Attacks are one of the main categories of skills, the other being spells. All attacks do damage, and some attack skills will also apply buffs or debuffs, or have other effects. The player’s default attack is an attack skill that is always available to use. Attacks deal attack damage with hits, and their damage and speed typically uses the player’s equipped weapons as base values, or the player’s unarmed values, if wielding none. One notable exception is attack skills that instead use the defensive values of the player’s shield, like Shield Charge.
Attacks have a chance to miss with hits, which is dependent on the relation between the user’s accuracy rating and the target’s evasion rating, unless something overrides this behaviour, such as "cannot evade", or "cannot miss".
The term hit refers to an effect that applies a discrete amount of damage to a target instantaneously. The damage can be mitigated down to 0, but can never be negative. Damage dealt by hits always has one of 3 damage sources (attack, spell or secondary, but note that damage over time never hits.) and is combined of any 5 damage types (physical, fire, cold, lightning or chaos).
Besides the amount of damage, its type and source, ‘hit packages’ also contain certain mechanics and effects, such as:
and others.
"On Hit" effects are when the player hits the enemy, and "When Hit" is when the enemy hits the player. In general, most effects are applied after the hit is completed and damage is dealt, since magnitude of damage is used to compute the magnitude of effect. These include, but are not limited to:
Additionally, some effects have specific requirements, such as Life Gain on Hit Support only working with attacks, culling strike only affects enemies with less than 10% life, and Voll’s Protector’s effect needing a critical strike.
Blocking an attack (even if you still take damage, as with Glancing Blows) prevents most on-hit effects (except the debilitate from Punishment) but does trigger the defender’s when-hit effects.