Game mechanics

## Movement and attacking

You can move player character either by holding or clicking the left mouse button. You can also move using buttons by assigning keys for the move forward, move backward, strafe left and strafe right buttons. Clicking enemy or destroyable object with the left mouse button will cause player to attack the target with the attack skill that's assigned to left mouse button skill slot. If the assigned skill is not an attack skill or the player has insufficient mana to cast the skill the player will use default weapon attack instead.

Melee attack skill will cause player character to move to the enemy and attack it while ranged attacks skills will not. If you want to prevent the player from moving when using attack skill you can hold **left shift** while attacking. If you just want to move to position you can hold **left ctrl** while clicking or holding the left mouse button.

## Potions

### Healing and Mana potions

You can use potions to restore lost health and mana. Unlike in first two games the healing and mana potions are infinite but have a default 30 second cooldown before they can be used again. This cooldown can be reduced through perks and enchantments.

* Perks Drinker and Drinker 2 reduce cooldown of potions by 10% and 5%.

## Damage

### Damage types

The game has total of six damage types which are physical, poison, fire, ice, lightning and arcane damage. Unlike in many other games of the genre, weapons are not bound to any particular damage type. This means that the attack skill used largely determines what type of damage gets dealt.

### Damage over time

The game has three damage over time (DOT) effects bleed, burn and poison. The damage per tick is usually 10-30% of the damage dealt by the initial attack that caused the burn. Due to this best way to deal more damage through DOT is to simply deal more damage and the best way to mitigate it is to increase ones defense and resistances.

It's good to note that it's solely determined by the attack skill if it can or will inflict burn, bleed or poison. Simply dealing fire or poison damage isn't enough to inflict burn. For example Earthquake can be used to inflict burn with Scorching fumes power-up while same is not possible with Embracing flames.

### Critical hits

When hitting enemies there's initially a 5% chance for the hit to considered critical hit which will cause it to deal 150% more damage. Both the critical hit chance and critical hit damage bonus can be increased with enchants, abilities, perks and skills. However there's a soft cap that limits critical hit chance to 50% and critical hit damage bonus to 450%. These can be increased with various enchantments that often come with epic, godlike or set items.

Early on it can be difficult for many classes to increase critical hit chance to get most out of critical hit bonus damage. But once one starts to find items that increase critical hit chance by +5% or more, it can make sense to use artifact forge to try to add critical hit chance and critical damage bonus enchants to gear to substantially increase ones damage output.

When it comes to endgame, increasing critical damage and critical hit chance are among the top ways to increase ones damage output due to how high critical damage bonus can go especially with Godlike items and Set items that increase the cap for max critical damage and critical hit chance.

## Enchantments

Enchantments here refers to extra stat increasing properties that items with rarity of magic or above have, for example +x% Critical hit chance, +x weapon damage, +x fire damage bonus etc.

### Weapon damage enchants

Since the damage of all attack skills are based on weapon damage, the enchants that increase weapon damage either by flat value or by percentage are great way to increase overall damage. This means that the higher your weapon damage the more you benefit from abilities and enchants that increase your physical, elemental, poison or arcane damage by percentage.

### Flat damage bonus enchants

These **+x damage bonus** enchants provide the player with fixed amount of damage for given damage type. This damage bonus gets applied on top of all attack skills making them great source of extra damage early on when base damage is still too low to actually benefit from percentage based damage bonuses.

It's important to note that these flat bonuses **do not benefit** from auras, abilities or enchants **that increase elemental, poison or arcane damage by percentage**. There's also hidden Enchantment modifier value which influences how much extra damage per hit from flat damage bonus enchants skill actually receives. Generally AOE and multi-hit skills have lower enchantment modifier where as single hit skills get the full amount.

### Mana and HP per hit

These enchants are subject to Leeching modifier meaning that with some skills you won't be getting the full amount with each hit. Many area of effect attack skills have leeching modifiers of 0.1 or 0.3 meaning that when using those skills you only get fraction of the listed mana or hp per hit value with each hit.

When it comes to regaining mana the x% damage dealt is gained as mana from Quintessence is unique in a such way that it ignores Leeching modifiers and just gives you the percentage of the damage back as mana. This makes the essence somewhat broken in the late game due to how much damage player does and how little skills actually use mana.

Some adventure map scenarios can have modifier that nullifies the effects from all life and mana enchants and even the effect from Quintessence making them quite challenging for many builds.

Mana and HP per hit enchantments do not apply to hits done by minions.

## Rage

Rage is the yellow bar in middle of health and mana bar and it's used to power-up skills in various ways.

### Generating rage

Each kill you make rewards you with 5 rage points but this can be increased through some skill-masteries. There are also skills like Transcended fury, Shield block and Lesser shield block that allow you to generate rage by other means. You don't gain any rage from kills with skills that have been powered up by rage.

### Max rage

Initially you can have a total of 45 max rage but you can increase these through various skill masteries, perks and glory ranks. Bounty hunter and Constructor classes can also increase max rage by spending ability points.

### Consuming rage

Each power-up charge consumes 7 rage and each skill can be powered up 3 times per attack for total of 21 rage. Rage cost can be reduced with enchantments and skill-masteries.

### Rage decay

When you stop attacking monsters rage starts to slowly decay. Rage decays by one point every 20 seconds but this decay can be stopped attacking an enemy. Time it takes for the first rage to decay after a kill can fluctuate a bit probably due to kills and hits made by Katarina.

## Power-ups

Each skill has 3 power-ups that can be unlocked by spending 1 skill point. These allow you to boost the skill in various ways by using the accumulated rage. These boosts can be anything from increasing the damage of the attack skill, igniting the enemy to take burn damage, slowing enemy down, inflicting vulnerability so the enemy takes more damage for x seconds, increasing range of the skill etc.

### Power-up preset

You can create power-up preset which you can quickly use during battle to power-up your skills. This is very useful if you often need to power-up a skill with 3 power-ups as this will allow you to do so with one button press instead of 2-3. Unfortunately the game only allows you to have one power-up preset.

The game also refers to power-up presets as power-up combos which can be a bit misleading. Power-up preset menu can be accessed by pressing power-up combos button next to left mouse button attack skill.

## Level scaling

### Items

All item drops and shop items are scaled to player level, this also applies to quest rewards and hidden content. So if one wants level 100 Bunny slayer for example one will have to avoid completing the quest until your character is level 100. Only few unique items in the game are worth it however.

### Enemies

Enemies scale to player level when enters or returns to area. This can cause surprising difficulty spikes early on when level-ups for players that often teleport to town to sells stuff. Game can be made considerably easier early on by clearing maps on one go and sending Katarina to sell items instead. When doing this it's important to spend more time shopping for better gear before entering new area as enemies will be much tougher. If player wants to make game a lot harder then visiting town on every level up will cause enemies to always scale to player level.

Check Difficulty for more information about level scaling.