How battles work: turn order, armor and statuses

Battles run automatically, so the fight itself is out of your hands. What you control is the lineup, and to set a good lineup you need to know the rules it plays by.

The order of a battle

A battle starts with a Preparation step, when start-of-battle effects fire. That includes your champion’s ability and abilities like Battle Cry and Hold. Heroes begin every fight at full health.

After that, each round has three phases:

Phase	What happens	Examples
Upkeep	Damage over time and start-of-round effects	Hexed, Burning, Poisoned, Purify
Main	Each unit acts, fastest first	Strike, Bolt, Thunderclap, Enfeeble
Cleanup	End-of-round effects	Mend, Second Wind, Brace, Crescendo

Rounds continue until one side has no units left. Long fights don’t go on forever: from round 15, every living unit takes growing fatigue damage each round.

Speed decides who goes first

Turn order is set by speed at the start of each round. A speed change during a round takes effect the next round, not immediately.

Acting first matters more than you might think. A fast Apprentice can hit the whole enemy team before anyone on that team acts, and killing a unit before its turn means it never gets one.

Your lineup decides who gets hit

Slot 1 is your front, and slot 5 is your back. Most attacks follow simple targeting rules:

Strike, Shield Bash and Drain Life hit the enemy at the front.
Bolt and Hex go to the enemy at the back.
Thunderclap hits every enemy.
Mend heals the friend with the lowest health.

Knowing this tells you where to put each hero. The sturdiest hero usually goes in front. The back is safer against melee, but not against Bolts, so a fragile hero isn’t automatically safe there.

Position also matters to abilities like Squire’s Armorer (helps the friend directly in front) and Shieldbearer’s Bulwark (covers the friend directly behind).

Armor is stronger than it looks

This is the most important rule that the ability text doesn’t spell out.

While a unit has armor, a hit takes away armor instead of health, and any extra damage is lost. A unit with 1 armor can completely absorb an 8-damage hit. The hit removes the armor, and no health is lost.

This has three big consequences:

Small armor gains are valuable when they come often. Grove Warden’s Barkskin gives only 1 armor per round, but that can cancel a full hit on each friend who has none.
Many small hits beat armor. Each hit only needs to take off a little, so Thunderclap, which hits every enemy, is excellent at clearing armor before your heavy attackers swing.
Some damage skips armor altogether. Pierce (such as Flurry, Precision and Executioner’s Axe) and status damage (Hexed, Burning, Poisoned) go straight to health.

Riposte only works while the unit has armor, and Bloodlust doesn’t trigger on hits that armor stops. Keep those two in mind when you decide who gets armor.

Statuses

Status	Effect
Held	Skips its next attack
Weakened	Loses 1 power each round for 2 rounds
Marked	The next attack that damages it deals double
Hexed	Loses 2 health per stack each round for 2 rounds
Poisoned	Loses 1 health per stack every round for the rest of the battle
Burning	Loses 1 health, then 2, then 3, and so on each round
Frenzied	An extra melee attack every round (this one is good!)

Hexed, Poisoned and Burning all ignore armor, so they are the natural answer to heavily armored enemies. Paladin’s Purify and the Holy Water trinket remove statuses.

Reading a lost battle

The battle report counts only health damage. A hero showing very little damage may still have done useful work stripping armor, so check the battle log before you decide to drop that hero. For each loss, ask:

Did the front hero die in the first round or two? You may need more health or armor up front.
Did the enemy back line go untouched? You may need Bolts or area damage.
Did you deal lots of hits for little health damage? The enemy’s armor probably absorbed them, and you may need pierce or status damage.