Combat

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 - Stable run takes up to thirty, and the Abyssal 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.

Party ceilings are not uniform. Three players is the norm and the number most dungeons use, but several entries run well past it. The figures below are player-recorded rather than published, so treat them as the community's best current record rather than a specification.

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. The studio markets death and loss as part of the dungeon risk, but in the current build no dungeon penalises you for dying early: full bag and gear loss was implemented at one point and has since been disabled. 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.

Secondary stats sit on top of those and are where most gear tuning happens.

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.

Combat Logs

Patch 4 added combat logging after players asked for it. You turn it on in the settings and account menu, and the game then writes real-time combat log files to your local game data folder while you play. Nothing is shown in game: the files are meant to be read or parsed with your own tools so you can pick a fight apart afterwards.

Two things are worth knowing before you build anything on top of it. This is the first version of the log format, and the studio has said the information recorded may change as fields are added, removed or reorganised, so a parser written today may need updating later. The studio also asked players to be careful when installing third-party plugins that read the logs.

A simpler in-game combat metrics interface is planned for a future update, for players who would rather not work with raw log files.

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.

The feel of a fight changed as well as its numbers. Hit detection was reworked to match what appears on screen, so hits no longer land after you have already moved clear of an enemy, last-second dodges against contact damage and projectiles register more reliably when latency is moderate, and damage, dodge, block and health readouts all appear faster than they did at launch.

Patch 4 moved on to experience and scaling rather than raw ability numbers. Experience rates inside a party were increased significantly, and grouping up is now the most efficient experience farm in the game. Combat skill experience scaling was updated so higher-tier dungeons reward more experience, and Dexterity experience was brought in line with the other skills for the same content.

The same patch fixed skill scaling for weapons and abilities, so higher skill levels now translate into more damage. The Supporter relic also began interacting correctly with support abilities, although the effect still does not appear in the advanced stats display; the studio has said that part is a later fix.

Potions Stopped Being A Strategy

The most consequential combat change of early September 2026 was not a number on an ability. On 3 September the studio closed an exploit that had let health potions be spammed for near-unlimited healing inside a run. A consumable is now locked while a use is in progress or a blocking buff is active, with a please-wait prompt if you try too soon, and the lock applies everywhere in the game rather than only in dungeons.

The studio said outright that dungeons would feel tougher for anyone who had relied on it, and that is the honest summary. Survivability moved back onto the build: gear, relics, the pre-fight elixir and stim pairing, and actually dodging. A related fix stopped potion stacks being pushed beyond their pack limit through bank interactions, which had been producing broken bank states as a side effect.

Stats That Had Been Invisible

A patch on 27 August 2026 restored primary stats and major secondary stats that had been wrongly hidden, and made them count properly toward gear score again. The list covers critical strike, cooldown reduction, attack speed, dodge, area of effect radius and damage types, and the character sheet and advanced view show the information they had been missing. Any build comparison made from the character sheet before that date was working from an incomplete picture.

DoT Potency also started working in the same patch. On abilities tagged as damage over time it can add ticks, shorten tick intervals and increase impact power through capped scaling, where previously it did nothing. Frostbreaker hammer chill began triggering the Frostline Belt's cold damage bonus on 3 September, matching how Ice Cube already behaved, and missing or corrupted visual effects on radial abilities such as Fortify, Ice Cube and Healing Pulse were repaired on 9 September.

Aiming With A Gamepad

Gamepad players can aim primary weapon attacks with the right stick in dungeons since 27 August 2026. It has to be switched on outside the game: open the game's properties in the Steam client, select Controller, then Controller Configuration, and choose Gamepad as the input device. This is the partial controller support the studio marked as shipped on its roadmap, not full controller support, which remains a later target.