Combat

Combat in Battleheart: Legacy is fairly straight forward, consisting of tapping to move, tapping to attack, and tapping skills to activate them. The simple nature of these mechanics provide for fast-paced and immersive battles.

Movement

Simply tapping the screen will cause your hero to move to that location. Moving around during battle is of varying importance for different classes, but must always be considered.

• Use "Line of Sight" to force ranged attackers into moving before they are able to attack you.
• Tight locations can be used to your advantage by minimizing the number of melee monsters that can reach you.
• Ranged heroes tend to be squishy and may need to "kite" monsters by keeping on the move.

Attacking

Just tapping a monster will initiate your attacks, but you must be in range. As this can sometimes be difficult for melee heroes, there is an option in the Setting menu called "Auto Movement" that will cause your hero to automatically approach melee range a selected monster if you don't have a ranged weapon equipped.

Once your attack has begun, it will continue until you change your target or your current target dies. If you have the option "Auto Targeting" on in the Settings menu, your hero will automatically choose a target when struck or choose another one when the current one dies. You can also cancel your current target by taping the screen with three fingers which can be useful if you want to center the screen on your character. The rate of attack is one of the main difference between the types of weapons and is important when choosing the suitable one. If every type of weapon has to inflict 5 auto-attacks the results would be as follows: bows tend to be the slowest of them all with 5 attacks in 8 seconds, both staves and colossal weapons do that within 7 seconds and the other "normal" (they don't require a special skill) have another factor that I'll call "combos". Swords, axes and blunt weapons appear to be the golden mean: 5 attacks using them can result in anything between 3-5 seconds, their combos consist of 2 hits. The "fastest of 'em all" are daggers and fist weapons both hitting 5 times in 2-3(!) seconds with their combos being made of 3-4 hits. Note that fist weapons take both weapon slots unlike daggers that you can take two of.

Your auto-attack rate can be improved upon via passive skills and equipped items with a maximum increase being 66%. It is the only means of benefiting from skills like Wrath. Skills like Frenzy can really help your attack speed.

Stutter-stepping

You can also remove your attack cooldown by using a technique called "stutter-stepping". The technique is demonstrated as followed:

• Move a little bit after your blade has touched the enemy/ or your staff has successfully conjured an elemental ball.

• Please note that this technique requires timing and might ruin an attack if not done well. If done carefully, you can effectively alleviate the Barbarian's issue of low attack speed, or daggers not hitting the 3 or 4-hit combo.

By performing this technique, you skip the backswing of your weapon and still deals damage since the game registers an auto-attack after the attack time is complete but counts the backswing as the whole auto-attack cooldown.

Active Skills

Your hero's active skills are listed along the bottom center of the screen. These are configured on your hero's character sheet but cannot be changed once you have entered a hostile zone as well as passive skills. For this reason, take special care to fine tune your skills before taking on different types of areas.

While your hero begins with only 4 available slots, this limit will increase to 6 slots at level 5 and then 8 slots at level 10. This limitation likely exists to prevent new heroes from cherry picking too many early skills, thus spreading themselves too thin too early and doesn't affect new game+. To be sure, you are welcome to do just that, but will still be forced to focus on 4 or fewer classes through level 5.

All active skills have a specific "cooldown" duration measured in seconds. Upon activation, the cooldown begins and the skills unusable until it completes; the skill is dimmed out during this period. Managing your cooldowns is a critical element of combat and must always be considered. Take, for example, the first two Knight skills, Power Attack and Cleave. The first has a 6 second cooldown while the latter has a 10 second cooldown. It is typically better to lead with Power Attack before Cleave for two reasons:

1. Getting your shorter cooldown burning first will ensure maximum usage. For monsters that die quickly, this can be the difference between using Power Attack twice (for a fast kill) or just once (relying on auto-attacks to finish the monster).
2. If there are multiple monsters, it will take some small amount of time for all of them to fall within the range of your Cleave attack. Waiting to use this second will ensure that you hit has many monsters as possible in your first use.

The last "skill" on your screen isn't a skill at all; it's your potions. You get 5 potions on normal difficulty and each one will completely refill your health regardless of how hurt you are at the time. For this reason, always try to use your potions at the last possible moment to maximize your benefit. Changing the game's difficulty setting will increase or reduce the number of available potions accordingly.

Passive Skills

Passive skills are not visible during combat, but can greatly improve your performance. Many of these skills combo well with other classes so it pays to cross train.

There are three basic types of passive skills:

• Equips: Empowers your hero to equip new items such as a shield or a bow.
• Stats: Directly improves a specific statistic such as attack power or chance to crit.
• Mechanics: Alters the way things work such as reducing cooldowns or creating a persistent offensive aura.

Because passive skills are always active, it takes no action on your part to reap their benefits. Choosing the right passives can be incredibly effective for this reason.

Damage Types

There are 4 basic damage types which generally depends only on the type of weapon you equip:

• Piercing: Bows, Swords, and Knives
• Bludgeoning: Fists and Maces
• Slashing: Knives, Swords, and Axes
• Magical: Staves

And then there are 4 sub-damage attacks which you can only deal through the use of active skills with the exception of staves:

• Poison: not all poison damage will deal periodic damage such as the Rogue's Envenom and Poisoned Knife. Various classes use poison like Witch and Necromancer but the Rogue uses it the most. Envenom causes your auto attacks to deal poison damage.
• Holy: usually good against undead enemies like mummies and skeletons, holy damage is found exclusively in the Paladin class. Wraith causes your auto attacks to deal holy damage.
• Unholy: bad against the undead, although most unholy skills are generally broke to start with, unholy damage is used in the Necromancer and Witch classes in spells like Life Drain and Soul Mass. There are no way to cause auto-attacks dealing unholy damage.
• Elemental: divided into 3 types: Flame, Ice, and Lighting. Used primarily by the Battlemage and the Wizard . A lot of the creatures of Haggerdom have resistances or vulnerabilities to these damage types, and it can be useful to know when using the Battlemage's Thundering, Arctic, and/or Flaming Weapon to maximize the damage done. Auto-attacks deal elemental attacks corresponding to their elemental weapon enhancements.

Creatures may have a resistance or take extra damage from the various different damage types. Generally the bonus damage and resistance are around 10% - 15% for the basic damage types and 20% - 30% for the sub damage types. These vulnerabilities and resistances may vary depending whether the monster is normal or a boss.