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Caelumora — v0.72.0: Combat HP Rework

Hey all! v0.72.0 is a major overhaul to how combat actually works under the hood — and on screen. Enemies now have real health pools, your attacks deal visible damage with floating numbers, and Hard Mode finally has real teeth.

HP-Based Combat

The old combat system was timer-based: wait out an interval, collect your loot, repeat. That’s gone.

Enemies now have real HP pools. Each attack deals damage based on your Attack Power, accuracy, crit chance, and the enemy’s armor and evasion. You whittle them down over a series of attacks until they fall. Every combat stat on your gear and skill tree actually feeds into real numbers now — not just speed multipliers.

Your weapon determines your attack speed. Swords swing every 2 seconds. Bows fire every 2.4 seconds. Warhammers hit hard but slow at 3.2 seconds. Pick your playstyle.

Combat VFX

Damage numbers now float up from the fight, Runescape-style. You’ll see your hits, your crits, your misses, and your dodges as they happen — 13 animation variants in total.

Regular hits show the damage dealt
Crits are labeled CRIT! in bright yellow
Misses show MISS — you swung and the enemy evaded
DODGE appears when the enemy’s attack misses you
EXECUTE, LIFESTEAL, PENETRATE, BLOCK, and SPECIAL all get their own treatment

It makes combat feel alive in a way that timers never could.

Hard Mode Gets Real

Hard Mode previously gave +50% XP and loot with no meaningful downside. The “enrage timer” was cosmetic at best.

Now, when you toggle Hard Mode, enemies are permanently enraged. Every enemy gets +50% to all of their stats — HP, damage, accuracy, armor, and evasion. You’re fighting a meaningfully harder version of every enemy in exchange for the bonus rewards.

It’s a real risk/reward tradeoff now. Some enemies in Hard Mode will put serious pressure on your healing and gear.

New Enchanting Properties & Gem Attribute

Two new enchanting properties compete for your weapon’s enchant slots:

Armor Shred — each attack reduces the enemy’s armor, stacking up to a cap. Great against tanky enemies.
Execute Threshold — instantly kills any enemy below a certain HP percentage. Dramatically speeds up kill times on bossy, high-HP targets.

These are designed to compete meaningfully against the resource multiplier enchants rather than being clear upgrades. Your choice of weapon enchant now matters for combat efficiency.

A new gem attribute is also available: Combat Ferocity, which adds bonus damage against enemies below 50% HP. It pairs naturally with Execute Threshold for a “finisher build.”

Bonus Transparency

Every combat stat now has a full bonus breakdown tooltip, consistent with the rest of the game.

Hover any of these stats to see every source contributing to its value:

Attack Power
Hit Chance
Crit Chance
Lifesteal
Armor
Evasion

Sub-skill milestones (Melee/Ranged/Magic) now grant real values into these stats — lifesteal, crit chance, penetration, armor, and evasion — instead of cosmetic labels.

Bug Fixes

Several issues from the v0.70.0 Combat Rework have been resolved:

Enemy HP bar was filling instead of depleting — fixed
Attack progress bars weren’t reaching 100% visually before triggering — fixed
Duplicate Enemy HP bar and Combat Stats section removed from the combat grid
Combat style was double-dipping into both the speed and damage pipelines — corrected
Lifesteal was double-applied (once in takeDamage, once in processCombatTick) — removed the duplicate
Special attack bonus damage was being double-multiplied — fixed
Stopping combat now properly resets enemy HP and attack timers
Blessing armor/evasion/attack power entries now show the correct values instead of “+0”

What’s Next

A polish pass on combat balance and tuning is coming based on feedback from this rework. There are still some edge cases to iron out, and I want to make sure the new Hard Mode difficulty curve feels right across all enemy tiers.

itch.io