The Gladiator Arena

Zenko's PvP is Gladiator — a real-time squad brawl. You walk your trainer avatar around the arena for positioning while your squad auto-fights, both sides at once, until one side is wiped or the clock runs out. It is played in two brackets: 5v5 (the flagship whale bracket) and 3v3.

Every fight is a deterministic simulation stepped at 10 ticks per second: the client records your moves and the server re-runs the identical fight from those inputs to decide the result, so no one can fake a win. Matchmaking pairs you with an opponent of the same squad size and a similar rating (a recorded ghost of their squad when no one is live).

Rewards are pure prestige and Gems — no $ZOLANA is ever emitted for PvP. Each bracket runs its own weekly season: the top 10 split a fixed 200-Gem pool and the 5v5 #1 is crowned Champion.

The clock

A match runs at 10 ticks / second with a hard 120-second (2-minute) cap. To make positioning matter, every creature's battle HP is pooled ×3 its effective Health. The first 2 seconds are an anti-cleave grace — nobody can die while both squads move into position.

Skills fire on a cooldown

There is no charge gauge and no turn order. Whenever a creature is in range and its skill is off cooldown, it casts its element signature automatically; otherwise it auto-attacks on an Agility-based cadence.

• 8-second skill cooldown for every signature — except the dedicated healer (Flora), which casts on a longer ×1.4 cadence (~11.2 s) so heal-stacks can't out-heal everything.
• Auto-attacks tick faster the higher a creature's Agility; Haste shortens that interval and Slow lengthens it.
• Equipped relic actives (creature and trainer) also auto-cast on their own cooldowns — party buffs, armor breaks and burst nukes fire without any input.

Targeting — the front line

A creature in your front slot is the default target for enemies (a persistent "attract"), so your back line is protected without needing a taunt up. A tank's Bulwark cast adds a short hard taunt on top. Only Void's Umbral Reave dives past the front line to the squishy back — unless a taunt is active, which peels even it.

Damage & mitigation

Every hit runs base Attack through the skill multiplier, the element wheel and a soft Defense curve:

• Defense never zeroes a hit — the 140 constant just softens it, so fights resolve by knockout, not stalemate.
• variance = ±8% (0.92 – 1.08) on every hit, so numbers wobble a little.
• critMult — base crit chance is 8% (raised by the Precision relic); a crit deals ×(1 + 0.5 + Ferocity), i.e. +50% plus your rolled Crit Damage.
• Ignis' execute pierces 20% of Defense, Void's reave 15%; the Piercing relic (Armor Pierce) stacks more on top.

Anti-stall: enrage & heal-decay

A pure fortress team used to survive to the timeout and win on HP%. Two symmetric ramps prevent that:

• Enrage — from ~25 s onward all damage ramps from ×1 up to ×2.5 by the 120 s cap (timeMult). Both sides ramp, so it forces a resolution without favoring attacker or defender.
• Heal-decay — every heal (support casts and lifesteal) loses power over the same window, falling toward 50% by the cap — regardless of any anti-heal relic. The Sunder effect and relic stack on top of this baseline.

Ending a battle

• Wipe — one side is fully knocked out (the winner).
• Timeout — at 120 s the side with the higher average remaining HP% wins; the attacker (challenger) loses ties.

The Witch Trial is a limited event boss fought as a real-time, in-world battle — you walk your trainer around the arena dodging her telegraphs while your squad auto-fights. It shares the same combat core as Gladiator (see the Witch Trial page for the full event rules), so you can plan a squad and do the math yourself.

Damage you deal to the Witch

Each hit uses the core formula — but the element wheel does NOT apply against the Witch (she has no element / matchup weakness), so it simplifies to:

Because Witch DEF is 120, ≈54% of your raw damage lands (140 / (140+120)). The fight reads your real effective stats — the same ATK/DEF/HP/AGI (from rarity, stage, variant, level and relic %-boosts) PvP uses — and your combat-relic battle stats apply too: Crit Chance & Crit Damage raise your crits, Lifesteal heals you off damage dealt, and Ward starts each creature with a shield.

Creature skills are the element signatures — the same seven as Gladiator (Terra shields, Ignis / Void / Aqua strike, Aero chips + slows, Flora heals, Lux hastes). The skillMult is 1.0 for a basic attack; the damage-dealing signatures land bigger multipliers:

Worked example

A creature with ATK 250 lands a 2.2× skill on the Witch:

Its basic attacks (skillMult 1.0) each deal round(250 × 1.6 × 140/260) = 215. Add up every creature's basics + skills over a run and that's your banked damage.

Surviving the Witch

Your creatures' battle HP is multiplied ×6 in the trial (the fight lasts minutes — a healthy creature always eats ≥3 telegraphed hits before going down). The Witch's damage is %-of-max-HP chip (basics ~10%, skills ≤35%), so a bigger HP pool is pure survivability; your damage OUT is unchanged. Downed creatures don't perma-die — only the Elders you sacrificed to enter are gone.

Every creature casts exactly one skill, fixed by its element — seven elements, seven signatures. Every creature of an element casts the same signature regardless of its stats; rarity moves exactly one number per skill (a Mythical's shield / execute / heal is stronger than a Common's). This is the single skill system shared by Gladiator, the Witch fights, and the raid bosses.

The seven signatures

Ranges below run Common → Mythical (rarity scales the one number). All are cast automatically on the 8-second cooldown when in range.

Between skill casts, creatures auto-attack the front / nearest enemy for 100% ATK on an Agility-timed cadence. Status effects (Sunder / Slow / Haste / Bloom HoT / Siphon) last ~5–6 s — under the 8 s cooldown, so there's always an off-window.

Every hit is multiplied by the element wheel. The bonus is deliberately modest so a good matchup is a real edge, never a hard counter:

The wheel

Five elements form a ring; Lux and Void counter each other in a mutual pair:

Aero and Lux/Void have no on-wheel weakness beyond the ring shown; every element both beats one and is beaten by one, so no element is strictly dominant.

Every creature has an Effective Power score. It rolls base stats into one number and scales it by every progression axis. Your team's total Power decides who you're matched against.

Effective Power (per creature)

Each multiplier is a real lever you control:

Level multiplier

Combat level is a separate axis from stage. +6% power per level, capped at Lv 100:

Stage multiplier

Only Elder creatures fight, but the stat multiplier still applies at its top value:

Combat-relic gear boost

A creature equips 3 combat relics. There are 13 combat stats; each relic's bonuses sum across the 3 slots then hit a per-stat cap, so gear is a real build axis (≈35–45% of end-game power) but never pay-to-win. The four power stats fold straight into Effective Power; the rest are battle stats the engine reads directly:

A crit deals base +50% plus your rolled Crit Damage; Lifesteal heals off damage dealt; Ward becomes a shield buffer at battle start that soaks the opening burst. The three battle-lane counters — Piercing, Sunder, Haste — are the answers to tanks, healers and slow cooldowns. See the Relics page for the full catalog.

Party Power (the roster number)

Your squad / party number is the plain sum of each creature's Effective Power (times any account-wide trainer-relic boost). It's what gates dungeons and raids and shows on your cards:

Gladiator matchmaking does not pair by power — it pairs same-bracket opponents with a similar rating (ELO), so a bigger number is an in-fight advantage, not a way to dodge tough opponents.

Two of the multipliers in the Power formula come from a creature's rarity and its shiny variant. These are the exact live values (mirrored from the Creatures codex):

Variant battle bonus

The number on your card IS your combat stat

Your creature card and the inspector show each creature's true combat stat — the exact ATK / DEF / HP / AGI the battle engine actually feeds in — not the raw base number. Each stat is the base rolled through the very same multipliers as Power:

That's why a Mythical's card reads so much higher than its base: it carries the ×5.6 rarity multiplier (×2.8 Legendary) on top of stage, variant and level — so a low-base Mythical still out-hits a high-base Legendary in the arena. In fact a normal Mythical (×5.6) equals a Rainbow Legendary (2.8 × 2.0 = 5.6), and a Rainbow Mythical (5.6 × 2.0 = 11.2) towers over everything. Combat relics are situational gear, so their %-boosts surface through Effective Power rather than being baked into this per-stat baseline.

Three numbers per match

Every rated match moves up to three separate numbers — kept distinct on purpose:

• MMR (rating) — a hidden ELO used only for matchmaking (starts at 1000, K-factor 32). It never resets, so games stay fair.
• Season points — your visible weekly rank in a bracket. A rated win spends one season ticket to add points; this number soft-resets to 0 every week.
• All-time points — a permanent career total (5v5 + 3v3 combined) that drives the rank shown on your character. Never resets.

Tickets

Playing matches is always free. What's gated is how many wins can bank toward the season:

• 10 free season tickets per bracket per day, refilled at 14:00 UTC — there is no hourly trickle.
• A rated win spends 1 ticket. Out of tickets, a win still moves your MMR but not your season points.
• Recharge +10 tickets for 5,000 $ZOLANA (repeatable, unlimited/day) — the only $ZOLANA sink in PvP. No $ZOLANA is ever emitted for PvP.

What a win is worth (all-time)

• Win — 10 + |ELO swing|, so beating a higher-rated opponent pays more; stomping a much weaker one still pays the base 10.
• 3v3 wins are worth half of a 5v5 win (5v5 is the flagship bracket).
• Losses, NPC / practice opponents — 0 points. A per-day cap of 500 per bracket bounds farming.

Career rank

Your all-time points earn a permanent named rank shown on your character (distinct from the weekly season number):

Weekly settlement

Both brackets (3v3 and 5v5) run their own weekly season and settle separately. At each settlement:

1. That bracket's top 10 split a fixed 200-Gem pool (tiered, not a percentage share).
2. The 5v5 #1 is crowned season Champion — the town champion aura + leaderboard crown.
3. Season points wipe to 0 for a fresh ladder; MMR and all-time points carry over untouched.

Pool per bracket = 60 + 40 + 25 + 18 + 14 + 11 + 10 + 8 + 7 + 7 = 200 Gems — and both brackets pay it, so a full week hands out 400 Gems total. Gems are the scarce currency; the ladder is one of the game's few Gem faucets.

Your creatures auto-fight, so squad composition, formation and your positioning are the game. A few principles that fall straight out of the engine above:

• Put a Terra (or a tanky body) in front. The front slot draws enemy fire by default, and Bulwark Stance shields + taunts on top — buying your back line time to work.
• Protect against the dive. Only Void's Umbral Reave reaches your back line; an active taunt peels it, so a front tank protects your squishy carries against it too.
• Cover the wheel. Mixing elements means at least one creature usually has the 1.2× edge, and you're never fully countered.
• Beat the clock, not the timeout. Enrage + heal-decay punish pure fortress comps — bring enough damage (Ignis executes, Void dives) to close before the ×2.5 ramp turns into a coin-flip on HP%.
• Gear to counter, not just to scale. Crit Chance + Crit Damage on a carry, Ward + Max HP on a tank; then reach for the counters — Piercing vs tank walls, Sunder vs healer stacks, Haste to cast your signature more often.
• Play the avatar. You steer your trainer around the arena in real time — kiting your squad toward a focus target or away from a losing scrum is a real lever.