Battle Log

The battle log is used to keep track of everything that happens in combat. After every action, it adds a few lines to explain what happened. In Dusk Tactics, there are a lot of things that can happen, even with a basic attack, and it can all happen pretty quickly. It helps to be able to check the battle log to see exactly what happened during the prior attack.

It’s changed form several times over the course of development (and might change again), but the standard Battle Log, shown above, is a window that appears in the bottom right hand corner of the screen during gameplay. You can view or hide it at any time by pressing the right-most button on the Battle Menu.

Features

While still in development, as of this writing the Battle Log can show actions such as attacks, abilities, item usage, and even if a unit simply decides to wait. When it comes to actual values like damage and/or healing, it can show a number of different variables including the actual damage and the raw damage done.

Raw damage is often displayed within brackets, so for example the ‘Wand Shot’ attack seen above caused 4 damage, but the raw value (before any resistances or mitigation) was 13.62.

Each item that alters damage will be displayed in it’s own color and in almost every case represent an additive value.

To break this down, we have the following modifiers: [-50% Graze] [-10% Blocked] [+10% Position] [-27% Vola Resist].

So the attacker gained an extra 10% damage due to attacking from a good position.

After the attack hit, it grazed the target (basically the opposite of a critical hit), and on top of that the target blocked it. The damage was further mitigated due to the targets Vola Resistance. These three factors alone reduce damage by 50%, 10%, and 27% respectively.

Taking all that into account we end up with 4.

Future versions will hopefully have the exact order of the modifiers and when they had an effect (before or after the attack, for example).

Things like Graze/Crit and Block mitigation have to be calculated towards the end since they only happen after the attack takes place. Positional, Weather, and other pre-attack calculations are done first since they can be calculated beforehand.

Healing is very similar, however it usually can’t be blocked.

There are also a number of different things besides damage that an attack can bestow upon the target. The ability used above has a knockback effect, so the log will tell us the # of tiles we were knocked back.

Lastly it tells us the JP and XP gained from the action. This does not include things like JP Share, it just shows the direct value earned.

For more information about how damage or healing is calculated, check out the Calculation section.