Combat Basics

Combat in Yomi no Sho looks hands-off — your Shades attack automatically and you mostly watch — but underneath that calm surface is a deterministic, tick-based simulation. Understanding the resolution order, the affinity wheel, and the damage formula will let you predict the outcome of a fight before you commit to it, which is essential for pushing zones at the edge of your party’s power.

The tick

Every combat round is divided into ticks of 0.5 seconds. Each tick, every combatant gains Action Points (AP) equal to their Speed stat. When a combatant’s AP reaches 100, they take a turn: their queued action resolves, and their AP is reduced by 100. Excess AP carries over, which means a fast Shade can occasionally take two turns in a row.

This has two practical consequences. First, Speed is the most important secondary stat in the game — a 10% Speed advantage translates to roughly 10% more turns over the course of a fight, which compounds with damage. Second, slows and stuns are disproportionately powerful because they delay AP gain. A 1-second stun is not just “1 second of lost damage” — it is a full skipped turn, plus the AP that would have accumulated during that tick.

The resolution order

Within a single tick, actions resolve in this strict order:

1. Status effect ticks. Damage-over-time effects (burn, bleed, poison) deal their per-tick damage. Expired effects are removed.
2. Buff and debuff updates. Active buffs decrement their remaining duration by 1 tick. Effects that trigger on buff expiry resolve now.
3. Action queuing. Each combatant whose AP exceeded 100 last tick queues their next action. The action is chosen by the Shade’s AI script — by default, the highest-priority off-cooldown skill.
4. Action resolution. Queued actions resolve in descending order of the actor’s current AP. Ties are broken by Speed, then by roster position.
5. Death checks. Any combatant reduced to 0 HP is removed from the field. On-death effects trigger here.
6. End-of-tick effects. Effects that are checked at the end of a tick (regen, certain passives) resolve.

The key insight is that action resolution happens before death checks. This means a Shade at 1 HP will still get their turn if their AP is high enough — they can often kill the enemy that would have killed them, trading favourably. Plan around this when reading fight previews.

The affinity wheel

There are six elemental affinities in Yomi no Sho: Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth, and Void. They form a wheel:

• Fire → Wood → Earth → Water → Fire (the “outer” cycle)
• Metal is strong against Void and weak against Fire
• Void is strong against Earth and weak against Wood

When an attack’s affinity is strong against the defender’s, it deals +50% damage. When it is weak, it deals −25% damage. Neutral matchups deal the base damage. Critically, affinity modifiers apply after defence is calculated, which means they are multiplicative with defence mitigation — a detail that surprises players coming from other games where affinity is additive.

Most late-game bosses have a primary affinity and a hidden secondary affinity. The primary is shown in the UI; the secondary is not. The secondary only matters for elemental defence — it determines which affinity the boss resists. Discovery of secondary affinities is a community effort and one of the main reasons this wiki exists.

The damage formula

A single attack’s damage is calculated as:

damage = (attack * skillMultiplier - defence * 0.6)
         * affinityModifier
         * critMultiplier
         * (1 + bonusDamage)
         * (1 - resistance)
         * randomVariance

Where:

• attack is the attacker’s total Attack stat, including all flat and percentage bonuses.
• skillMultiplier is the skill’s base multiplier, usually between 1.0 and 3.5.
• defence is the defender’s total Defence stat.
• affinityModifier is 1.5, 0.75, or 1.0 depending on the matchup.
• critMultiplier is 1.5 by default, increased by Crit Damage stat.
• bonusDamage is the sum of all “increased damage” modifiers from buffs and gear.
• resistance is the defender’s resistance to the attack’s affinity, a value between 0 and 0.8.
• randomVariance is a uniform random between 0.95 and 1.05.

The formula has several non-obvious implications. First, defence is subtractive before multipliers, which means stacking defence has diminishing returns against high-multiplier skills. A 1000-attack skill with 3.5x multiplier against 500 defence deals (1000 * 3.5 - 500 * 0.6) = 3200 damage; doubling defence to 1000 reduces that to 2900, only a 9% reduction. Second, bonusDamage is additive with itself but multiplicative with everything else, which makes “increased damage” buffs extremely strong when stacked.

Reading a damage log

The in-game damage log (accessible from the post-fight summary) shows every action and its resulting damage. Each line looks like this:

[Tick 14] Kagaribi uses Ember Lance (3.5x) on Hollow Ferryman
  Attack: 1240 | Skill: 3.5 | Defence: 480 | Affinity: 1.5 (Fire > Wood)
  Crit: Yes (1.85x) | Bonus: +35% | Resistance: 10%
  → 7421 damage (Hollow Ferryman dies)

Reading these logs is the fastest way to understand why a fight went wrong. If your damage is lower than expected, check the affinity line first — a wrong-aspect attack is the most common culprit. If the affinity is correct and damage is still low, look at the resistance line; some bosses have hidden resistances that the wiki documents.

Practical applications

For most of the early game, you can ignore all of this and still progress. The mechanics become essential at three points:

1. Ascension 2, when bosses start having enough HP that you cannot simply out-damage them.
2. The Drowning Marsh, where every encounter has a forced affinity matchup.
3. World bosses, which have enrage timers and require precise rotation planning.

When you reach those points, return to this page and read the formula carefully. The Mechanics section goes deeper on each subsystem, with worked examples and damage calculators.