Run Mode

A Journey chapter isn't a list of separate battles — it's one run. You take all 16 of a chapter's nodes as a single gauntlet, with one locked team, and your team's condition carries from fight to fight. That's what makes it feel like an adventure.

The two decisions this page settles: which difficulty you lock in (below), and whether to push the next node or bank what you have when your team is hurt.

What a run is

A run is a chapter's 16 nodes played in order, grouped into four sprints of four:

Sprint	Nodes	Ends at
Sprint 1	1 – 4	Checkpoint
Sprint 2	5 – 8	Checkpoint
Sprint 3	9 – 12	Checkpoint (node 12 is an Elite)
Sprint 4	13 – 16	Victory — chapter clear at node 16

Between nodes within a sprint, your team's state persists — there's no free healing except what your team does during combat.

Your locked team

Before node 1 you pick three fighters, and they are locked for the entire run. No swapping fighters, changing gear, changing specializations, re-ascending, or selling anything until the run ends. Choose a team that can survive all four sprints, not just the opening fight.

Combat

Each node is an interactive, turn-based fight. Fighters act in turn order, you direct skills and targets, and status effects, cooldowns, and buffs/debuffs all resolve through the same system your enemies use. Win the fight and you advance carrying your team's end-state — current health, lingering effects, and cooldowns — straight into the next node.

A fighter who is knocked out stays down for the rest of the sprint. They return at the next checkpoint.
There's no healing between nodes beyond what your team can do mid-combat (a Mender, lifesteal, and so on). Clear a node greedily and you may enter the next at half health.

The strategic core: it's not "can my team win this fight?" — it's "can my team win four in a row without falling apart before the checkpoint?"

Checkpoints

After nodes 4, 8, and 12 you hit a checkpoint:

Your whole team is fully restored — everyone revived, health back to full, all buffs and debuffs cleared, cooldowns reset.
You collect a checkpoint reward (loot plus a bump to your Battle Level).
The next sprint starts fresh.

So a chapter is really four clean four-fight stretches, not one brutal sixteen-fight marathon.

Failing and retrying

A loss ends the run — but you keep the loot

Wipe on a node and the run ends. You keep every reward from the nodes you already cleared (and any first-clears, stars, and milestones you banked are yours for good). Retrying currently restarts you at node 1 — resuming from your last checkpoint isn't built yet. So if your team is battered deep in a sprint, weigh a risky next node against losing that attempt's un-banked progress.

Difficulty tiers

Every node can be authored across three tiers. Within a world the tiers sit at the same essence tier — what climbs is the gear rarity the fight expects you to be wearing (the world's own gear: Std → Rare → Mythical). So the ladder is "how kitted are you?", not "how ascended":

Tier	Expects the world's…	The fight is…	Unlocks when…
Normal	Standard gear	a fair, even-footing on-ramp	Always available
Hard	Rare gear	the same tier, geared up, plus Hard's extra mechanics	You 3-star all 16 nodes of the chapter on Normal
Nightmare	Mythical gear	the same tier at top gear, plus heavier mechanics still — and pinned to a set Ascend bracket	You 3-star all 16 nodes on Hard

A world's Mythical-tier fight (its Nightmare) sits right about where the next world's Normal begins — that seam is what carries your progression forward.

The map's difficulty selector shows the recommended team power for each tier — a "is my team ready?" bar, and that number is honest: it's the power of a tier-appropriate, properly-geared team, so team power ≈ node power really does mean even footing. On Hard and Nightmare the number is met by bringing the right gear rarity; the added difficulty then comes from the mechanics, not from a secretly-inflated stat wall. (Nightmare's bar is shown even though the tier isn't open to play yet.)

On top of the geared stats, Hard also changes the rules — its enemies gain extra threats (burning and bleeding damage-over-time, Anchor thorns that punish attackers, a turn-30 enrage, and hard-hitting elite and boss signature and control skills — the nastier locks and stuns are reserved for the elites and bosses, not the trash). Hard is a genuinely different fight, not just bigger numbers.

You choose the difficulty on the map, before the run, and it locks once the run starts — you can't step it up or down mid-gauntlet.

Higher bands are still being tuned

Most players will be running the Normal band. Hard and Nightmare are still being tuned and may not be open to your account yet — their power requirements (the world's Rare / Mythical gear, and for Nightmare a set Ascend bracket) still show on the selector so you know what they'll ask for.

The Dissonance dial

The Journey's whole difficulty is one dial — the Dissonance Level. Instead of picking Normal / Hard / Nightmare as a separate step, you set a single number and every enemy in the run scales to it: crank it up and they hit harder and hold more health; wind it back down and they ease off. It's the Journey's version of a Diablo-style "monster level."

How it works:

Each level adds +4% enemy power, compounding on the base fight: Level 5 is about ×1.22, Level 10 about ×1.48, Level 20 about ×2.19, and it keeps climbing up to a ceiling of 100. (This is a gentler curve than it used to be — it was re-anchored from +8% so that Nightmare is farmable for a properly-geared team rather than a wall the best gear couldn't answer.)
You set it once and it sticks. It's a saved setting, not a per-fight choice — you only touch it when you actually want to change the challenge, and it then applies to every node you play until you move it again.
The tier is the band it lands in — not a separate pick. The old Normal / Hard / Nightmare labels are just the name of where your level sits: 1–20 is Normal, 21–40 is Hard, 41+ is Nightmare. Set the level, and the tier follows. (That's why you can't be "Normal 40" — 40 is Hard.)
You climb it by clearing it. You can only challenge up to five levels past your best clear in each world — beat D10 in a world and you can attempt up to D15 there; clear D15 and D20 opens up. Each world is proven on its own, so a clear in an easy world doesn't unlock the same level in a harder one. (A sweep only auto-repeats a level you've already beaten by hand — you can't sweep your way up the ladder.)

The payoff: fighting harder enemies pays more. A Dissonance clear rolls its loot at the tier its band names — D21+ pulls from the Hard loot tables, D41+ from Nightmare — so the drops are both higher rarity and more numerous (roughly one extra roll per 20 levels), and the chests that drop are richer (a Dissonance clear on the Normal baseline drops the Rare/Mythical chests a plain clear never would). Best of all, a Dissonance chest remembers the level it was earned at: when you open it, the gear inside gets +that many points of Frequency on top of its normal roll — so a Mythical from a D30 chest carries roughly +30 Frequency, and one from a deep D87 clear can push past 120. That's a lot of extra room for Notes, which is what feeds breaking gear down into power for your avatars.

Still rolling out

The Dissonance dial is still opening up to all accounts. If you don't see the control yet, it isn't switched on for your account.

What a run is​

Your locked team​

Combat​

Checkpoints​

Failing and retrying​

Difficulty tiers​

The Dissonance dial​

See also​