Combat

Combat in Idle Wushu is tick-based and resolves automatically. You set up your character (your school, weapon, ability loadout, gear, and combat tree), then your character fights on its own, one tick at a time. Winning is about preparation, not reflexes.

The combat clock

Everything in the game runs on a 3-second tick. In combat, two separate timers fill up over those ticks:

• Your auto-attack swings on a steady interval set by your weapon. It costs nothing and always available.
• Your abilities fire on their own cadence whenever one is ready, you have the Qi for it, and you are not prevented from casting.

Both you and your opponent run these timers at the same time, so faster characters simply act more often. Anything that speeds you up (Haste) or slows you down (Slow) stretches or shrinks these intervals.

Your combat stats

Your character is described by a set of derived stats. Right now these come mostly from your cultivation rank and your combat tree; gear adds more as you progress. The stats group into a few jobs:

Group	Stats	What they do
Vitals	HP, Qi, regen	Your health and your ability resource, plus how fast each refills
Offence	Attack, Pillar	Attack drives weapon hits and external (physical) abilities; Pillar drives internal (spiritual) abilities
Accuracy	Accuracy, Dodge	Decide whether an attack lands
Critical	Crit Rate, Crit Damage	Chance for a bigger hit, and how much bigger
Defence	Defence, Ability Defence, Damage Reduction	Soak physical hits, spiritual hits, and a flat percentage off everything
Penetration	Armour Pen, Ability Pen	Cut through a target’s defence
Tempo	Speed, Ability Haste	How often you swing and how quickly abilities come off cooldown
Sustain	Lifesteal, Resilience, Tenacity	Heal from damage dealt, resist being debuffed, and shorten debuffs that land

You do not edit these numbers directly. You raise them by cultivating, spending combat points, equipping gear, and keeping the right buffs up.

How an attack resolves

When a hit is attempted, the game asks two questions: does it land, and how hard.

Does it land

Hit chance compares your Accuracy against the target’s Dodge:

hit chance = Accuracy / (Accuracy + Dodge)

The result is always clamped between 5% and 95%. No matter how accurate you are, attacks still miss 1 time in 20; no matter how evasive a target is, it still gets hit 1 time in 20.

How hard it hits

Damage is built up in stages. In order:

1. Base damage comes from the move’s scaling (weapon hits and external abilities use Attack; internal abilities use Pillar), times a small random roll of plus or minus 15%.
2. Penetration shaves the target’s defence before it applies.
3. Defence reduces what is left on a diminishing curve, so each point of defence is worth a little less than the last. Stacking defence stays useful but never makes you immune.
4. Critical hits multiply the result. A normal crit deals 1.5x damage, and Crit Damage raises that multiplier. Crit Rate is capped at 50%.
5. Damage Reduction takes a flat percentage off, capped at 75%.
6. Outgoing and incoming modifiers from buffs and debuffs (Empower, Weaken, Expose, and so on) adjust the final number.

Every landed hit deals at least 1 damage.

The short version

High Accuracy lands hits. Attack and Pillar make them big. Crit Rate and Crit Damage make some of them huge. Defence and Damage Reduction keep you alive. Penetration is how you beat a tanky target.

Abilities and Qi

Abilities are your active moves. Each one costs Qi, your combat resource. Qi refills a little every tick and faster with the right buffs. When an ability is ready and you can pay for it, it fires; if you cannot, your character falls back to an auto-attack.

Speeding up your abilities works two ways: Ability Haste lowers cooldowns, and Haste buffs shorten the cast cadence. Effects like Silence (cannot cast), Disarm (cannot auto-attack), Stun, and Freeze can lock parts of your kit, which is why status effects matter so much.

Schools, weapons, and loadouts

Your fighting style comes from a martial school. There are eight schools, each built around a distinct theme, from the disciplined Iron Lotus to the reckless Heavenly Demon. You join one school, and it defines the abilities available to you.

• Each school has two weapons, and each weapon comes with its own set of abilities.
• You build a loadout by choosing four abilities plus one ultimate to bring into a fight, so two players in the same school can play very differently.
• You can learn abilities from other schools, but off-school abilities are limited to a lower mastery level and scale off the ability’s own power rather than your school’s strength, so your home school is always where you are strongest.

Levelling your abilities

Each ability levels up the more you use it, from level 1 to level 5. Higher levels make an ability hit harder, cost less Qi, and come off cooldown a touch faster. By level 5 a move is roughly 40% stronger than at level 1. Off-school abilities cap at level 3.

The combat tree

Killing enemies earns combat points. You spend these in your combat tree to allocate stats: more Attack, more Defence, more Crit, and so on. The tree is the main way you customise your character’s raw numbers, so two cultivators of the same rank can be tuned for very different roles.

Status effects

Most of the depth in combat lives in status effects: damage over time, control like Stun and Freeze, defence shreds, healing, shields, and dozens of buffs and debuffs. How likely a debuff is to stick depends on the target’s Resilience, and how long it lasts depends on their Tenacity.

See the full Status Effects catalogue for what each one does and how to apply, resist, or cleanse it.

Where you fight

The same combat engine runs everywhere, but the stakes and rules differ by mode.

Solo hunting

Against monsters you fight one foe at a time. When it falls it drops loot and combat experience, then respawns after a short delay. This is your steady source of gear, materials, and combat points.

Co-op dungeons

In a party of up to five, you clear rounds of enemies in sequence. Your HP, Qi, and anything you have spent carry over between rounds, so survival is a long game. If a member falls, they revive at the start of the next round at half health, but if the whole party drops at once the run ends.

Duels

One on one against another player, both sides’ stats are locked in when the duel begins. If neither player wins within the time limit (about 30 minutes), the cultivator with the higher remaining health percentage takes the win, and an exact tie is a draw. Consumables are disabled in duels, so it is a pure test of build and school.

Related

• Status Effects: the buffs and debuffs that decide most fights.
• Cultivation: the source of your base combat stats.
• Skills: how you gather and craft the gear you fight in.