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Combat aimed, not targeted
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An adventurer in the field Official key art, Pearl Abyss
Targeting	None; every attack is aimed
Skills used by	Direction and button combinations
Disabling effects	Eight kinds, from stiffness to the grab
Position bonuses	Behind, grounded and airborne
Defenses	Invulnerability frames and super armor

Combat in Black Desert has no target lock. Nothing is selected before it is hit, every attack is aimed at a place rather than at a creature, and a miss is a miss.

Skills are not picked off a bar either. They come out of combinations of movement keys and mouse buttons, which means the interface is closer to a fighting game than to the tab-target rotations most large games in the genre use.

The consequence is that position decides a great deal. Where a character stands relative to what they are hitting changes the damage, and whether they are hitting at all, so the same skills in the same order produce very different results.

Most of what happens in a fight between players is a contest over who can stop the other moving. The game has eight kinds of disabling effect, and they differ in how long they last and what they leave the target able to do.

Stiffness is the mildest, holding a target upright in a flinch for about a second and a half, and it does not apply to someone already on the ground. Stun is similar but heavier. Knockback and float move the target instead of freezing it, bound drops them flat for around two seconds, and knockdown does the same for roughly twice as long.

The grab is the one that decides fights. Officially a grapple, it lifts an opponent and holds them, during which they can be hit but only by critical and rear attacks, and it always ends in a float, a bound or a knockdown. It can be used against a target in almost any state.

Landing a hit is only part of it, because where the hit comes from multiplies what it does.

An attack from behind and an attack on someone lying on the ground each do half again as much damage. An attack on someone in mid-air does two and a half times as much, which is why so many combinations are built to put an opponent into the air and keep them there.

Those bonuses are why the disabling effects matter so much. A grab that ends in a float is not just time bought; it is a setup that turns the next few seconds of damage into something far larger.

Two mechanisms answer all of that. Some skills carry invulnerability frames, brief windows during which a character cannot be damaged or disabled at all, and using them at the right moment is most of what skilled defense consists of.

Super armor is the other, a state in which a character can be hit but not stunned, stiffened, frozen or knocked down. It has one hole, and it is deliberate: a character in super armor can still be grabbed. That single exception is why the grab is the most valued tool in the game's player combat.

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