Combat

A player engaged in combat.

Another player engaged in combat.

The combat actions interface.

Choose your first attack!

Combat is a mechanic 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 their max health, damage and deflect rating, allowing them to use stronger equipment and unlocking stronger monster variants with increased rewards.

The current combat professions available to the player, one per episode, are as follows.

Episode		Name
1	Hopeport		Guard
2	Hopeforest		Scout
3	Mine of Mantuban		Minefighter
4	Crenopolis		Watchperson
5	Stonemaw Hill		Shieldbearer

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 their equipped armor, weapons or potions once combat has begun.

Melee weapons, as their name implies, have an attack range of 1 tile, whilst ranged weapons have a range of 5. Upon initiating combat, if necessary, the player will automatically move to within attacking range for the weapon they have chosen.

Weapon Swapping

If a ranged weapon is chosen to initiate combat, the player will automatically swap to a melee weapon upon running out of ammo as of this update. Prior to this, the player was expected to manually swap to a melee weapon. Failure to do so within the final global cooldown of the ranged weapon incurred a harsh global cooldown penalty, sounding a klaxon and triggering a notification telling the player that they are out of ranged ammo.

Once ranged ammo has been depleted, the game will select what it deems to be the weapon from the player's loadout that will deal the most damage to the monster they are currently fighting. Assuming the two melee weapons are of similar strength, the game will take elemental immunity and advantage into account when making this selection.

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 mobs, kiting it to some degree to take full advantage of their ranged weapon until it runs out of ammo. As of writing this, this update has rendered kiting slightly more tedious, but not impossible, to execute, as the player's in-combat movement pathing is cancelled after every ranged hit.

Attack Speed

After every weapon hit, a white 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

Reaching 0 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.

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 preceeding it in the same episode. Certain mobs throughout the game may also occasionally drop items used for other professions.

Normal monsters have vulnerabilities and/or immunities to certain elemental attack styles, as displayed on their card. Monsters are immune to its own elemental attack style, and it is generally inadvisable to fight a monster with a weapon matching its elemental immunity.

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

Monster Types

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 aggroed onto you.

Passive monsters may be fought as an offline activity and combat is initiated in a similar way to that of active monsters. However, passive monsters require weapons above a certain strength rating to fight, and players may not select any weapons below this strength rating.

Certain 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 retreat out of their attack range. If a player so desires, they may kill these monsters at a much lower combat level, albeit very inefficiently.

Certain monsters are bosses, which will be indicated on their card. Bosses boast increased HP compared to normal monsters of the same level, and some have access to area of effect attacks as indicated by orange highlighted tiles and a blue cast bar above their combat panel. Currently, bosses are only found as part of quests and thus may only be killed once. Most of the named bosses that are currently ingame do not have any elemental vulnerabilities or immunities.

Trivia

• Special attacks are intended to be a feature of the combat system, and are scheduled to be released some time during Early Access.
• 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 6 November 2024 (Update):
  • Combat was included in the first public early-access release of the game.