Turn-based combat

Every fight in ARK is turn-based: your hero (and anything you summon) against a group of one to four monsters (and anything they summon). You pick a skill and a target, and the battle runs until it's your turn again. Every skill, stat and status works the same way it does on paper. Damage, armor, resistances, leech, procs and poison all follow the rules in the rest of this wiki.

Who acts next: rounds

A battle goes in rounds. In each round everyone alive acts once, fastest first. In the current alpha, turn order uses each fighter’s basic-attack frames, affected by IAS, weapon speed and slow. The frame counts come from the breakpoints tables. FCR only grants a breakpoint-based chance to skip a normal spell's cooldown. It never changes round order or grants an extra turn. See breakpoints.

Whoever has the shorter action acts earlier in the round.
Being at least twice as fast as the fastest enemy gives you a second turn each round, at its end. A smaller edge only moves you up the order.
Ties go to your side, then to whoever joined first. A summon called mid-round acts from the next round.
You always open a battle: in the first round you act before any monster.
The "Next" row in battle shows the coming turns.

Effect time advances at complete round boundaries. Poison ticks, auras pulse, walls of fire burn and slow projectiles fly as the simulation processes a round. A buff shown as 10 rounds lasts ten rounds regardless of attack speed or party size. Every buff, curse and status ends with the battle, so cast your buffs in the fight you need them. Only a Druid's form stays (until you change back), along with a shrine's blessing and the Ferryman's toll.

Getting hit and blocking

A hit bigger than 1/12 of a fighter's max life staggers it, and blocking takes a moment too: if the fighter hasn't acted yet this round, its turn moves to the end of the round.

Block chance is the number on your gear and skills, as it is: no Dexterity or level in it, so it doesn't fade as you level up. It's capped, and spells can't be blocked.

Autoheal heals a share of your max life at the end of each of your turns (capped at 8%). It comes from some skills, event blessings and the GRAAL rune.

Replenish Life heals a flat amount at the end of each of your turns, however long the turn was: strong on the first floors, while Autoheal (a share of your max life) is what keeps up deep down. Negative replenish (a cursed item) drains you, but never kills.

Turning the clock against monsters

Some gear and skills take turns away from monsters instead of life:

Daze is a chance, on each hit, that the monster loses its next turn. A dazed monster can't be dazed again until it has acted, so it still gets at least every other turn. The Evocator's Dread curse dazes everyone it reaches.
Knockback sends the target to the end of the round; if it has already acted (or was last anyway), it acts last in the next round.
Hit Blinds Target: a blinded monster misses a third of its weapon attacks while blindness lasts.
Slows Target makes every action of the monster take longer, so it acts later in the round (and, slowed enough, you may get two turns to its one).

Frozen, stunned or dazed fighters lose their next turn, and the status ends with it. Nobody loses two turns in a row: after a lost turn, the next one is always played, however fast the enemy re-freezes. A fighter is pushed back by a stagger or a block at most once between two of its turns, and all slows together never slow anyone by more than 50%.

Every battle ends

After 40 of your turns, everyone in the battle starts losing a share of their max life at the start of each turn, more every turn, and barriers break. A fight two sides can't win (a boss you can't flee, wards that keep coming back) still ends.

Item charges

Skills on your gear with charges ("Level 5 Winter's Breath (12/20 Charges)") show up as extra actions in battle, at the item's level and with their own cooldown. Each use spends a charge; the merchant refills them.

Interrupted battles

Loading an unfinished battle restarts that room's fight for both sides. Your hero returns with the life, equipment, item charges and cooldowns held at the start of the fight; your mercenary and persistent summons also return to their starting state. Damage and charge spending from the interrupted attempt do not carry over against fresh enemies. Entering the room's healing is not applied again. Once a battle is resolved, its final life and spent charges are saved normally.

Skills and cooldowns

Starting kits supply focused damage and a support tool, rather than a free damaging area. Learn group attacks from skill rewards. Barbed Tooth is a single bone projectile; Druid starts with a Raven companion and Wendigo form. Frozen Armor and Dread are instant defensive/control options that retain their cooldowns.

Melee Splash and lightning thorns

Splash spreads a percentage of a landed melee hit's physical roll to up to two other enemies in the current group. For example, 50% Splash on a 100-physical-damage roll sends 50 physical damage to each secondary target before its own armor and resistance. Crushing Blow and added elemental damage are excluded. Secondary hits do not repeat Strength, leech, weapon procs, statuses, thorns or Splash; their kills still grant kill rewards. Missiles and spells do not Splash. Blocking or avoiding the primary hit prevents it.

Lightning thorns returns its listed lightning damage when a melee attack lands. The attacker applies lightning resistance, magic damage reduction and lightning absorption to that reflection. It shares the thorns log/feedback and credits the reflecting fighter when it kills. Ranged attacks and Splash do not trigger it.

Cast on level up

An equipped level-up proc earns one queued chance roll for each level gained. It casts at its listed level when the next battle opens, before your first action. Removing the item afterward does not remove an earned activation. These are free triggered casts: no turn, cooldown, charge or FCR roll. The queue is saved between rooms; reloading an interrupted fight replays its opening activations as part of the whole room checkpoint. Activations are consumed by that fight, including a flee.

Each skill has a cooldown in turns, counted in your own turns. A skill with a 2-turn cooldown can be used, then skipped for your next two turns, then used again. Every skill page lists its cooldown ("Turn-based cooldown").

FCR rolls once after a successful normal cast with a positive cooldown: 10% cooldown-skip chance per positive class/form breakpoint; all current thresholds grant their full benefit (100% is only the mathematical ceiling). Success leaves that spell ready for the next turn; its turn, life costs and item charges are still spent. Attacks, instant skills and triggered effects are excluded. FCR does not shorten other cooldowns.
The basic attack never has a cooldown. Some starter damage skills also remain repeatable fillers. Stronger group attacks have longer recovery; for example, Forked Lightning waits three own turns and Falling Star waits four. Their full damage and group coverage are retained.
Your remaining cooldowns carry into the next fight, including skills from item charges. Walking through rooms, beating a floor, changing your bar or traveling to another difficulty does not reset them. Only your own combat turns shorten them. Reloading an unfinished battle restores the cooldowns it started with.
Fast direct novas and areas wait at least 2 turns; Exorcism waits 3 because of its extra damage against undead and demons.
Cooldowns go from 0 to 5 turns. Haste on gear (and in a Haste Shrine) is a chance, at the end of each of your turns, to take one more turn off your longest cooldown.
Instant skills don't end your turn: you use them and keep acting.
Skills that cost life (blood magic) still cost life. Some cost a flat amount, others a share of your max life, so the price grows with you.

Blood price: buying back a cooldown

The Black Knight doesn't have to wait. Every Black Knight has a blood price (10% to start): a skill on cooldown can still be used by paying that share of max life for each turn left. A skill with 3 turns to go costs 30% of your max life; with 1 turn left, 10%. The skill bar shows the price next to the turns left, and the cooldown starts over after you use it.

You can't pay with your last drop: if the price is all the life you have, the skill waits.
Price of Blood and Heart of Nothing lower the price, never below 3% per turn.
The price is life you lose, not damage: armor, resistances and barriers don't touch it. Leech, life per kill and the Black Knight's own passives are how you get it back.
It's a trade, not a rule to always follow: paying 30% to finish a boss before it acts is worth it; paying it on trash rarely is.

The toll: stronger with every death

The Ferryman is paid by the dead. His toll passives (Toll of the Dead, Coin for the Crossing, Toll of Souls, Bone Tally) give him one stack of their bonus for every death in the battle: monsters, your mercenary, your summons, theirs. Each toll stops at 10 stacks.

The stacks last until the next battle starts, so the loot of the battle (and any reroll of it) is rolled with the Magic Find and gold the dead paid.
Big groups, summoners and anything that raises the dead (yours or theirs) feed the toll. Killing the small ones first makes the boss fight easier.

Void damage

Most damage meets a wall: armor for physical, resistances for the elements, and the odd elite that is immune to one. Void damage (the Black Knight's) meets none of them. No resistance, immunity, absorb or damage reduction applies to it: a monster takes exactly what the void deals. That's why void skills hit for less on paper than the elements and cost life to cast.

Your skill bar holds 6 skills plus the basic attack. Passives always work and don't take a slot.

Positions and area of effect

Your side stands on the left in a line, the monsters on the right. The first fighter takes the middle and the rest fill in above and below. Everything can reach everything, so melee and ranged skills work against any target. The shape of a skill still matters:

Skill type	Hits
Strike, projectile	The target you pick. Projectiles fly clear of the others. Cones (arc) and extra targets also catch neighbors.
Nova	The whole enemy side, unless it's a cone: then only those in front of you, within its angle.
Area	The target and every neighbor within the skill's radius. Bigger radius, more rows.
Aura (mercenaries only), buff on yourself	Your whole side (or the whole enemy side, for auras that curse).
Summon	A new fighter joins your side in the next free row and takes its own turns, attacking what you attack. Summons follow you: whatever is still alive when a battle ends comes along to the next one, with the life it kept (and it recovers a little in every room you walk into, like you). Summons with a duration (Bone Wall, revived monsters) do not. A raised skeleton needs a corpse only the first time. Your summons crumble when you leave a floor: every floor starts with the army to rebuild.

Monsters

Monsters choose their skills the same way they always did. They prefer curses, summons and buffs when those help, then the attack that would hurt their target the most (through its resistances, and for weapon attacks its armor and block), then the basic attack, and they go for whoever stands closest (summons in front of you can cover you). Only elites with an immunity mod are immune to an element; no other monster resists more than 95%. After using a skill a monster waits at least a turn before using it again.

Bosses telegraph their biggest attacks. When a boss winds up, its whole turn goes into the wind-up and the blow lands on its next turn, so you get one turn to prepare: heal, buff, kill it, or freeze or stun it, which cancels the attack.

Reading the battle on a phone

Tap a monster to aim; tap the selected monster again to inspect its resistances, modifiers and skills. Tap anywhere to close the details; that tap does not attack or change your target.

Hold a skill button for half a second to read its description, level, element, life cost and cooldown without using it. This also works while the skill is on cooldown; item-charge details use the item's skill level. Release after holding to keep reading, then tap to close. A short tap uses an available skill as usual.

The battle log announces a skill before its result, then reports damage, blocking, avoidance, immunities and statuses. Tap the fixed log preview to read up to 300 retained lines in a separate paged report. Back closes it without taking a turn.

The basic attack and five equipped skills stay fixed beside the hero's life bar. Each button shows the skill and its damage estimate, cooldown or blood price. Hold to inspect long names and details. Tap an enemy portrait to select the target; tap it again to inspect. The next-turn queue uses numbered portraits; tap one to inspect its fighter. Charging attacks keep a visible warning.

More opens skill descriptions, item skills, hero/target inspection and companion details. Reports use pages without scrolling. Holding an item skill inspects its granted level without using a charge. Inspection and selection do not advance the battle. Settings is available from home.

When a battle ends, Continue stays at the bottom. Victory removes enemy portraits and retains one hero life bar; the result is paged if needed.

Fast combat feedback

The turn resolves and saves immediately. Its visual sequence shows casts, impacts and life changes in order, sharing at most 360 ms per action, regardless of the number of fighters. Skip combat feedback in Settings immediately shows the resolved result for every action. Opening a report or pausing the app also completes the presentation. Playback never repeats an attack or spends another charge.

Enemy portraits briefly shake on a hit, without flashes or colored borders; reduced motion keeps them static. Ally portrait borders distinguish hits, blocks, avoidance, immunity and healing. Life bars show remaining life immediately with a brief trailing segment for lost life; healing flashes green. Used skills briefly highlight, and skills becoming ready highlight after the sequence. Summon deaths, boss phases and wind-ups appear next to the fixed controls and remain in the full log.

Reduced motion uses stationary cues without portrait movement or animated life trails. Damage numbers can be disabled separately. Skip combat feedback is a persistent device setting and does not change initiative, cooldowns or combat rules.

Effect duration in rounds

Poison and bleeding spread their damage over whole rounds. Rounding a duration up does not add damage: 30 poison damage over 1.5 rounds becomes 15 damage per round for two rounds. Poison Length Reduction reduces the total before that rounding; at 50% reduction the same poison deals 15 damage over one round.

Periodic damage keeps the attacker that applied the damaging effect. A lethal poison or bleeding tick credits that attacker, grants its life per kill and on-kill effects once, and respects its Rest in Peace. A weaker reapplication does not take ownership of a stronger active effect. Reflection kills also grant the reflecting fighter's kill effects. Periodic kills do not revive dead attackers or trigger their on-kill casts.

Durations shown in skill details are complete rounds, rounded up. At the next round boundary the simulation advances one round of status, poison, area and summon timers. Adding fighters or changing attack speed does not shorten a round. Speed still changes initiative and can grant an extra action; cooldowns remain the caster's own turns. These are simulation rounds, independent of the short visual combat feedback.

Reading the battle screen

Skills appear as compact icon buttons with their names beneath them. Tap to use a skill; hold to inspect its description, estimated damage against the selected target, cooldown and life cost. The sword is a placeholder icon until individual skill artwork is available. A number on an unavailable skill shows its remaining cooldown in hero turns.

The turn forecast shows the next four actions with cropped portraits, positions and names. Tap a forecast entry to inspect that actor. Enemy cards above it still select your target. Victory presents the complete battle summary together, including experience and level-up notices, with a single Continue action. The battle log remains available separately.

Estimated damage appears beneath each damaging skill name and follows the selected target. Your active buffs, curses and statuses appear above your life bar; swipe the strip sideways to see more effects. Skill inspection separates the skill cooldown from the remaining turns until it is ready.

Cast announcements identify the enemy or companion using a skill before its impacts. Damage, blocks and dodges remain visible longer; a resolved action has at most 1.2 seconds of playback. Settings can skip playback, hide damage numbers or reduce motion. These options do not change the simulation.

Temporary skill buffs and debuffs start at no more than 5 rounds at skill level 1. Stand Fast lasts 3 rounds at levels 1–5, 4 at levels 6–10, and 5 at levels 11–15. Timed shrine blessings last five rounds. Event blessings and curses count battles instead of rounds and are also shown in the effect strip. Summons and persistent areas have their own lifetimes.

Every hero level grants five attribute points and one skill point. Open Hero to assign them outside combat. Unspent points highlight the Hero button and the matching hero tab. Disable this reminder in Settings; reduced motion keeps its border static.