Glossary

Battle collection RPG glossary

Roughly forty terms, grouped by the part of the game they belong to rather than alphabetically, because these words are far easier to hold onto in the company of their neighbours.

Definitions describe the genre in general. Where a specific product uses a term differently, that product's own documentation governs. Last reviewed: 22 September 2026.

Using this glossary

Games in this genre rarely define their vocabulary. A tutorial will hand you a shard, tell you to tap it, and move on, leaving you to work out later that the shard was the game's entire economy in miniature. The definitions below are written so that each one stands alone, but the groupings matter: the currency terms only make sense against the acquisition terms, and the acquisition terms only make sense against the progression terms.

A practical way to use the page is to read one group, then open the game you are considering and try to name the equivalent. Titles vary their labels — what one calls a shard another calls a scroll, a ticket or a contract — while the underlying mechanic stays recognisable. Naming the mechanic under the label is most of the skill.

Characters and rosters

Champion, hero, unit: A collectable combatant. Titles differ on the noun; the function is identical. A champion has a rarity, a faction or element, a set of skills, and a development ceiling.
Roster: Every champion an account owns, including the ones never used. Roster depth is the usual measure of account progress, because most late content requires several developed teams at once rather than one strong team.
Rarity: A tier assigned at acquisition — commonly expressed in stars or in words such as rare, epic and legendary. Rarity sets a champion's ceiling, not its immediate strength, and a fully developed lower rarity often outperforms a neglected higher one.
Shard, scroll, ticket: A consumable item exchanged for a randomised champion. Shards usually come in grades, each grade carrying its own table of probabilities. See drop rate.
Duplicate: A second copy of a champion already owned. Whether duplicates are valuable is one of the sharpest differences between titles: some convert them into upgrade material, some raise the original's ceiling, some leave you with a redundant unit.
Ascension, rank-up, promotion: Raising a champion's ceiling by consuming other champions or dedicated materials. It is the step most new players underestimate, because it consumes resources at a rate that grows steeply with each rank.
Level cap: The maximum level a champion can reach at its current rank. Reaching the cap without ascending is the most common way for a new account to stall.
Awakening: A further ceiling increase beyond ascension, generally requiring rare materials from specific content. Not every title has one.
Faction, affinity, element: A category attached to each champion that interacts with enemy categories, typically as an accuracy or damage modifier. Some content locks entry to a single faction, which is a quiet way of requiring roster breadth.
Gear, artefacts: Equippable items that modify a champion's statistics. In many titles gear quality contributes more to final performance than the champion's own rarity, and gear is farmed from dedicated stages rather than summoned.

Combat

Turn-based combat: Combat resolved in discrete turns rather than in real time. Each side acts in an order determined by the participants' statistics, and a turn spent is a turn that cannot be taken back.
Turn meter, speed: The mechanic determining who acts next. Speed fills a meter; the first to fill it acts. Speed is therefore the statistic that controls the whole encounter, which is why experienced players treat it as the first thing to optimise.
Buff, debuff: A temporary modifier applied to an ally or an enemy. Buffs raise capability, debuffs lower it or impose a condition such as a skipped turn. Most difficult content in this genre is a debuff puzzle rather than a damage race.
Accuracy and resistance: Paired statistics deciding whether a debuff lands. High accuracy on the attacker, high resistance on the target. A team that appears to fail at damage is often failing at accuracy.
Area of effect, single target: Whether a skill strikes all enemies or one. A roster needs both, and the ratio needed changes by content type.
Cooldown: The number of turns before a skill can be used again. Skill rotation across cooldowns is the tactical core of most encounters.
Team composition: The set of champions taken into an encounter and the roles they cover — damage, sustain, control, support. A composition is judged by coverage, not by the sum of its parts.
Auto-battle: A mode letting the game play an encounter using its own decision logic. Auto-battle is how repeatable content gets farmed at volume, and how much content can be cleared on auto is a fair measure of a title's real time cost.

Currencies and acquisition

Soft currency: Currency earned by ordinary play — coins, silver, gold. Usually plentiful and rarely the constraint on progress.
Hard currency, premium currency: Currency bought with money or granted sparingly as a reward. It converts into summons, energy refills and shop items. Every meaningful bottleneck in the genre is denominated in hard currency.
Energy, stamina: A meter consumed by entering a battle and refilled over real time, often at a rate of one unit every few minutes. Energy converts a question of how long you want to play into a question of how long you are willing to wait, or how much you are willing to pay to skip waiting.
Refill: Restoring energy immediately, usually with hard currency. The number of refills available per day is often capped, and the price often escalates with each refill within a day.
Summon, pull, gacha: Exchanging a shard or currency for a randomised reward. The word gacha comes from Japanese capsule-toy vending machines and is used across the genre regardless of a title's origin.
Banner, featured summon: A time-limited summon pool with adjusted probabilities, usually promoting a specific new champion. Banners are the main reason the genre's spending is lumpy rather than steady.
Drop rate: The published probability that one summon yields a given outcome. A per-attempt probability says nothing about a run of attempts: ten pulls at a one per cent rate do not add to ten per cent. The randomised rewards page works the arithmetic through.
Pity counter, mercy: A mechanism guaranteeing a given rarity after a stated number of unsuccessful attempts. Where one exists it is the single most useful number in the economy, because it converts an open-ended probability into a bounded worst case.
Bundle, pack, offer: A fixed set of items sold for a set price. Bundles are where the genre's real prices live, and comparing them requires reducing each to a price per unit of hard currency in AUD.
Battle pass, season pass: A tiered reward track spanning a season, with a free row and a paid row. It is a subscription in structure, and it makes rewards contingent on playing regularly enough to finish the track.
Free to play: Describes an account that spends nothing. It also describes the business model itself, which is why the term does the work of two ideas and often confuses discussion.
Paywall, gate: A point where progress stops without either payment or a substantial wait. Gates are rarely labelled, and finding where a title's first gate falls is a reasonable way to judge it.

Content modes

Campaign: The scripted route through a game's locations, usually divided into chapters with rising difficulty. The campaign is generally the source of basic materials and the intended path for a new account.
Dungeon: Repeatable instanced content dropping a specific material type at a specific tier. Dungeons are where account progress actually happens once the campaign is cleared.
Clan boss, guild raid: A large recurring encounter fought by every member of a player group against a shared target, with rewards scaled to the group's collective damage. It is usually the most reliable source of high-tier materials, and it requires belonging to an active group.
Arena, player versus player: Competitive content matching your roster against another player's, usually resolved against a stored defensive team rather than in live play.
Event: Time-limited content with its own reward track. Events are the mechanism that converts a game from something you play into something you keep up with.
Daily quest: A short list of tasks resetting each day, rewarding a modest amount of currency. The list is short by design and is the anchor of the daily habit.
Farming: Repeating a stage for its drops rather than its content. Most hours in this genre are farming hours, which is why auto-battle quality matters so much.

Progression and meta

Meta: The prevailing consensus about which champions and compositions are effective at a given moment. It shifts with each release, and it is a description of player behaviour rather than a property of the game.
Tier list: A ranked classification of champions produced by players. Tier lists are opinion, dependent on the content assumed and the gear available, and they are not published by this site.
Power creep: The tendency for newly released champions to exceed older ones, which gradually devalues past acquisitions. It is a structural feature of a genre that must keep selling new characters.
Endgame: Content assuming a mature roster and gear. Most of a title's design effort lives here, and most of its spending pressure does too.
Cross-progression: Whether one account carries between devices or platforms, and in which directions. This is a per-title question answered by the vendor's support documentation, and it is worth settling before you choose where to start. See desktop and system basics.
Account binding: Linking an account to an email address or an external identity so it survives losing the device. An unbound account generally cannot be recovered, which is covered on the account security page.

Worked example: one sentence, decoded

Worked example

A sentence of the kind that appears in patch notes or player discussion:

"Speed-tuned the clan boss team so the debuffer outpaces the boss, then swapped in a legendary from the banner once pity hit."

Decoded: the player adjusted gear so that a champion applying debuffs acts before the clan boss does, because a debuff landing after the boss acts is wasted. Having done that, they obtained a top-rarity champion from a time-limited banner — not by luck, but by reaching the pity counter, the guaranteed threshold. Two of those decisions cost time; one of them may have cost money. The sentence does not distinguish, which is how most discussion in this genre reads until you can separate the two yourself.

Where to go next

If the mechanics are new, the genre structure page shows how these parts assemble. If the acquisition terms are the part you want settled, the randomised rewards page covers probability and the Australian bodies that deal with it. If you are weighing a specific title, the evaluation checklist lists what to check and where each answer lives.