How combat works.
Weapon have hit chance, attack speed and damage. Enemy dont have stats which could affect hit chance. So hit chance is what weapon say, but there are hidden stats. Dexterity raise little hit chance and some passive abilities from weapon skills.
Attack speed is global timer. Both enemy and player. When enemy gets spawned or player wield weapon, then personal timer start. If weapon have attack speed 0.2 attacks / second. Then every 5 seconds player can try hit enemy, if not adjacent to enemy just right moment, then need to wait for next attack possibility.
Strength and weapon skills increase damage.
There is 5 damage types: physical, fire, cold, poison, lightning. They all have can have debuff effects. Bleed, burn, slow, poison, amplify.
Bleed do physical damage every second for 5 seconds, damage calculated from hit damage.
Burn do fire damage every 3 seconds for 13 second, damage calculated from hit damage.
Slow will slowing movement and attack speed 20% for 10 second.
Poison will last 20 seconds and disable regenerate health and potions instant heal only 50%.
Amplify increase all damage taken by 20% for 10 seconds.
Resistances can lower damage and debuff time.
There are other debuffs too but works on every damage type. Example stun.
Armor is important, it reduces all direct physical damage taken by the amount of armor, so player or enemies can be immune to physical damage. Armor dont reduce bleed damage, bleed has ignore armor.
Raising defense skill lower enemy hit chance to player.
Blocking damage with shield works only against physical damage. Shield have block amount and skill passives could increase that.
If player or enemy dodge attack, then no damage taken.
Only way to reduce elemental damages is resistances or dodge.