Revision 4

Stamina in The Relic: First Guardian works the opposite way round from most action RPGs. It is never spent on attacking. The gauge exists strictly for high-stakes defence, which the developers summarise as freedom in attack, intensity in survival.

What Stamina Is For

The practical consequence is that you can strike continuously with relentless creativity and consistency, and the only real resource decision is defensive. Emptying the gauge on a mistimed dodge leaves nothing for the attack that follows, which is where the tension in a fight comes from.

Dodging and Parrying

Dodging is the primary evasive option, and parrying sits alongside it as a timed defensive answer. Encounters are designed around dodge, parry, and weapon mastery rather than around statistics, so learning a brutal's timing matters more than raising a number. Since no two brutals fight alike, the defensive rhythm has to be relearned per encounter.

Changes Since Launch

Which Button Dodges

Patch 14 moved the dodge on a gamepad. It had sat on the bottom face button since launch, and on 21 August 2026 it moved to the right face button, while the internal input handling behind attack, guard, dodge, movement and skills was reworked. The change did not last. Patch 15, released six days later on 27 August 2026, reverted the gamepad and keyboard input settings to their previous stable state to resolve input issues.

The Patch 15 note does not list the individual bindings it restored, so guides, videos and screenshots recorded in that six-day window may show a layout that no longer applies. The in-game control guide is the reliable reference; Patch 16 redrew its images for Xbox, PC and PlayStation and made its text easier to read.

Two adjustments made defence more forgiving than at release. The player character's parry timing window was extended for smoother combat, and base defence was increased by 30. Player targeting was also fixed, having previously caused in-place movement glitches that could interfere with evasive movement. The most consequential change came in Patch 7: while locked on, a dodge now moves relative to the camera view rather than the direction the character happens to be facing. Rolling away from a boss no longer depends on where your character has been turned, which makes the defensive half of the game read correctly under pressure. Details are on the Updates and Patches page.

Later patches fixed defensive bugs in specific places. Patch 15 stopped players reviving in a guard stance after dying while guarding, and Patch 16 fixed the guard animation persisting after a respawn. In the Harlan encounter, hits two to five of Volgar's Skill04 were wrongly set as unblockable until Patch 16. Patch 17 fixed Igwis attacks that could not be parried properly and made some previously unparryable Stenor attacks parryable.

Exact stamina values, recovery rates, and invulnerability windows have not been published, so this page covers the confirmed design rules. The wider ruleset is on the Combat System page.