giants, bosses and the roaming Catchers are left out: a world boss a group is meant to gather for must not melt because one raider out-levels it.

The practical takeaway: don’t farm grey trash. It dies faster now, but it still pays the reduced XP in the table above, so the hour is better spent at your own level. Move up the level bands with your character. On server-owned zones, attacking a monster far beneath you is blocked outright with a “No challenge” note (the roaming Catchers are exempt: anyone can hunt those).

When you fall

When your HP reaches zero you fall, and a choice appears:

• Restore Point: rise at this area’s waystone.
• Dawnhaven: rise at the home town’s waystone (not offered when you are already in Dawnhaven).
• Accept Rescue: only while an Oracle is casting Resurrection on you. You rise where you fell, with half your HP.

Rising at a waystone gives back a fifth of your HP, MP and FP, so heal up before you head back into a fight. If you choose nothing for 10 minutes, you rise at the area’s waystone on your own.

Leaving while fallen (refreshing the page, closing the game, losing your connection or changing channel) brings you back standing in Dawnhaven, with a fifth of your HP, MP and FP. You never come back where you fell. The one exception is a live guild war on the channel you return to, which seats its own fighters back on the Ring.

The Skyfront Ring, the guild-war ground, is the only place you get back up with full HP, MP and FP.

Stacking XP bonuses