Ability Rotation And Combo Planner

What This System Is

The rotation planner makes combat behavior part of a build strategy instead of relying on loadout-slot order. Designers can author distinct burst and sustain behavior once, then exercise it through the Combat Balance Lab, Strategy Matrix, Campaign Journey Simulator, and dependency-aware Content Health checks.

How Authors Use It

Each build-strategy profile can own a rotation with:

a one-time ordered opener;
ordered priority rules;
authored-combo requirements;
player- and target-health ranges;
target status-stack thresholds;
stamina and mana reserves;
an execute threshold that may break those reserves;
optional fallback to usable loadout order.

Health and reserve percentages are validated from 0 through 100. Rotation abilities, required combo metadata, and referenced status effects are resolved against the current catalogs by Content Health.

The shipped dragoon.burst policy builds a Spear Thrust, Chaotic Stab, and Ripple Thrust combo before consuming wound stacks with War Fiend. dragoon.sustain holds a larger stamina reserve and only prioritizes War Fiend's life steal below its player-health trigger.

Rules And Invariants

At each player action opportunity, the resolver evaluates opener entries and priority rules in authored order. It records why each candidate was used, held, or rejected. A candidate can be held for cooldown, combo, resource-reserve, health-trigger, or status-stack reasons. Ties and fallback use stable loadout order, so a fixed fixture seed produces the same timeline and metrics.

Profiles are opt-in. A fixture with no rotation policy retains the original round-robin selector and therefore keeps existing fixture behavior and baselines.

Validation And Debugging

Combat reports expose:

per-ability action distribution;
combo completion percentage;
average cooldown-waste time;
minimum resource reserve;
aggregate used, held, and rejected decision reasons.

Fixtures may assert ability_used, combo_completion_rate_at_least, cooldown_waste_at_most, and minimum_resource_reserve_at_least. These cover dead abilities, broken combos, excessive holding, and resource-policy regressions.

The editor's Strategy Matrix includes the metrics and the first run's explainable action timeline. This lets designers compare both equipment selection and actual behavior for each profile.

Journey Integration

Campaign encounters inherit CampaignJourneyPolicy.strategy_profile_id. Before every encounter, the journey applies that profile's rotation to the inherited combat build. The encounter summary also lists the loadout slots usable at the player's current level and unlock state, making progression-driven slot changes visible in one journey run.

Examples

Use dragoon.burst when a fixture should build combo state quickly and convert wound stacks into burst damage. Use dragoon.sustain when the same encounter should prove that reserve thresholds and low-health life-steal behavior keep the player alive longer.