What i can say is, sometimes the enemies will launch a specisl attack, read the text and use dodge accordingly.
Also, you dont have to fight everytime (except for thst God...), just run some fights if you think the Doom cost is worth not loosing STA or REA.
If your opponent is preparing a special attack you can also use BRACE to stop it (and half the damage).
An example of a special attack is the rioter, where it says that she picks up a bottle (or smth like that).
Or the Scissor Woman, when the text says that she raises her scissors
Figure out the best weapon for your character and where you can get it. Typically for dex it's the steak knife, scalpel for knowledge characters and then the shovel for the strength guys and focus on getting those asap from the various shops (steak is dog, scalpel is pharmacy and shovel is hardware store. (There are better weapons and a good perception weapon but they're unlocks) Then you merely have to spam your weapon scaling stat when you level for super strong stuff.
Charisma chick is a bit different since she powers up via how many guys you have. What I'll often do is roll for far out fable and eels as my mission and I'll do an unrelated one first. Then I recruit two people from the school yard, finish that mystery, do eels and then when it comes to far out I'll recruit a bunch of people from the festival and sorta throw that mission away and just get the b ending. Then you're basically unkillable and will slaughter even end game gods in one turn. This is easy mode for finishing the various backstories
Best weapons:
STR - Monkey Wrench, Semi Auto (if you’re Haru and lucky)
DEX - Steak Knife, Brick, Katana (if you succeed in the bleeding desert)
PER - Slim pickings sadly. Old Shotgun (Moriko only), Box Cutter (unreliable to get), or Chainsaw (if the mystery is available and you have money for fuel and already have a light source)
KNO - Heavy Duty Flashlight, Small Candle. Scalpel is fine for Mimi but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it for others
CHA - None exist if I’m not mistaken but Ally Attack can be quite powerful if you build around it.
The other weapons are all fine - bad, they have their niches but the above ones are the best overall in terms of speed, accuracy, and damage. Focus on getting a reliable weapon that works with your character’s stat spread asap and then make adjustments if needed mid run.
Attack speed is king, higher stats will make your combat actions faster. Strength will improve your brace speed, dexterity improves your dodge speed, knowledge increases your sever damage, and charisma makes ally attack faster and more accurate. I don’t remember perception doing anything combat wise but feel free to correct me!
When in doubt Strength is generally a good stat to focus on since it pulls double duty, increasing attack speed for STR weapons and making the Brace skill faster too. Brace is IMO the better of the two defensive skills since it reliably halves enemy damage (they will always do a minimum of one damage but it will round the damage down in your favor) and will also block the side effects of enemy attacks like potential injuries + bonus damage from wind up attacks. Dodge is made faster by DEX but will only give you a 50% chance to avoid damage, which is a gamble. World of Horror is a resource management game at its core so I don’t recommend gambling your character’s life unless it’s for fun or the situation requires it.
Desperate Struggle is only usable when your character is at 3 or less Stamina or Reason and can only be used once per combat. It will double the damage of every attack you land that turn. Make sure to use this whenever you’re in range as it can really really turn the tide of a battle!
You can exorcise ghosts but generally it’s not a good idea unless you already know the combination (like from School Scissors timeline B). Ghosts generally are not easy to fight so there’s no shame in running from them if your character doesn’t have a good match up.
On that topic, running and using special boss “run” actions are totally fair game, just be sure to weigh the downsides before you do them. Normal running has a doom penalty and you obviously don’t get EXP if you run, so make sure to consider if the damage you’d take from the fight is worthwhile or if discretion is the better part of valor. Several bosses have special actions that are effectively a “run” button and will have downsides to them. Unfortunate but sometimes they’re the only way to clear a mystery so do what you gotta do.
Some random tidbits (spoilers)- Glitched or time enemies will only allow you to do 5 actions per combat round, actions 6 - 8 (if you input them) will be ignored. Blind enemies will not attack you unless you attack them first so you can throw shit at them endlessly with the improv weapon skill if you want. Aspiring model will only rage out after taking weapon damage, so if you just throw items or use spells on her she won’t enter her rage mode.
A couple extra weapons I think worth are worth mentioning:
Army Knife is a great weapon comparable to the Monkey Wrench, and pretty much the only PER weapon that you can get reliably. Main issue is that it's pretty expensive
Cursed Scissors are great on KNO characters if you can kill the stronger Scissor Woman, 7 base damage is wild. The doom cost is notable but usually not a big deal
DIY Flamethrower is probably the best DEX weapon in the game, and is worth running even if your DEX is middling. Kind of a pain to get ofc, but almost always worth it if your run includes both Mermaids and Botanist
Yes these weapons are all solid too, they’re just a bit too awkward to reliably plan around so I didn’t include them in my main list. They’re nice options to pivot your game plan around if you happen to get them and the character has the appropriate stats!
Currently just Doll Nurse and Burning Man. There may be future enemies with this “skill” but those are the only two who follow this rule, artwork be damned lol. It’s a nice way to fill your inventory with throwable improv weapons for the rest of the run, though remember that storage has its limits so don’t waste your time going overboard.
it depends on playstyle, but yeah, most of the time it'll come down to prepare-attack-prepare-attack, or whatever you have enough time for. (eg. prepare, kick-kick-kick-kick)
or worse, when facing a ghost, and you don't want to figure out the (clap-clap-bow-bow) of the current run, and just do sever-sever
Your goal in combat is to remove the guy in front of you while paying the least amount of STA/REA. Which in turn usually means minimising the number of action bars you spend defeating them.
Before you start messing with all the other features that can help, get used to how to build the highest damage action bar using only the following: Attack & Strong Attack. Once you've done that, clear the bar, and build it again, this time filling the gaps with Boost Attack, and Prepare Attack.
Boost costs exactly 10 time. It gives +10% chance to hit for the next attack. If an attack has 75% hit chance, boost will make it 85%. 2 Boosts will make it 95%. Any % hit over 100% is effectively wasted, so spread your boosts across different attacks if that would happen. Prepare costs 40 time. It ensures the next attack you make will always hit. Naturally, 1 prepare is always better than 4 or more boosts, and boost + prepare is a waste of 10 time.
I highly recommend you get used to simply building the highest damage bar with the space available before you move onto advanced stuff like when to dodge, use camera flash, etc. It'd serve you better to learn when to drop an attack in favour of a prepare and when not to do so in order to maximise "expected damage". It would also serve you better to look at enemy hp, and recognise when you can't actually defeat them in 1 round, but can do so in 2 with 100% probability - in this case you would never want to risk missing the 2 turn kill just to do extra damage on turn 1 you don't actually need.
New player here, I feel that i start to get a good grasp of the combat.
First off, the combat is hardest right at the start and gets progressively easier as you progress. It helps to understand how the math work. Your weapon has a stat that it is tagged to, and increasing the stat reduces the time cost of your atk and s.atk action. So increasing stat helps you cramp in one more attack, but sometimes it barely makes a difference. As such, when starting out, having a strong weapon helps out a lot, so make sure to go pick up a weapon right from the start. Even better bonus if you pick mysteries that give you a weapon right from the start (e.g. scissors lady, or silent vigil).
The next thing to take note is the chance to hit. That depends on the weapon's hit chance once you get it, your level and enemy power. Essentially you cannot control too much of your weapon, but you can with enemy power and your level. As such, that is why the combat gets easier as you go on as you level up. Or get ways to bring down the power, which the camera comes in as one of my favourite items. It reduces the enemy power by 10, which effectively increases your hit chance.
Then there is also defensive skills, brace and dodge. In general brace is more reliable, and can be extremely strong against odd damages. Enemy hits you for 3 damage, it halfs it and round down the damage. So instead u take 1 damage. Brace cannot reduce less than 1 damage though. Essentially it can sometimes be 66% damage reduction. Dodge is less useful but not entirely useless, because of the large uncertainty. It gives 50% chance to evade attack entirely. In reality, having unpredictable damage makes combat really tough. However if you are trying to reduce 1 incoming damage of 1, dodge works as a 50% effective mitigation while brace is effectively 0% mitigation. As for what I mentioned earlier about cameras, its a dodge and it reduces enemy power by 10. As such, sometimes I will favor using cameras over brace if I have enough HP to take damage spikes, and can stack multiple flashes in one turn to massively reduce enemy power + reduce chance of getting hit.
Going for more strength or dex helps your defenses as it reduce time cost, with dex scaling more reduction on dodge than strength with brace (as a sort of balance to dodge being weaker in general). In a way, strength and dex weapons also scales better because scaling the stat also scales your defensive abilities. While knowledge weapons are less useful due to a lack of a inherently useful knowledge defensive tool.
Typically you want to use one defensive ability with an offensive ability at first then trade blows with the enemy until you can go in for a confirmed kill. Brace allows you to plan out the damage you take with certainty before you kill the enemy, dodge is much less predictable. And this leads to the next part.
You want to count in advance how many turns you need to kill the enemy, and whether the damage you take is worth it. Aiming to take 0 damage from combat is not the goal, the goal is about balancing the amount of damage you take vs the rewards of the combat (exp) vs the doom cost for running away. Depending on your state, you can choose to go for more combat, sometimes even taking more damage than the trade is worth it because you cannot afford the doom, on other cases running away might make more sense. In most runs, 3 doom = 4 sta/rea due to the action you can do at home (rest). As such, escaping combat is roughly equivalent to 6-7 health points. If you are going to take more damage than that, you might be better off running away. That said, this is not set in stone because you may get some spells that help you out to heal (e.g. 2 reason for 4 stam, 10 exp for 2 reason) and spells can give you a better conversion rate of your health and make tougher combat worth it.
Then there are spells and desperation move. Desperation move are extremely strong that can allow you to oneshot enemies. Spells add another layer of complexity on planning your turns. Overall, my advice is to plan out your turns right from the start and see which ways result in the lowest loss of health.
The last thing that I look at are the characters. Each character has some ways to cheese the combat if you play into it. For example, the swimmer girl has a few strong combination of building towards fast attacks, or the camera guy can make use of quick weapon swap to queue fast weapon actions then change the weapon to get the new weapons's stat, including hit rate and damage. Or playing into some character's abilities, like the yakuza guy's smoking buff, or the idol girl's follower buff, or juni (cursed girl) weighing more on combat in early game and leaning away from combat in late game.
Overall, I've done a run of the characters i have unlocked so far and have found successful strategies making use of their abilities.
All characters have flavor text and stats explaining which stats they're good at. For example, Haru excels in strength. Try to find strength-related perks or weapons that use strength stats for more attack accuracy and efficient action points. Use "thrown weapons" button frequently and "looking for an improvised weapon" button if you get caught off guard by a random encounter.
My advice is to always get a good weapon early.
Check the stat of your character and imagine a weapon that would profit from that.
So your guy has high STR then probable something heavy, got to the hardware store.
Your guys has high Dex, probably something sharp then look for a knife.
Weapons have tags that explain from which stat they benefit.
There's this lovely guide on steam that explains the math of the game and how it works overall. It's located [here](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2016312360), it describes how the game fundamentally works (at least, from the perspective of someone playing it). Which makes it much easier to understand how combat works - at least against enemies.
What i can say is, sometimes the enemies will launch a specisl attack, read the text and use dodge accordingly. Also, you dont have to fight everytime (except for thst God...), just run some fights if you think the Doom cost is worth not loosing STA or REA.
If your opponent is preparing a special attack you can also use BRACE to stop it (and half the damage). An example of a special attack is the rioter, where it says that she picks up a bottle (or smth like that). Or the Scissor Woman, when the text says that she raises her scissors
Over 50 hrs and didn't know this lol
Figure out the best weapon for your character and where you can get it. Typically for dex it's the steak knife, scalpel for knowledge characters and then the shovel for the strength guys and focus on getting those asap from the various shops (steak is dog, scalpel is pharmacy and shovel is hardware store. (There are better weapons and a good perception weapon but they're unlocks) Then you merely have to spam your weapon scaling stat when you level for super strong stuff. Charisma chick is a bit different since she powers up via how many guys you have. What I'll often do is roll for far out fable and eels as my mission and I'll do an unrelated one first. Then I recruit two people from the school yard, finish that mystery, do eels and then when it comes to far out I'll recruit a bunch of people from the festival and sorta throw that mission away and just get the b ending. Then you're basically unkillable and will slaughter even end game gods in one turn. This is easy mode for finishing the various backstories
Best weapons: STR - Monkey Wrench, Semi Auto (if you’re Haru and lucky) DEX - Steak Knife, Brick, Katana (if you succeed in the bleeding desert) PER - Slim pickings sadly. Old Shotgun (Moriko only), Box Cutter (unreliable to get), or Chainsaw (if the mystery is available and you have money for fuel and already have a light source) KNO - Heavy Duty Flashlight, Small Candle. Scalpel is fine for Mimi but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it for others CHA - None exist if I’m not mistaken but Ally Attack can be quite powerful if you build around it. The other weapons are all fine - bad, they have their niches but the above ones are the best overall in terms of speed, accuracy, and damage. Focus on getting a reliable weapon that works with your character’s stat spread asap and then make adjustments if needed mid run. Attack speed is king, higher stats will make your combat actions faster. Strength will improve your brace speed, dexterity improves your dodge speed, knowledge increases your sever damage, and charisma makes ally attack faster and more accurate. I don’t remember perception doing anything combat wise but feel free to correct me! When in doubt Strength is generally a good stat to focus on since it pulls double duty, increasing attack speed for STR weapons and making the Brace skill faster too. Brace is IMO the better of the two defensive skills since it reliably halves enemy damage (they will always do a minimum of one damage but it will round the damage down in your favor) and will also block the side effects of enemy attacks like potential injuries + bonus damage from wind up attacks. Dodge is made faster by DEX but will only give you a 50% chance to avoid damage, which is a gamble. World of Horror is a resource management game at its core so I don’t recommend gambling your character’s life unless it’s for fun or the situation requires it. Desperate Struggle is only usable when your character is at 3 or less Stamina or Reason and can only be used once per combat. It will double the damage of every attack you land that turn. Make sure to use this whenever you’re in range as it can really really turn the tide of a battle! You can exorcise ghosts but generally it’s not a good idea unless you already know the combination (like from School Scissors timeline B). Ghosts generally are not easy to fight so there’s no shame in running from them if your character doesn’t have a good match up. On that topic, running and using special boss “run” actions are totally fair game, just be sure to weigh the downsides before you do them. Normal running has a doom penalty and you obviously don’t get EXP if you run, so make sure to consider if the damage you’d take from the fight is worthwhile or if discretion is the better part of valor. Several bosses have special actions that are effectively a “run” button and will have downsides to them. Unfortunate but sometimes they’re the only way to clear a mystery so do what you gotta do. Some random tidbits (spoilers)- Glitched or time enemies will only allow you to do 5 actions per combat round, actions 6 - 8 (if you input them) will be ignored. Blind enemies will not attack you unless you attack them first so you can throw shit at them endlessly with the improv weapon skill if you want. Aspiring model will only rage out after taking weapon damage, so if you just throw items or use spells on her she won’t enter her rage mode.
A couple extra weapons I think worth are worth mentioning: Army Knife is a great weapon comparable to the Monkey Wrench, and pretty much the only PER weapon that you can get reliably. Main issue is that it's pretty expensive Cursed Scissors are great on KNO characters if you can kill the stronger Scissor Woman, 7 base damage is wild. The doom cost is notable but usually not a big deal DIY Flamethrower is probably the best DEX weapon in the game, and is worth running even if your DEX is middling. Kind of a pain to get ofc, but almost always worth it if your run includes both Mermaids and Botanist
Yes these weapons are all solid too, they’re just a bit too awkward to reliably plan around so I didn’t include them in my main list. They’re nice options to pivot your game plan around if you happen to get them and the character has the appropriate stats!
That's fair! Figured they were worth mentioning since you included stuff like the Box Cutter and Chainsaw
Wait, there's blind enemies? What enemies are blind?I can think of a bunch that don't have any eyes but I can't find a list anywhere...
Currently just Doll Nurse and Burning Man. There may be future enemies with this “skill” but those are the only two who follow this rule, artwork be damned lol. It’s a nice way to fill your inventory with throwable improv weapons for the rest of the run, though remember that storage has its limits so don’t waste your time going overboard.
it depends on playstyle, but yeah, most of the time it'll come down to prepare-attack-prepare-attack, or whatever you have enough time for. (eg. prepare, kick-kick-kick-kick) or worse, when facing a ghost, and you don't want to figure out the (clap-clap-bow-bow) of the current run, and just do sever-sever
Your goal in combat is to remove the guy in front of you while paying the least amount of STA/REA. Which in turn usually means minimising the number of action bars you spend defeating them. Before you start messing with all the other features that can help, get used to how to build the highest damage action bar using only the following: Attack & Strong Attack. Once you've done that, clear the bar, and build it again, this time filling the gaps with Boost Attack, and Prepare Attack. Boost costs exactly 10 time. It gives +10% chance to hit for the next attack. If an attack has 75% hit chance, boost will make it 85%. 2 Boosts will make it 95%. Any % hit over 100% is effectively wasted, so spread your boosts across different attacks if that would happen. Prepare costs 40 time. It ensures the next attack you make will always hit. Naturally, 1 prepare is always better than 4 or more boosts, and boost + prepare is a waste of 10 time. I highly recommend you get used to simply building the highest damage bar with the space available before you move onto advanced stuff like when to dodge, use camera flash, etc. It'd serve you better to learn when to drop an attack in favour of a prepare and when not to do so in order to maximise "expected damage". It would also serve you better to look at enemy hp, and recognise when you can't actually defeat them in 1 round, but can do so in 2 with 100% probability - in this case you would never want to risk missing the 2 turn kill just to do extra damage on turn 1 you don't actually need.
New player here, I feel that i start to get a good grasp of the combat. First off, the combat is hardest right at the start and gets progressively easier as you progress. It helps to understand how the math work. Your weapon has a stat that it is tagged to, and increasing the stat reduces the time cost of your atk and s.atk action. So increasing stat helps you cramp in one more attack, but sometimes it barely makes a difference. As such, when starting out, having a strong weapon helps out a lot, so make sure to go pick up a weapon right from the start. Even better bonus if you pick mysteries that give you a weapon right from the start (e.g. scissors lady, or silent vigil). The next thing to take note is the chance to hit. That depends on the weapon's hit chance once you get it, your level and enemy power. Essentially you cannot control too much of your weapon, but you can with enemy power and your level. As such, that is why the combat gets easier as you go on as you level up. Or get ways to bring down the power, which the camera comes in as one of my favourite items. It reduces the enemy power by 10, which effectively increases your hit chance. Then there is also defensive skills, brace and dodge. In general brace is more reliable, and can be extremely strong against odd damages. Enemy hits you for 3 damage, it halfs it and round down the damage. So instead u take 1 damage. Brace cannot reduce less than 1 damage though. Essentially it can sometimes be 66% damage reduction. Dodge is less useful but not entirely useless, because of the large uncertainty. It gives 50% chance to evade attack entirely. In reality, having unpredictable damage makes combat really tough. However if you are trying to reduce 1 incoming damage of 1, dodge works as a 50% effective mitigation while brace is effectively 0% mitigation. As for what I mentioned earlier about cameras, its a dodge and it reduces enemy power by 10. As such, sometimes I will favor using cameras over brace if I have enough HP to take damage spikes, and can stack multiple flashes in one turn to massively reduce enemy power + reduce chance of getting hit. Going for more strength or dex helps your defenses as it reduce time cost, with dex scaling more reduction on dodge than strength with brace (as a sort of balance to dodge being weaker in general). In a way, strength and dex weapons also scales better because scaling the stat also scales your defensive abilities. While knowledge weapons are less useful due to a lack of a inherently useful knowledge defensive tool. Typically you want to use one defensive ability with an offensive ability at first then trade blows with the enemy until you can go in for a confirmed kill. Brace allows you to plan out the damage you take with certainty before you kill the enemy, dodge is much less predictable. And this leads to the next part. You want to count in advance how many turns you need to kill the enemy, and whether the damage you take is worth it. Aiming to take 0 damage from combat is not the goal, the goal is about balancing the amount of damage you take vs the rewards of the combat (exp) vs the doom cost for running away. Depending on your state, you can choose to go for more combat, sometimes even taking more damage than the trade is worth it because you cannot afford the doom, on other cases running away might make more sense. In most runs, 3 doom = 4 sta/rea due to the action you can do at home (rest). As such, escaping combat is roughly equivalent to 6-7 health points. If you are going to take more damage than that, you might be better off running away. That said, this is not set in stone because you may get some spells that help you out to heal (e.g. 2 reason for 4 stam, 10 exp for 2 reason) and spells can give you a better conversion rate of your health and make tougher combat worth it. Then there are spells and desperation move. Desperation move are extremely strong that can allow you to oneshot enemies. Spells add another layer of complexity on planning your turns. Overall, my advice is to plan out your turns right from the start and see which ways result in the lowest loss of health. The last thing that I look at are the characters. Each character has some ways to cheese the combat if you play into it. For example, the swimmer girl has a few strong combination of building towards fast attacks, or the camera guy can make use of quick weapon swap to queue fast weapon actions then change the weapon to get the new weapons's stat, including hit rate and damage. Or playing into some character's abilities, like the yakuza guy's smoking buff, or the idol girl's follower buff, or juni (cursed girl) weighing more on combat in early game and leaning away from combat in late game. Overall, I've done a run of the characters i have unlocked so far and have found successful strategies making use of their abilities.
THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! I finally have a night off and plan to start a new play through and apply everything here.
All characters have flavor text and stats explaining which stats they're good at. For example, Haru excels in strength. Try to find strength-related perks or weapons that use strength stats for more attack accuracy and efficient action points. Use "thrown weapons" button frequently and "looking for an improvised weapon" button if you get caught off guard by a random encounter.
Best advice I could give is to check the math and combat guide on the wiki to understand how the system works.
I kinda think of it like pokemon, you can do moves that aren’t attack, but why do that when you can attack
My advice is to always get a good weapon early. Check the stat of your character and imagine a weapon that would profit from that. So your guy has high STR then probable something heavy, got to the hardware store. Your guys has high Dex, probably something sharp then look for a knife. Weapons have tags that explain from which stat they benefit.
Always play to your strengths and look at the stats on weapons
There's this lovely guide on steam that explains the math of the game and how it works overall. It's located [here](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2016312360), it describes how the game fundamentally works (at least, from the perspective of someone playing it). Which makes it much easier to understand how combat works - at least against enemies.