Combat in Soulbound: Online is fast and chaotic, in the "bullet-heaven" or survivor-like style. Fights fill the screen with enemies and effects, and the goal of each dungeon run is to chain ability combinations powerful enough to clear rooms before they overwhelm you.
Co-op And Roles
Encounters scale for solo play and for co-op. Most beacon rungs admit up to three players, the entry-level Eastern Reach run takes far larger groups, and the weekly raid admits five. Because the game is classless, your role is decided by the gear and abilities you bring rather than a fixed class. Parties can cover tanking, healing and damage, and a single player can switch between those roles by changing their loadout. The studio is testing ten-player co-op dungeons, which would raise party sizes further.
Builds In The Fight
What makes a fight feel different from run to run is the relic system. Inside a dungeon, relics modify your abilities, weapons, and stats, so the same starting ability can behave very differently depending on what you have stacked on it. With more than 100 combinations available per run, the strongest builds are often ones you did not plan.
Risk And Loot
The tagline "Fight Together. Die Together. Loot Forever." points at the tension in every run: the deeper you push, the more you can carry out, but dying can cost you what you were carrying. The studio markets death and loss as part of the dungeon risk, so greed has consequences. The studio's roadmap ties full bag and gear loss to optional high-risk dungeon modes and a high-stakes High Roller mode planned for later in Early Access, rather than making total loss the rule for every run, so the base death penalty is lighter than the tagline suggests.
Combat Stats
Your equipped gear provides the stats that decide how hard you hit and how long you survive. Six primary stats appear on most gear, and each one hands out a bundle of bonuses rather than a single number.
Primary Stat | What It Provides |
|---|---|
Power | Physical resistance, melee penetration and knockback |
Precision | Critical strike chance, projectile speed and attack speed |
Focus | Area-of-effect size, heavy hit chance and effect duration |
Ferocity | Critical strike damage, heavy hit chance and damage-over-time potency |
Vitality | Health, health regeneration and status resistance |
Will | Cooldown reduction, mana and stun resistance |
Secondary stats sit on top of those and are where most gear tuning happens.
Group | Secondary Stats |
|---|---|
Offence | Critical Strike Chance (default 3%), Critical Strike Damage (default 150%), Attack Speed, Heavy Hit Chance (default 0%), Heavy Hit Damage, DoT Potency, Knockback, Trigger Ability Chance |
Defence | Max Health (default 100), Health Regeneration, Dodge Chance, Resistances |
Utility | Cooldown Reduction (capped at 40%), Movement Speed, Duration, AoE Radius, Link Count, Projectile Count, Buff Power, Threat |
Damage types | Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning, Void, Ethereal, Explosive and Poison damage, plus Healing Power and Shielding Power |
Stats are either global, applying to everything you do, or affinity-based, boosting one specific ability. Relics can push some values past their normal ceilings for the length of a run.
Because the game is classless, you tune these stats by choosing gear. Common directions are a tank profile built on Max Health and resistances, a damage profile built on Power with critical strike chance and damage, a dodge profile that stacks Dodge Chance, and a healer profile built on Buff Power, Healing Power and cooldown reduction. More on assembling these is on the Relics and Builds page.
Where Combat Happens
All combat takes place in dungeons; the shared overworld has no roaming enemies, so the open world is for gathering, trading, and questing rather than fighting. Inside a dungeon, defeating enemies drops Yoku that fuels your relic picks for that run.
Post-Launch Balance
Core combat balance has been reworked repeatedly since launch across Fortify, Bomb, Machine Gun, Drone, Blackhole, Greatsword, Gleam Twins, Staff, Chakram and Sword. Fortify's base value and duration were cut sharply, bombs gained damage and lost their negative trade-off stats, the machine gun's explosion radius and heal chance were reduced, and the greatsword and chakram both had cooldowns shortened. Damage-type plumbing was cleaned up at the same time: Phantom Resonance on the chakram now grants void damage rather than ethereal, and staff relics were moved off ethereal damage onto explosive.