EVILBANE combat system
You carry one melee and one ranged weapon into every Operation and swap freely. Lock-on fixes the camera on bosses, and swapping to ranged releases it. Stamina gates sprinting, jumping and rolling; SP orbs pay for weapon skills.
Official EVILBANE screenshot — Netmarble Monster / Netmarble.
EVILBANE combat is built on one idea: you always carry two weapons and you are supposed to keep swapping them. Every Operation starts with one melee weapon and one ranged weapon, each with its own Active Skill, and the fight is largely about when you change hands.
The loadout you actually bring
| Slot | What it holds | How it pays for itself |
|---|---|---|
| Melee | One-handed sword or greatsword | Stamina, positioning, guard on some one-handers |
| Ranged | Crossbow, scattershot bow or magic orb | Magic Ammo, except the magic orb which runs on its own mana |
| Active Skill | Fixed per weapon, not chosen | Skill Points (SP) earned in the fight |
| Heavenstone skills | Shared budget of 10 cost | Limited uses per Operation |
Lock-on, and why it drops
Pressing the Lock Target key (Tab, or RS on a controller) fixes the camera on mid-bosses and main bosses. Two rules matter, and both are in the official FAQ because they confused testers:
- Switching to a ranged weapon releases the lock. You cannot hold a boss in the camera and fire at range at the same time.
- Pressing Lock Target while holding a ranged weapon auto-swaps you to melee. The lock always implies melee.
Sustained boss aggro is a melee job, and ranged is for the windows in between.
Reading the tells
| Tell | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Blue glow on the enemy's body | A QTE window is open | Press at that moment for heavy damage, a quick reload, or another special effect |
| Red eyes | The enemy is charging a powerful attack and will not flinch | Stop trading hits and dodge |
| Nothing you do interrupts an attack | It was a dodge-or-move attack | Get fully outside the attack range — perfect timing alone will not save you |
The last row costs people runs. The FAQ is explicit that some attacks cannot be dodged even with perfect timing, so the answer is distance rather than timing.
Stamina, and the sprint that kills you
The green bar under your health is stamina. Sprinting, jumping and rolling all draw on it, and when it empties you simply cannot do any of them. In practice this means the standard panicked retreat — sprint, roll, roll, jump — is exactly the sequence that leaves you standing still in front of a boss. Watch the green bar as closely as the red one.
The orb economy
SP orbs drop when you defeat enemies, land a melee heavy attack, or break an enemy's weak spot. Their colours are a small language of their own:
| Orb colour | Effect |
|---|---|
| Red | Restores health |
| Blue | Charges the skill gauge that pays for your weapon's Active Skill |
| Light blue | Restores Magic Ammo and mana |
Beyond orbs, basic weapon hits also charge the skill gauge, so a crossbow build that keeps shooting is not starved of Active Skill uses.
Ammo, and what each ranged type needs
- Crossbow and scattershot bow burn Magic Ammo. Pick up the blue-crystal Magic Ammo Pouches lying around an Operation to refill the magazine, then remember to reload — the FAQ calls out the reload step specifically.
- Magic Orb uses no ammo at all. It attacks from the mana stored inside the orb, and once that mana is spent the orb has to recharge before it can fire again.
Official EVILBANE screenshot: in-run HUD — Netmarble Monster / Netmarble.
Objectives inside a fight
Operations are not pure arenas. Objective markers and the on-screen tracker tell you what the run actually wants:
- Red markers are Main Missions. Clearing them is the win condition.
- Blue markers are Side Missions, and they hand out recovery items, buffs that last for the run, and materials used to unlock Heavenstone skills.
- Some Main Missions are destructive — the HUD screenshot shows a tracked objective to destroy all targeted buildings, at 4 of 5 done.
Where combat difficulty really comes from
Dying in EVILBANE is usually one of four things, all documented:
- Stamina empty at the moment you needed to roll.
- Trading hits with a red-eyed enemy instead of repositioning.
- Treating a ranged weapon as a safe main — the lock-on rules quietly punish it.
- Losing the run. Materials and gold collected inside an Operation are lost if the Operation is not cleared, so the fight you take to chase one more pickup is the fight that costs you the whole session's income.
What the numbers say
The content figures are official: 13 Operations, 18 Heavenstone skills, 6 melee weapons and 7 ranged weapons. Two weapons have published names from official screenshots — a greatsword called Song of the Razor Wind and a one-handed sword called Black Wave — and the razor wind's first enhancement step moves it from 250 to 262 attack. That is the scale of one upgrade step, not a weapon tier list.
