On this page
- A1 is the basic attack and never has a cooldown. A2, A3 and sometimes A4 are stronger active skills with cooldowns. Passives work on their own. An aura is not a skill: it is shared only by the leader.
- A cooldown counts the champion's own turns. It ticks at the start of each of them, so a skill with Cooldown 3 is ready again on the third turn after you cast it.
- A stunned turn and an extra turn both count as full turns: cooldowns and buff and debuff durations tick on them. A counterattack is not a turn and ticks nothing.
- Skill books can shorten a cooldown, but they can also add damage, chance, healing, shield or "ignore RES".
- Auto does not walk down a fixed list. It scores every skill against every target and casts the best; the priorities you set only bias the scores.
The parts of a champion's kit
- A1 - the basic attack
- Every champion has one, and it has no cooldown, so it is always available. It is the skill Auto falls back on when nothing else is ready or useful.
- A2, A3, A4 - active skills
- Skills you (or Auto) choose to cast. Almost all have a cooldown: A2s mostly 4 turns, A3s mostly 4 to 6, and the longest in the game is 7. About four champions in five have exactly A1 to A3; a few dozen have an A4.
- Passive [P]
- A skill with [P] after its name. It is never cast; it triggers by itself on a turn start, a hit or an event. Roughly half of all champions have at least one. A passive can have a cooldown too (its page says so): it starts when the passive fires and counts down on the owner's own turns.
- Aura
- A bonus the leader shares with the team, for example "+30% SPD to all allies in the Arena". It is not a skill you can cast. It only works from the leader slot and only in the places its text names; see building your first team. About two in three champions have one.
Passives keep working while a champion is stunned, frozen or asleep. [Block Passive Skills] switches them off, and [Block Active Skills] locks every active skill except A1.
How cooldowns count
When a champion casts a skill, the skill's cooldown is set to its full value. At the start of each of that champion's own turns, every cooldown drops by 1. A skill is ready when its cooldown reaches 0. Here is a Cooldown 3 skill:
| Champion's turn | Cooldown at the start of the turn | State |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | Cast it. The cooldown becomes 3. |
| 2 | 2 | Not ready - use another skill. |
| 3 | 1 | Not ready. |
| 4 | 0 | Ready again. |
So Cooldown N means one cast every N turns at the fastest, with N − 1 turns of other skills in between. Nothing the enemy does moves this clock: it counts your champion's turns, not rounds of the battle.
What counts as a turn
| Situation | Cooldowns tick? | Durations tick? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A normal turn | Yes | Yes | |
| A turn lost to [Stun], [Freeze] or [Sleep] | Yes | Yes | No active skill is cast. Passives and [Continuous Heal] still work. |
| An extra turn | Yes | Yes | A full turn: any skill, and your buffs lose a turn. |
| A counterattack | No | No | An extra attack, not a turn. |
The important one is the second row. Being stunned does not pause the clock: a skill's cooldown still goes down and your buffs and debuffs still lose a turn, but you also lose the chance to cast. A 2-turn buff on a stunned champion loses one of its two turns while the champion cannot act. The extra turn works the other way: it is a free cast, but it also burns one turn of your own buffs and cooldowns.
Some effects change cooldowns directly, such as reset and increase. Many resets exclude the caster or the casting skill so they cannot be chained forever, and [Nullify] cancels cooldown reductions aimed at the bearer.
Skill books
Each skill has a few upgrade steps, and each step is one of these:
- Damage (the most common): the skill's damage multiplier goes up. See How damage works.
- Buff/Debuff Chance: raises the skill's own chance, the first gate in Landing debuffs.
- Cooldown -1: the skill comes back one turn sooner.
- Heal, Shield and Ignore RES: bigger heals or shields, or a share of the target's RES ignored.
Almost nine in ten skills with a cooldown can be shortened by books: most by 1 turn, about a quarter of all of them by 2, very few by 3. A cooldown book is worth more than it looks. Taking a skill from Cooldown 4 to 3 raises its casts from 3 to 4 per 12 turns, a third more, and for a skill that places a key buff or debuff that is a third more uptime. A skill's page on the champion list shows exactly which steps it has. Which tomes to use, and when, is covered in Making a champion stronger.
How Auto picks a skill
Auto does not follow "use the biggest skill first". Each turn the game looks at every skill that is ready and every target it could use it on, gives each pair a score from a set of rules, and casts the highest. Three kinds of rule matter most:
- Placing an effect. A skill that places a buff or debuff scores points for it, scaled by how likely it is to be placed. If the target already has that effect, that part scores nothing, so Auto has little reason to recast a buff that is already up. Some effects are worth far more than others. In the generic rule set most champions use, for instance, [Block Damage] is worth 200 points, [Perfect Veil] 150, [Veil] 110, [Stun] 100, [Unkillable] 75, and a 60% [Increase DEF] 50 against 25 for the 30% one.
- Damage. Damage is scored as the percentage of the target's MAX HP it would remove: roughly one point per 1%. Against a small enemy that is a lot. Against the Nightmare Clan Boss, with 652 million HP, even a 5-million hit scores under one point, so on a boss Auto is guided almost entirely by the buffs and debuffs, and damage only breaks ties. In a measured Clan Boss fight, the real team cast each cooldown skill as soon as it was ready and A1 filled the gaps.
- Penalties and personal rules. Standing penalties steer Auto away from pointless casts, such as attacking a target that has [Block Damage] (minus 1,000) or one that is already stunned, frozen or asleep (minus 20). Over a hundred individual units, champions and bosses among them, also have rules of their own, many of the form "prefer skill X while skill Y is on cooldown". There is no general penalty for A1; the "cast the strong skill when ready, otherwise A1" habit comes from those per-champion rules and from the effect scores.
Different places use different rule sets. The Clan Boss, the Hydra, the Chimera, the Arena and the Doom Tower each have their own, which is why the same team can open differently in different modes.
Priorities and what they do
The game lets you set a preference for each skill (first, second or third, or not to use it). That does not turn Auto into a script: the preference is folded into the skill's score as a bias, with first, second and third pulling in that order, and "not used" is a veto. A skill that is not ready is never cast, whatever its priority.