DHC Arena

How the Arena works

The board

There is a Guide button in the Arena itself, next to Leave. It shows the playing sections of this page over the board, so you never have to leave a match to look a rule up.

Five kinds of gem on a 7x7 board:

Both Crews share these five. The colour is the rank, not the person, so the same violet gem drives your back Fighter on your turn and theirs on theirs. Leave violet lying around and their back rank is the one who gets to use it.

A move is a slide, not a swap. Pick a gem and drag it any distance along its row or column; everything between shifts one step back toward where it came from. It is the same motion as Monstrocity and Skull Swap, so it should already be in your hands. A slide that makes no match is free — it reverts and costs you nothing.

Match size is reach

Their Crew stands in a line, and how far into it you can hit is decided by how big your match was:

Reach is a ceiling, not a requirement — you can always hit something shallower, and if nothing shallow enough is left standing the frontmost survivor takes it. This is what makes the formation a real decision: the order you pick your Crew sets front, mid and back, so the Fighter you least want reached goes last.

Cascades, chains and multi-matches

• A cascade — gems falling into a new match on their own — multiplies the damage of each further link.
• A multi-match is two or more matches from the one slide. Six gems across the matches pays +30% damage; nine or more pays +90%. Cascades are luck, but two matches from one slide is something you found, so only the slide itself is paid this way.
• A match of 5 or more gives you another turn.
• A cascade stops when a wave clears nothing. That happens only in one situation: every gem of the match is carrying a bomb that was armed this move, and an unarmed bomb's gem is protected from clearing so the bomb survives. The match still counts, it just cannot repeat. Those gems stay put, their bombs go live at the end of the move, and the next match on them sets them off.

Shield has a ceiling

A Fighter's shield cannot exceed half its own health. It is a share rather than a flat number, so a tough Fighter carries a bigger shield the same way it carries more armour, and a shield match that would push past the ceiling simply tops up to it.

Without that ceiling nothing ever took shield away except damage and a Break hit, so a Crew that kept matching blue banked it for the whole battle and eventually could not be killed. If you are facing a Crew that shields faster than you can cut through, Break (⛏️) strips shield equal to half its hit before any damage lands, and is the kit that exists for exactly this.

Bombs

• A match of 4 arms a grenade, which clears its whole row and column.
• A match of 5 or more arms a detonator, which clears everything — it wears a heavier white outline and pulses faster, so you can pick it out of a busy board at a glance.

A bomb sits on the board wearing a colour, and either side can set it off by matching that colour. It is not yours because you made it. Anything you arm goes live at the end of your move, never inside your own cascade — so a bomb is always a risk you are leaving on the table, not a free extra hit.

Bombs set off bombs. A blast that reaches another live bomb detonates it too, and that one reaches further still. The chain is what pays: two bombs hit about twice as hard as one, five hit about eleven times as hard, and three or more punch all the way to their back rank — which a single bomb can never do. You did not clear that board with one bomb; you cleared it with the bombs you had been sitting on.

When a battle is decided, every bomb still on the board goes off as a last hurrah. Nothing is resolved by it; it is the payoff for a board littered with bombs nobody dared spend.

Every piece does something

What a trait does comes from what it is, not from the slot it sits in. A blaster arm adds damage; a protector arm adds armour. Both are arms.

Your torso still sets base health and your weapon still sets base power and your fighting style. Everything else — head, headgear, arms, both effects slots and your companion — is read for what it is.

Tap any Fighter mid-battle to see exactly which of its pieces is doing what.

Whose move it is

When the defending Crew acts, the board says so. Their move is announced — THEIR MOVE across the board — the cell they are about to slide lights up, and everything holds still for a beat before it happens. An extra turn says whose as well: THEY GO AGAIN or YOU GO AGAIN, never just "again".

This is deliberately slower than it needs to be. Without it a defending move lands in the tail of your own cascade and reads as your board doing something inexplicable to you — several players took the Crew's reply for a glitch that was damaging them.

Fighters

Every Fighter's numbers come out of the traits you gave it, and a weapon decides how it fights:

Torso sets health, weapon sets power and style, headgear sets how often a hit lands big. Rarity helps but does not decide — the spread between two traits of the same tier is deliberately wider than the gap between the tiers themselves, so a well-matched common Crew genuinely beats a legendary one more often than not. A Crew of commons wins about seven battles in ten against a Crew of legendaries in simulation, and that is the intended answer: the Arena is about how you play, not what you were lucky enough to draw.

Charge builds one point for the whole Crew on every ⚡ match and erupts at 10, hitting everything on the other side at once. The meter sits beside your Crew's name, so you can always see how close it is.

The arena itself is the defender's front-rank background, and it does something — decided by what the background actually is:

Every background is a named place — Hellscape, Wormhole Passage, Thunderhead, Whiteout, The Xlon Complex — and where a background's own title already reads as somewhere you could stand, it keeps it. The rest are named from what they show, always keeping a word of the original so the piece is still recognisable. It is shown at the start of a battle and again under the board — hover or tap the arena's name there and it tells you what it is doing to the fight.

Reading a Fighter before you field it

Every Fighter in the picker carries one word, and the number behind it is in the tooltip:

Surviving only tells you anything about a win. A Crew loses only when every Fighter has fallen, so there is no such thing as surviving a defeat. The question the label answers is whether a Fighter was still standing at the end of the battles you won — because one that falls on the way did not carry that win the way the other two did.

Read the position with the rate. A match of 3 reaches the FRONT rank, so the Fighter at the front is hit far more often than the one at the back. 60% at the front is a better Fighter than 60% at the back, and the tooltip says which seat it mostly stood in. Nothing is adjusted for you — the number is what happened.

Where to put them

All three of your Fighters attack equally often: the gem colours come up in equal measure, and a colour is a rank. Position decides how often you are hit, not how often you hit.

So the toughest Fighter belongs at the front, where a match of 3 lands and most of the damage goes. The deadliest belongs at the back — not because the back hits harder, it does not, but because only a match of 5 reaches it, so it survives longest and therefore attacks over more turns.

One exception: a Volley Fighter ignores reach entirely and hits everything wherever it stands, so the back is strictly its best seat.

And a fallen Fighter takes its colour with it. Matching a dead Fighter's gem does nothing at all, so losing one costs you a fifth of the board as well.

Your defence is your three strongest, arranged for you. Not your three rarest — rarity score is close to unrelated to how a Fighter actually performs, which is deliberate. The game fields the best three by the health and power the engine derives from their traits, puts the toughest at the front where every match of 3 lands, and the hardest hitter at the back where only a 5 reaches.

Only the attacker's Fighters need to recover. Your Crew defends around the clock whether you are logged in or not, and defending costs them nothing — a defender never chose to be there, so being popular must never be something you can be punished for.

Your arch nemesis

Once you have fought someone three times or more, the Arena works out who you are most locked with and pins them to the top of the rival list, marked Arch nemesis, with your record against them.

It is not whoever beats you most — that is a wall, not a rival. It is the opponent with the most battles and the least settled between you: ten fought at five apiece outranks ten you swept. The grudge is all-time and does not reset with the monthly season, because one that did would not be a grudge.

The card reads You won 21 · They won 11 · They started 63%.

That last figure is a share rather than a count, so you can see at a glance who comes after whom without adding the record up first — and it is the part worth knowing. Defending costs you nothing — a defender is played by the AI, is never benched, and never reaches the ladder — so until now there was no way to find out that somebody had been coming at your Crew while you were away.

Only ranked battles count. Practice is never recorded at all, and live matches never touch the ladder.

The trait drop

A win pays a wildcard — any trait in the game, not a fixed category. The Arena needs three assembled Fighters to enter, so it is never allowed to hold a piece a Fighter cannot be finished without. The same reasoning covers Realm Raids and Boss Battles; see DHC Fighters.

The roll is banded by how far up you punched — the gap between the rival Crew's best Fighter and your own, by rarity score:

So the hardest fight available is sixteen times the mythic chance of farming someone weaker, and six times the legendary chance.

The rival list shows this per opponent, once you have picked your Crew — the gap is measured against the Fighters you bring, not the ones you own, so it moves as you change your line-up. The best fight on the board is highlighted. Nothing stops you beating the weakest Crew every time; it is simply the worst-paid thing you can do.

It is the same principle as raid looting: the risk you took is what is being rewarded.

One rewarded battle per opponent per day. You can fight the same person again, and it still counts on the ladder — it simply will not pay a second trait. And the platform-wide cap of three traits a day applies here as everywhere else, so the Arena cannot be farmed past it.

A win only counts as your payout for that rival if a trait actually came out of it. A win blocked by the three-a-day cap leaves the rival unspent, so it can still pay you tomorrow — it used to consume the pairing anyway, which cost you the trait and the rematch both.

Both of those rules are now visible before and after the fight. A rival you have already taken a trait off today is marked Beaten today · no trait in the list — still pickable, because the rematch counts for the ladder — and a win that pays nothing says which of the two rules swallowed it rather than leaving you to guess. It used to say nothing at all when the daily cap was the reason, and blamed the cap when the real reason was the rematch.