Dofus Arena


Dofus Arena was a free turn-based strategic online game and was the second game of Ankama Games. It was a PvP game based on the story of Dofus. Dofus Arena incarnates the essence of DOFUS's gameplay, featuring increasingly difficult tactical fights. As a coach, each player creates and manages his own unique team of characters, enabling him to face opponents of all kinds, in different elements.
The game was closed in October, 2014.

Gameplay

Team Creation

Every player makes a team of which the sum of the value of every fighter, spell, equipment and penalty does not exceed 6000 kama. Teams compose of 2 to 6 fighters, with the average being 4-5.

Classes

There are 12 classes, all of them a form of human, each with 10 spells available to them. Spells serve mainly to deal damage, but there are also plenty of spells that change stats, debuff, heal, throw, change place, push, attract, summon or globally affect the game.
Additionally, you can equip your fighters with weapons, pets, cloaks, hats and/or dofuses. Weapons serve as a second way to deal damage - besides spells - and change Initiative. The other kinds of equipments change one or more of the following stats: Max Health, Action Points, Movement Points, range, dodge & blocking, resistance, damage multiplier and reflecting.
There are 8 equipments kinds: weapons, the familiar ones, rings, amulets, boots, capes, hats and Dofus. Each character can carry only one equipment of each category.
All the categories of equipment bring no-claims bonus to the carrier. The weapons have however a role particular to Dofus Arena because they make it possible to regulate the initiative of the characters.

Particularity

The game doesn’t contain any experience system that could affect your team: Ankama Games didn’t want to give advantages to players with more time. As a result, the newest player can make exact the same team as the best player of the game.
It is not possible to get a successful team by throwing random elements together. Rather, the teams used by high level players focus on maximum synergy between spells, equipment and characters. There is no "best" team and teams that focus on one part of the equipment spectrum are equal to more balanced teams.

Fight

Currently two forms of combat are available, 1vs1 and 2vs2. In these modes, your team and your opponents team battle against each other in one of the 18 maps.

The only goal of the game is to lower the health of all the individuals in the opponents team to 0. Or in other words: the goal is to make your damage spells hit while evading, recovering and redistributing the damage spells of your opponent.

The game promotes planning and using different spells in succession.

The turn order is determined by the initiative of each fighter. This stat depends on the class and can be altered with equipment. The order goes from the fighter with the highest amount of initiative to the one with the least initiative.

The game futures a side/back system: you get 20% more damage attacking the side and 40% more for attacking the back of your opponent.

To reduce repetition, there are 2 elements randomly chosen at the start of the game: bonus cards and event cards. Bonus cards are strong actions that can be activated by everybody, but can only be used once per team. Event cards are cards that affect the game and change every round, this ranges from "everybody deals 10% more wind damage" or "all sacriers gain 2 MP and do 10% more damage" to "everybody loses 1 AP".

Coach Management

The majority of the fights are ladder based and grant the winner "coach items"- that serve solely for appearance, those items do not affect combat – and points, calculated by the Elo rating system. If you have enough points you gain a level – which doesn’t affect combat in any way.

The ladder ranks everybody by their points gathered.

All stats are recorded and the replay of every single match is available.

Reception

Despite all the work on it and a beta test period that lasted nearly a decade, the game was never officially released. Development was officially "paused" in February 2012, and the lead developer left in July 2012. The game remained unfinished but playable for quite a while, until the Dofus Arena website was quietly closed without notice on October 14, 2014 and the game servers shut down.