Combat

Every hit on a wizard, a skeleton, a spider, a bat, a plant, the listener, the boss or a crate lands the same way, and every heal works the same way. That is not a detail -- it is why a dodge roll turns *everything* at once, and why a shield never has to know what hit it.

What a blow does

A blow takes health, hands out a knockback, and staggers -- and how much of each it does is the weapon's, not the target's. A hard enough hit floors you: your torso unlocks and you tumble. A full-charge bash floors outright.

Out of health, a wizard does not die. See Going down, below.

The screen tells you how hard something landed before the number does. A hit throws a toon starburst sized and spiked by the damage, with debris in the victim's own material -- bone chips off a skeleton, ichor off a spider or a plant, iron sparks off the boss -- and the sound to match. A hit of your own flicks the crosshair and shoves the camera a hair toward it. Damage numbers float up off the wound: bone white normally, gold when it is big.

A swing that missed shows nothing at all, because nothing moved.

The four ways a blow is turned

In order, because they are checked in order:

1. Invulnerability frames. A dodge roll is untouchable for its whole length, and it turns away everything at once -- an arc, a punch, a swing, the spikes. A roll also passes *through* projectiles rather than stopping them in somebody it did nothing to. It is not a way through the world or through a crowd, only through shots.
2. A raised shield. A blow marked blockable, arriving at your front, is turned off your stamina rather than your health. See Weapons.
3. The spawn shield. For a few seconds after you spawn the blow still lands -- the kick and the stagger come with it -- and only the damage is turned.
4. Poise. The boss's, and the boss's alone. While it lives nothing staggers it, nothing floors it, and a knockback moves it a fraction of what it would move you. A boss you can stun-lock is not a boss.

Nothing lands on the dead, either: a character out of health is mid-tumble toward a respawn or a bone pile, and a blow would restart a tumble that then never ends.

Bare hands

An empty mitten punches. It is not much, but it is never nothing: it lands on anything that can be hurt -- a skeleton, a beast, a crate -- while another player is only shoved, and the shove that comes with it moves props and staggers something already off balance.

Grabbing and throwing

Hold the button with a staff or a sidearm in that mitten and whatever is in front of you is tethered to the hand and levitated ahead of you. Let go to throw it along your aim.

Grabs are tethers, never welds -- a grabbed thing is still a physics body being pulled, which is why a heavy crate lags behind your hand and a light one snaps to it. How much you can carry is your grip, and grip is where the Artificer and the Wizard earn their keep.

The dodge roll

Two quick taps of a walk key -- W W, A A, S S, D D -- rolls that way, whatever else you are holding. Untouchable the whole way, and paid for out of stamina.

It goes even when you cannot afford it. The roll's first tick is never refused: it takes whatever is left in the meter, however little, and empties it if that is what it takes. The way out is always there, and the price of taking it when you could not afford it is being winded. See Movement for what winded means.

Whether a roll happens at all is the server's call -- the ground, or the one air roll a fall allows, or a wall -- so a roll you press for and never get is a roll the world refused.

Going down

Out of health is not death. A lethal blow tumbles you as any hard blow would, and when the tumble settles you are down: on the floor, crawling at a fraction of your walk, and unable to do anything else at all -- no mittens, no hotbar, no levers, no chests, no pickups.

What can now kill you is the bleed-out clock, and only that.

• The clock is shorter every time it has happened to you this run, down to a floor it never goes under.
• Every blow that lands on you while you are down takes time, not health -- there is no health left to take.
• Enemies keep hunting you. Being down is not being hidden.

A lethal blow lands its tumble and none of its knockback, and so does every blow after it -- so a body stays where it fell and a rescuer always knows where to come.

Being picked up

A teammate standing over you and holding the use button fills a revive bar. Letting go, walking out of reach, being staggered, or going down themselves interrupts it -- and they have no hands of their own while they do it, so somebody has to be watching the room.

A revive is not a heal. It gives your health back and takes a large slice of the lifebar as fatigue, which wears off on its own -- or is lifted early by a potion or a cleric's circle. Fatigue on the bar means it takes that much less damage to put you down again.

Giving up

You do not have to wait. Holding the use button on your own body ends the clock yourself: you die, you respawn, and your kit is on the floor where you fell.

The button must be released after you fall before the hold counts, so the swing that killed you can never spend it for you.

Actually dying

When the bleed-out runs out you ragdoll for a few seconds with YOU DIED across the screen, then respawn fully healed and fully cleansed -- every affliction cleared with the body. A real death owes nothing.

What it costs is your kit. Everything goes on the floor: the paper doll as one corpse named for you, the belt item by item, and the pack on your back as itself. Walk back to it. See Equipment.

Healing

• A healing potion clicked in a mitten restores health outright, and drinking it also counts as a meal. Thrown, it shatters and splashes every wizard and skeleton nearby for half -- including you.
• The cleric's Heal Circle pulses healing into whoever stands in it, friend or foe.
• Both lift the fatigue a revive left, beside the health they put back.
• Mushrooms eaten out of a mitten heal or poison depending on which one you picked.