How to Play Pit Pike
Everything you need for your first match: the controls, what the numbers mean, and the systems that decide close games. All values here are the ones the server actually runs.
The basics
- Teams of 1, 2 or 3 fight rounds in a walled arena. Wipe the enemy team to take a round.
- Every champion starts each round at full health and mana on opposite sides of the pit.
- Ranked ladders run at 2v2 and 3v3. 1v1 and custom lobbies are unranked.
- It is free, runs in the browser, and needs no download.
Controls
Pit Pike is a mouse-and-keyboard game - you need a desktop or laptop. Every key below is rebindable in Settings.
| Action | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Move | W A S D | Hold both mouse buttons to run forward. |
| Look / aim | Mouse | Click the arena to lock the pointer; Esc releases it. |
| Jump / wall-bounce | Space | Bouncing off a wall grants a short burst of speed. |
| Abilities | 1 – 6 | Your action bar, in the order you arranged it in the lobby. |
| Target enemy | Tab | Cycles enemies. Left-click also targets whoever is under your crosshair. |
| Target ally | Caps Lock | Cycles teammates (including yourself) for heals and shields. |
| Use trinket | T | Your one equipped trinket, if it has an active effect. |
Optional binds let you target enemy 1/2/3 or ally 1/2/3 directly, and "skill target" keys redirect a single cast without changing your real target - the standard arena setup for fast healing and swaps.
Health, mana and the global cooldown
- Base health
- 1000
- Mana
- 100
- Mana regen
- 5/s
- Global cooldown
- 1.0s
- Crit chance
- 15%
- Crit damage
- 150%
Most abilities trigger the global cooldown, so you cannot chain two spells in the same instant. Presses that land just before an ability is ready are queued rather than dropped, so you never lose a global to a slightly early keypress. Health pools vary by class - a Warrior carries more than the 1000 baseline.
Casting, interrupts and line of sight
Abilities are either instant or have a cast time. A cast is interrupted if you take an interrupt, and moving or losing line of sight to your target cancels it. Interrupts also lock the school you were casting for a few seconds, which is how you shut a healer down. Pillars in the arena block line of sight both ways - breaking LoS is a defensive tool, not a bug.
The server rewinds positions to compensate for latency: a cast is judged fairly at both the moment you start it and the moment it lands, so high-ping players are not punished for starting a legitimate cast.
Crowd-control diminishing returns
You cannot chain-stun someone forever. Repeated crowd control of the same category on the same target lands at 100% → 50% → 25% → immune. The ladder resets after 15 seconds without a new application of that category. Damage over a threshold breaks fear-type effects early, and interrupt lockouts are exempt - they punish a caught cast rather than chaining.
Dampening
To stop a match stalling forever, healing weakens as a round drags on: every 30 seconds of combat applies another -5% healing, up to 100%. Long games are decided by damage and cooldowns, not by who can heal the longest. The current dampening is shown on your HUD.
Executes
Several abilities hit far harder below 30% health. Tracking enemy health for that window is how rounds close out.
Loadouts, classes and trinkets
You can play one of the 10 champions - each with a fixed pool you draw up to 6 abilities from - or build a freestyle champion by picking 5 of the 20 grimoire talents. On top of that, every player equips exactly one of 8 trinkets: some are passive, some are an extra button on T.
Practice first
The Firing Range is a solo arena with target dummies where every cooldown is yours to learn - no queue, no pressure. It is the fastest way to feel out a new class.