EastScape Wikibuilt from the game itself
Fighting
Click a monster to fight it. Combat is one skill: every hit you land trains it, and Hitpoints goes up alongside it.
The Melee skill page — every level, every item and the xp, in tables.
On this page: Getting started · Weapons · The 14 grades · How it works · Swinging faster · Going further · Tips
Getting started
- Click a monster. You walk to it and keep swinging until one of you stops.
- Whoever hits it first owns it. Nobody else can take your kill, except in the Wilderness, where nothing is owned.
- Eat before you need to. Cooked fish is most of the healing in the game, and a salve from the cauldron heals more than any of it. See Cooking.
- Better weapons and armor need a higher Combat level. Bom's Prize Counter sells every grade, but it's expensive: everything is much cheaper smithed, and plenty of it drops.
Weapons
Every grade has the same three weapons, and they're almost exactly even on damage over time. Pick the one that feels right.
| Weapon | Swings every | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Gladius | 1.8s | fast and accurate, small hits |
| Longsword | 2.4s | the middle of the three |
| Maul | 3.0s | slow and heavy, big hits |
The 14 grades
Weapons and armor need Combat; rings and amulets need Hitpoints.
| Grade | Needs | Full set defence | Weapons: quick, balanced, heavy (accuracy / strength) |
|---|---|---|---|
 Bronze | 10 | 25 | Bronze gladius (+10 / +4), Bronze longsword (+8 / +6), Bronze maul (+6 / +8) |
 Emerald | 20 | 45 | Emerald gladius (+16 / +6), Emerald longsword (+12 / +10), Emerald maul (+8 / +14) |
 Diamond | 30 | 62 | Diamond gladius (+21 / +8), Diamond longsword (+16 / +14), Diamond maul (+11 / +20) |
 Dragonstone | 40 | 80 | Dragonstone gladius (+26 / +11), Dragonstone longsword (+20 / +18), Dragonstone maul (+14 / +25) |
 Onyx | 50 | 97 | Onyx gladius (+31 / +13), Onyx longsword (+24 / +22), Onyx maul (+17 / +31) |
 Starfall | 60 | 118 | Starfall gladius (+36 / +16), Starfall longsword (+28 / +26), Starfall maul (+20 / +36) |
 Eclipse | 70 | 135 | Eclipse gladius (+42 / +18), Eclipse longsword (+32 / +30), Eclipse maul (+22 / +42) |
 Nova | 80 | 153 | Nova flare knife (+47 / +20), Nova halberd (+36 / +34), Nova starbreaker (+25 / +48) |
 Singularity | 90 | 174 | Singularity event blade (+52 / +23), Singularity voidglaive (+40 / +38), Singularity collapser (+28 / +53) |
 Celestial | 99 | 194 | Celestial gladius (+57 / +26), Celestial longsword (+44 / +42), Celestial maul (+31 / +58) |
 Voidforged | 105 | 206 | Voidforged gladius (+60 / +28), Voidforged longsword (+46 / +44), Voidforged maul (+33 / +61) |
 Penumbra | 110 | 216 | Penumbra gladius (+62 / +29), Penumbra longsword (+48 / +46), Penumbra maul (+34 / +63) |
 Stormward | 115 | 227 | Stormward gladius (+65 / +31), Stormward longsword (+50 / +48), Stormward maul (+36 / +66) |
 Chrono | 120 | 237 | Chrono gladius (+67 / +32), Chrono longsword (+52 / +50), Chrono maul (+37 / +68) |
Full set defence is helm, body, legs, shield, gloves and boots together.
- The top two grades name their weapons differently. Nova and Singularity don't have a gladius, a longsword and a maul, but the three roles are the same: quick, balanced, and slow and heavy.
- Their weapons are a chase. Every Nova or Singularity weapon needs a core as well as bars. Both cores drop from The Junk King, and from the Black Crypt's Hoodie and the Great Pyramid's Squeeze, at about 0.05% a kill; the singularity core drops much more often from Captain Claw (1.6%). Or build one at an anvil:
Nova core at Smithing 80 from 15 hail shard, 10 static pelt, 5 storm jelly, 2 eclipse bar; 
Singularity core at Smithing 90 from 15 catalytic converter, 10 slagstone, 1 kindled diamond, 2 nova bar. Armor and tools don't need a core. - A Kindled Diamond is the other way up. At the Gem Bench it raises a piece you already own one level, up to +3. It never breaks the piece, but 5-10% of the time the gem shatters.
How it works
- Combat is one skill, and there are no stances to pick. Every hit you land trains it, in step with the damage. It does three jobs at once: you land more of your swings, you hit harder, and you get hit less.
- Hitpoints always trains alongside it. Damage pays Melee xp (Archery with a bow, Magic with a wand), plus a third as much into Hitpoints, so your health goes up whatever you fight. At range it climbs slower: with a bow or a wand, Hitpoints gets a third of what it gets with a melee weapon, because you're not the one standing in the way of the hits.
- Tickets drop as a range, not a fixed number. Every kill is worth a set amount, and what actually drops is a slice of it, so two of the same monster rarely pay the same.
- Most monsters pay 0.6x to 1.4x of what they're worth: a fairly tight wobble.
- The Thunderhead's monsters pay 0.2x to 1.8x instead: Hail Drake, Storm Golem, The House, Thunder Goose, Thunderwolf. The average is exactly the same, but any single kill can pay a fifth or nearly double. The House is worth 273, so out there it pays 55 to 491, where anywhere else it would be 164 to 382.
- Why: the Thunderhead was by far the richest place in the game, and its drops were cut. A flat cut only makes a place worse; a wider range gives back the excitement without giving back the average.
- Ticket buffs multiply the drop, so a Coin Toad or a tincture is worth the same percentage wherever you fight.
- The jackpot kill: about 0.4% of kills pay 12 times what they should. It isn't tied to what you killed, where you are, or how long you've played.
- During a 2X event, every ticket doubles, dropped or paid, for everyone on the server.
Swinging faster
Click the monster you're already fighting and your next swing comes sooner. Keep doing it and it comes sooner still, in four steps:
| Clicked before the swing? | Off the wait | Gladius | Maul |
|---|---|---|---|
| No — left alone | — | 1.80s | 3.00s |
| 1st swing in a row | 3% sooner | 1.75s | 2.91s |
| 2nd swing in a row | 5% sooner | 1.71s | 2.85s |
| 3rd swing in a row | 7% sooner | 1.67s | 2.79s |
| 4th swing in a row | 10% sooner | 1.62s | 2.70s |
| and onwards | 10% — the ceiling | 1.62s | 2.70s |
- It counts swings, not clicks. Each time your weapon comes around, the game asks one question: did you click since the last swing? Yes, and you move up one step; no, and you drop straight back to the bottom. Clicking five times between two swings is worth the same as clicking once, on purpose.
- So the trick is one click per swing. Watch your character, click the monster again each time it lands a blow, and by the fourth you're at the ceiling and staying there.
- Miss one and you start over at the bottom, not one step down. A run of clicks is worth far more than the same number scattered around, so this rewards paying attention, not clicking a lot.
- Starting a new fight resets you. Walking to the next monster costs you the ladder, so it pays best on a big, slow monster you stand and work. It's also why finishing off something already hurt beats wandering to a fresh one.
- It stacks with everything else (a faster weapon, a tool or pet speed bonus, a whiskey), because it takes a percentage off whatever your wait already is. Quick weapons gain the least in seconds, heavy ones the most.
- You never have to use it. Leave it alone and your swing is the plain number in the table; the game is balanced around that. It works on other players in the Wilderness too, and so does theirs.
- Every style gets the same. A bow or a spell climbs the ladder exactly like a sword, and it never costs extra arrows or pages per kill.
- Reading your target's plate: the wide bar under your target's health is your own swing, filling to your next blow. Gold means you've clicked for it, and it says what the swing takes off (+3% to +10%). Bronze with a flickering "click" means you haven't: click the monster now. The four squares after it are the ladder: lit gold for the steps you have, flickering for the steps you'll lose if your blow lands with no click, and a red flash means you lost them.
Going further
Many monsters' hits carry a type. Whatever a monster shrugs off is what it hits with (a Furnace Imp resists fire, so it burns you); otherwise its kind decides: spiders, snakes and toadstools poison; wolves, raptors and bandits make you bleed. An element is half of each hit, colored to match. Poison, bleed and fire hurt on top: the hit lands, then 40% more of it as poison, 35% as bleed, or 25% as a burn arrives over the next three seconds. Bring food for those, or gear that resists them.
Resistances on rolled gear take their share off the element part of a hit and off the poison, bleed or burn: of the Firewalker (fire), of the Yeti (frost), of the Lightning Rod (storm), of the Lantern (void), of Shade (sun), of the Antidote (poison), of Stitches (bleed), up to 60% each. A monster's page and its card say what it hits with. See Rolled loot.
Monsters by type
Traits
Swift, Brutal and Precise monsters are a fifth more dangerous than a plain monster of the same level, and pay a fifth more tickets and combat xp for it. Vampiric ones pay a tenth more. Frenzied is every boss's last stand.
Champions
About 2.5% of respawns of an ordinary monster come back as a Champion: blue on the map, named for its affix ("Swift Bog Gnasher", "Armoured Yeti"), with twice the health, and it hits 30% harder on top of its affix. The affix is one of the traits above, an element, poison or bleed, or one of two only Champions get:
| Affix | Does |
|---|---|
| Armoured | takes a quarter less from every hit |
| Hulking | half as much health again |
It's worth the trouble: tickets x2, rolled gear x3, charts x3. Never a boss, an event's monster or a dungeon's.
Tips
- Click right after your own blow lands. Any time before your next swing counts, but an early click gets the whole shortcut; a late one has already lost part of it.
- Save your attention for long fights. At the top, the click ladder is about a tenth more swings: a nice edge, never a must. It adds up on a boss or a big, tough monster, and barely matters on a chicken.
More in Skills
Alchemy: sand into potions · Tools: the grade ladder · Fishing · Cooking · Smithing · Mining