Combat

Due to the merging of the combat professions and associated changes to other professions, this article may be out of date. You can help improve this page by editing it.

Combat
Release						6 March 2025 (Update)
Episode						Global
Premium						No

A player engaged in combat.

Another player engaged in combat.

The combat actions interface.

Choose your first attack!

Combat is a mechanic (and a profession of the same name) in Brighter Shores in which one or multiple player characters fight against monsters or each other. Currently two styles of combat exist, melee and ranged, with melee being the predominant combat style used. Players can equip weapons and armor to make themselves stronger, and potions to heal or buff themselves. Gaining combat levels will increase the player's damage, as well as their max health by 10 per level. Higher combat levels will allow the player to use stronger equipment and unlocking stronger monster variants with increased rewards.

The current maximum level for combat is 2,000, which will increase by 500 levels every episode.

Combat Mechanics

Players may choose any of their currently equipped weapons to initiate combat with a monster, and may swap to any of their equipped weapons between attacks during combat. However, they may not change any part of their loadout, including transmogs, nor organize their inventory, once combat has begun. The player can cast the Immunity spell to avoid (or leave) combat.

On the "Prepare for Battle" interface, there will be indicators displaying how effective your current gear will be against your selected target, indicated by one to three red or green arrows, or a blue equals sign.

Melee weapons have an attack range of one tile, whilst ranged weapons have a range of five tiles. Upon initiating combat, if necessary, the player will automatically move to within attacking range for the weapon they have chosen.

It is generally recommended to initiate combat against exclusively melee monsters with a ranged weapon to deal some free damage while the monster walks up to the player. However, it is recommended to always begin combat in melee when fighting monsters with ranged attacks, as they may land free hits on the player while the player is closing the gap after running out of ammo.

When a ranged weapon runs out of ammo, its card shrinks and its image is dimmed, becoming unselectable for the rest of the fight.

Shields are only effective when visibly equipped (i.e. when using one-handed weapons). However, the game is currently unable to display this information in the user interface. As such, the player will take more damage when using two-handed weapons.

In combat, the player will have a health regeneration equal to 2% of their maximum hitpoints.

Auto-retaliate

Once combat has been initiated, the player will automatically retaliate the monster after every hit. If a ranged weapon was chosen to begin combat, the player will automatically swap to a melee weapon upon running out of ammo. The game will select what it deems to be the most effective weapon from the player's current loadout based on the monster they are currently fighting. Any elemental immunities possessed by the target will be avoided accordingly.

Players may click on the ground during combat to move, which manually overrides auto-retaliation.

Damage

Main article: Damage

During combat, the attacker and their target will deal damage to each other with every attack. The maximum hit will depend on the level of the attacker and, in the case of the player, the strength of their weapon. This is then reduced by the target's armour rating which matches the damage type of the attack. The exact damage dealt will then be rolled between the player's minimum and maximum hits after adjusting for armour. The minimum damage the player may roll will never be lower than 20% of their average hit.

Monsters also have their own deflection stats, evident when an overlevelled player deals damage to an underlevelled monster, as their damage will be greater than what they would normally deal to a monster of similar level. The reverse is also true when fighting monsters above the player's level, albeit less noticeably, as overlevelled monsters are gated by the player's combat level.

If a player is fighting a monster that is many levels below them, a damage cap is implemented, limtiing the kill rate that the player is able to achieve for that monster.

Apart from elemental immunities and vulnerabilities, monster armour ratings are flat values and likely also depend on their combat level, with their weak element having a lower value than the rest, and their immunity element being functionally 100% reduction. There is currently no way to view a monster's armour ratings in-game.

Movement

Movement is allowed during combat, albeit with a reduced movement speed. However, players may not interact with other objects, scenery, dropped items, or reorganize their backpack in any way. Once combat has been initiated, they must end the encounter either by winning, dying, or escaping with the Immunity spell.

If initiating combat with a ranged weapon, a player may retreat to keep their distance from their target, kiting it to some degree to take full advantage of their ranged weapon until it runs out of ammo.

Attack Speed

Main article: Weapon attack speed

After every weapon hit, a white spinning indicator will appear on its card indicating the duration of its attack animation, after which all weapons will be darkened and placed on a global cooldown. The duration of this global cooldown is dependent on the weapon that was used to perform the previous hit. Switching weapons during the global cooldown will ensure the next hit is performed with the new weapon without delay. Since a hit occurs at the end of the attack animation, a weapon's attack speed is the sum of both its animation and global cooldown durations.

Death

Main article: Death

Reaching zero hitpoints in combat will cause the player to die and respawn in the Hopeport infirmary. Other than inconvenience, there currently appear to be no other consequences.

Experience modifiers

Main article: Experience § Combat experience modifiers

If the player is a higher level than the monster they are fighting, they will incur an easy battle penalty on their earned experience, up to 25% with increasing level difference.

In addition to this, the experience given by the monster is further adjusted by their level difference from the player, with relatively higher levelled monsters providing more experience, and lower levelled monsters providing less. This second adjustment is separate to, but applied in tandem with, the Easy Battle Penalty.

Monsters

Main article: Monsters

Monsters are classed into two main categories, active and passive. Killing a monster rewards experience, coins, and a chance to drop equipment of variable rarity and randomized stats. The level of equipment dropped range between the level of the monster killed and the level of the monster immediately preceding it in the same episode, except for the highest levelled monster, which will drop equipment up to the current maximum combat level. Certain monster families may also drop items used for other professions.

As the player progresses through combat, higher level monster variants will be unlocked, and knowledge points may be spent to unlock passive monsters as offline training methods.

Active monsters

Active monsters may be further subdivided into neutral and aggressive monsters. The names of neutral monsters are displayed in orange, while aggressive monsters are indicated by a red name. An exclamation mark (!) will appear over the head of an aggressive monster if it has targeted the player, usually with an aggression radius of five tiles in any direction.

Active monsters may have vulnerabilities and/or immunities to certain elemental attack styles, as displayed on their card, and are typically immune to its own elemental attack style with the exception of Impact, which has no immunity. It is generally inadvisable to fight an active monster with a weapon matching its elemental immunity.

Certain active monsters are stationary and do not move from the tile they spawn on. If these monsters do not possess a ranged attack, it is possible to either retreat out of their attack range or step underneath them safely without disengaging combat, allowing the player to heal or otherwise regenerate their health. If a player so desires, they may kill these monsters at a much lower combat level at the cost of reduced kills/hr.

Passive monsters

Passive monsters may be fought as an offline activity and combat is initiated in a similar way to that of active monsters. The combat level of passive monsters is always equal to its unlock level, and players will require a weapon with a minimum strength rating of the monster's $CombatLevel+20$ to fight. Weapons below this strength rating may not be selected. Passive monsters have no elemental vulnerabilities and cannot physically damage the player. Certain passive monsters will list an elemental immunity, however this is irrelevant as the player's damage is always converted to Impact regardless of the actual element of the weapon chosen.

Fighting passive monsters below the highest tier available to the player, regardless of whether the player has unlocked the new highest passive or not, will subject the player to the passive activity penalty, but they are not subject to the Easy Battle Penalty.

Using a stronger weapon than the minimum requirement on passive mobs that are affected by the passive activity penalty causes the animation of fighting the monsters to cycle faster, with the experience per kill also decreasing to adjust for the increased kill rate. However, this does not affect the average XP, coins, or drops per hour. The highest levelled passive monster is affected by strength-dependent animation cycling, but their xp per hour rates are not affected by the passive activity penalty.

Bosses

Bosses, as indicated on their card, boast increased HP compared to normal monsters of the same level, as well as mechanics the player will be required to perform correctly to avoid taking significant damage.The only mechanic currently implemented in-game are area of effect attacks, indicated by orange highlighted tiles and a blue cast bar above their combat panel. Presently, bosses are only found as part of quests and thus may only be killed once. Most named bosses currently in-game do not have any elemental vulnerabilities or immunities.

Striping

Striping is a system introduced with the combat rework, which aims to progress the player through each area of the game evenly without revisitng past monster variants they've already fought before. Players are cycled through every area, fighting the regional variants in ascending combat level order, before cycling back to the first area and fighting the next strongest variant. The episodes that the player cycles through is based on their release date, not personal unlock, with the exception of the purchasing of a Premium Pass.

Upon the release of a new episode, the player's stripe will be personalised (i.e. edited) such that the variants of the new episode, which would have been surpassed by the player on a non-personalised stripe, are placed immediately in front of the player, encouraging them to play the newest content. Once they have caught up in the newest episode to the non-personalised stripe, they will resume cycling back through the previous areas from the next monster variant.

A similar mechanic to the above applies for free-to-play players. As free-to-play players only have access to the first two episodes, their stripe will cycle between monster variants in Hopeport and Hopeforest. Should they purchase a premium pass, they will cycle through the lower monster variants of the paid episodes placed right ahead of them, encouraging them to explore the new episodes they now have access to. Once they have caught up to the appropriate monster variant in the new episodes, they will once again cycle back to Hopeport to fight the next monster variants.

The striping system means that monsters with the same name and variant may be different combat levels for certain players, depending on their progress in the free-to-play stripe when they bought a Premium Pass, or their progression when individual episodes are released.

The maximum combat level achievable in free-to-play is 1000. Should a player revert back to free-to-play, their stripe will also revert back into the default free-to-play version with only Hopeport and Hopeforest. If they are above combat level 1000, they will also stop gaining any further combat experience. However, their pay-to-play stripe is remembered should they wish to re-subscribe later.

Trivia

• Prior to 6 March 2025, separate combat professions existed for each individual episode. However, they have since been merged into one profession in phase one of the combat rework. Phase 2 will involve a skill tree, as well as special attacks. The profession planned for Episode 5, Shieldbearer, was also scrapped prior to ever releasing.
• Special attacks are intended to be a feature of the combat system, and will likely be released along with skill trees during phase 2 of the combat rework.
• PvP is an upcoming combat feature that will allow player characters to fight each other. Currently it is scheduled to be released some time during Early Access.

Update history

This information has been manually compiled. Some updates may not be included yet.

• update 3 December 2024 (Update):
  • Auto-retaliate no longer cancels player pathing.
  • Allow NPCs to attack players who are crouching.

• update 27 November 2024 (Update):
  • Players now automatically swap to a melee weapon when running out of ranged ammo and automatically retaliate monsters.

• update 11 November 2024 (Update):
  • Slight combat balancing adjustment so fighting low level foes isn't so overpowered.
  • Remove bogus stats from passive monster cards.
  • Fixed 'divide by zero' error showing up during combat.

• update 6 November 2024 (Update):
  • Fixed bug where some players were occasionally getting stuck in combat.

• update 6 November 2024 (Update):
  • Added to game.