Arknights: Endfield Combat System Explained: Mechanics, Roles & Strategy

In Arknights: Enfield, the combat system is in the form of a real-time action RPG that replaces the traditional tower defence gameplay, and focuses fully on squad coordination, battle tactics and several combat mechanics. Players form a team of 4 Operators while actively participating in combat through movement, attacks, dodges, skills, and positioning. Unlike several other RPGs that focus on cooldown mechanics, Arknights Endfield Combat system focuses on Skill points systems, attack combos, and special abilities that recharge with every blow on the enemy.

Combat takes place in an open environment where enemies attack dynamically from all directions. Players or Operators have to constantly watch the enemy’s behaviour, movement and attacks to perfectly dodge or counter them with their skills. Team coordination is key in this combat system, as stronger attack combos require more than one Operator to execute perfectly.

If you’re looking to get more information about Arknights: Endfield, feel free to check out the related guides below:

• Arknights: Endfield Base Building Guide: How to Optimize AIC & Resource Flow
• Last Rite Guide in Arknights: Endfield: Best Skills, Gear & Team Compositions

These guides can help you boost your progress and enhance your overall gameplay experience.

By the way, if you’re already eager to play Arknights: Endfield, we highly recommend playing Arknights: Endfield on PC and Mac with MuMuPlayer for a smoother gameplay experience. MuMuPlayer is the top Android emulator that offers optimal gaming performance with smooth keyboard and mouse controls, high FPS, and multi-instance support.

You could also directly download Arknights: Endfield PC on MuMuPlayer if you don’t want to miss out on the latest game updates.

Core Combat Structure and Battle Mechanics

The Combat squads consist of 4 operators. The player directly controls one operator, while the remaining 3 operate automatically. At any time, the player can instantly switch control between operators without interrupting attack chains, skills, or enemy states. Players have full control over the entire squad’s skills and Ultimates regardless of which operator is currently controlled.

There are 6 Operator classes and 5 Damage types that form the foundation of Endfield’s combat system.

Operator classes are:

• Guard: High physical damage and statuses.
• Defender: High durability and provides healing.
• Caster: Elemental Arts infliction specialist.
• Supporter: Provides Buffs to allies and debuffs to enemies.
• Striker: Exploits pre-applied effects on enemies and launches its decisive attack.
• Vanguard: Restores Skill Points and team resources.

Talking about damage types, there are 5 in the combat system. There is a Physical damage type and 4 of the Elemental Art Damage types, namely:

• Heat damage: Inflicts Combustion.
• Electric damage: Inflicts Electrification.
• Cryo damage: Inflicts Solidification.
• Nature damage: Inflicts Corrosion.

Each operator has a specific damage type, and some Operators can inflict Physical damage as well as have a specialised Arts damage.

The Attacking model

Each Operator has a basic attack, and they can chain these basic attacks to form combos that deal increased damage to the enemy. Movement plays a key role in these basic attacks, as when attacks are launched after jumping, a dive attack is performed, which is a far more powerful version of the basic attack.

At the end of each combo, the operator performs a Final Strike, which is a powerful attack that recovers some Skill Points (SP) and accumulates Stagger on the target.

Stagger

Each enemy has a small Stagger bar under its HP bar that shows the Stagger status. Once the Stagger bar gets full, the enemy gets stunned and remains in that state until the bar slowly consumes itself and reaches 0. This is a great window for players to land a decisive combo and deal massive damage to the enemy.

All Final strikes of Basic attacks accumulate Stagger, while some Battle skills can also do it. Though those are mostly the Physical ones. Each battle skill is different, and not every skill inflicts Stagger.

Types of Skills in Endfield Combat

Battle Skills

Battle Skills are Operator-specific, powerful attacks that you can execute during the battle. They can apply certain effects to enemies, such as stunning, decreasing their defensive armour, and much more. You have access to every Operator's battle skills during the battle, and don’t have to switch between active Operators to cast your battle skills. The Operators are relocated as required when performing battle skills.

Skill Points (SP)

Skill Points are the resource to perform Battle skills and other powerful attack combos. You will find your SP bar above the active Operator’s HP bar. It has three small bars next to each other. Battle Skills consume 1 bar of SP. SP bar can be recharged by inflicting damage with Final Strikes, performing heavy attacks, dodging the incoming attacks perfectly and also by traits of Operators if they have a SP recovery tag that allows quick recovery of SP.

Combo Skills

These are special skills that are activated when certain conditions are reached while fighting the enemy. If the condition gets triggered, then the Operator can cast a Combo Skill, which inflicts a lot of damage or supports the squad in certain ways.

Ultimate Skills

The Ultimates are powerful abilities that can only be cast once in the battle. They are quite similar to Battle Skills, but they don’t consume SP and instead need to be activated by recharging. They are recharged naturally by casting other skills and taking down enemies during the battle, when you keep fighting using your team’s skills. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about recharging them; rather, find a perfect window to land the blow and get the damage inflicted, once they are recharged.

Movements and Dodges

You can perform Dodges with your active Operator. The dodges also have a stamina bar, which only appears after you start dodging for the first time.  Each Operator can dodge up to a maximum of 3 times in a row before they exhaust their dodge bar.

However, the most beneficial are the Perfect dodges. You can perform perfect dodges that occur when an enemy is about to hit you, and you dodge their attack. The approach of performing perfect dodges is when the enemy’s attack shows a small red light before reaching you. There is quite a lot of time between the small red light flickering and the incoming attack, so players can quickly get used to perfect dodge, as the window for performing it is quite big.

When you perform Perfect Dodge, you consume a very small part of the dodge stamina, allowing you to keep dodging for a very long period. Also, Perfect dodges restore Skill Points, so make sure to dodge the attacks perfectly to cast your Battle Skills.

Nature of Damage Types

As discussed earlier, there are two distinct categories of damage: Physical and Elemental Arts.

Physical Damages

Physical inflictions cast a set of physical status effects. The primary physical status is Vulnerable, which increases incoming damage taken and can stack up to 4 times.

Apart from Vulnerable, we have Lift, Knockdown, Crush, and Breach.

While casting Lift and Knockdown on an enemy, the Vulnerable stacks up, lifting the enemy in the air and dealing massive damage that knocks out the enemy.

When casting Crush or Breach, it consumes the already present stacks of Vulnerable to deal very serious damage to the enemy.

Elemental Arts

There are four Elemental Art types: Heat, Electric, Cryo, and Nature.

Applying one Elemental instance to an enemy will inflict that particular Elemental damage. If that same element is used for attacking twice in a row, it will trigger an Elemental Burst that can be a Heat burst, Electric burst, or other ones as well. The same Element can be inflicted up to four times.

If different elements are used while attacking, then it triggers an Elemental Reaction. During a Reaction, increased damage is received from Elemental attacks.

If Heat is inflicted after an Electric, a Nature, or a Cryo attack, then it will trigger Combustion, which does burning damage over time. If Electric is inflicted after Heat, Nature or Cryo, then Electrification happens, where the enemy is electrified and receives passive damage for a period. If Nature is inflicted after any element, then Corrosion takes place, reducing the enemy’s resistance to elemental damage. Similarly, inflicting Cyro after any element will trigger Solidification, which does freezing damage over time.

While the enemy is solidified, if any physical damage is inflicted upon it that has a Vulnerable status, the solidification is consumed to trigger a Shatter damage effect, which deals massive physical damage.

Play Arknights: Endfield on PC or Mac with MuMuPlayer

For the ultimate gaming experience, we suggest you download Arknights: Endfield PC on MuMuPlayer. This emulator offers several advantages:

1. Smooth Gaming Experience

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Customize smart keyboard and mouse mappings for precise and comfortable control. MuMuPlayer also supports gamepad input, offering a familiar, PC-like playstyle for any game genre.

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Conclusion

There are numerous mechanics present in the Arknights Endfield combat system. From utilising Battle Skills efficiently to executing Elemental Reactions, players have a lot of creative ways to attack the enemy. Certain effects, such as Staggers, perfect dodges, and Vulnerability makes the player pay attention to the enemy's movement and act accordingly in the damage windows, rather than just spamming a particular move as in other games. The ones who understand these battle mechanics well and play as per the Operator's best roles will master this particular combat system.