Bleed

Bleed is a damage over time status effect similar to blight. Bleeding heroes and enemies will take health damage equal to the strength of the bleed at the start of their turn. Most bleeds in the game last for 3 turns, or 5 turns if applied with a critical hit. When an enemy is killed by bleeding, they will not leave a corpse behind (this does not apply if you do not have corpses enabled), giving your party an easier time to get rid of big sized enemies' corpses in order to reach the back ranks if you do not have corpse-clearing skills. The duration of bleeding can be extended by reapplying it on top of either the hero or enemy, meaning it's best to avoid having a hero receive various attacks that inflict them with bleeding if you are not able to cure it.

Bleed can be removed with Bandages, the Plague Doctor's Battlefield Medicine, the Grave Robber's Toxin Trickery, the Hellion's Adrenaline Rush, and the Flagellant's Suffer.

During camping, every hero (except Flagellant) can remove bleed from other heroes with a shared camping skill Wound Care; the Arbalest can cure bleed from another hero with her skill Field Dressing, and the Plague Doctor and Flagellant can cure bleed on themselves with Self-Medicate and Lash's Kiss respectively. Also, during camping, the Antiquarian, Leper, and Abomination are capable of increasing bleed resistance with the addition of other resistances, although the Antiquarian can only give the buff to a companion apart from herself meanwhile the Leper and Abomination grant their buffs to themselves.

Bleed, like blight, can kill a character on Death's Door before they can use a Bandage on their turn by forcing a Death's Door check the moment the hero takes damage from the bleed at the start of their turn. If out of combat, there will be a chance to use Food or Bandages to prevent death, as long as the party does not move. When using Food to avoid your character dying from bleeding while at Death's Door, it is recommended if possible to give 1 Food per bleed tick if the bleeding damage is too high to countermeasure with the healing Food provides, and also there's the fact that a hero can only directly consume up to 4 Food from the inventory between battles. If this is not the case and the bleeding damage is lower than what the Food can heal, then it's better to consume enough Food to not have your hero in Death's Door for each bleeding tick, resulting in less stress for your party and the same result of keeping your hero alive.

=List of Combat Skills That Inflict Bleeding on Enemies=

Highwayman's Open Vein and Flagellant's Punish and Rain of Sorrows skills all come with a corresponding debuff to enemies' Bleed Resist. Additionally, Grave Robber can decrease enemies' Bleed Resist with her skill Flashing Daggers, but it does not cause bleed.

Bleed Resistance
All heroes have a base resistance to bleed, which affects how likely they are to receive bleed from enemy attacks. Like most other hero resistances, Bleed Resist increases by 10% per Resolve Level. For increasing Bleed Resistance beyond Resolve Level and Base resistance for better odds of avoiding bleeding from enemies and specific Curio effects, there are various Trinkets and the Antiquarian's combat skill Fortifying Vapours which grants a small buff to both bleed and blight resistance while also healing a small amount. The Leper also can increase his own bleed resistance with his Combat Skill Withstand.

The following is a list of heroes sorted by their base Bleed Resistance, from highest to lowest:

Trivia

 * It is possible to bleed enemies that normally would have extremely high resistances agaisnt bleeding like Unholy skeletons by applying various debuffs of bleed resistance and then using a bleeding skill on a hero equipped with bleeding skill chance trinkets to maximize the chances of the bleeding being successful. This method is highly impractical, however, as blight is much easier to apply to said enemies than bleeding and is usually more effective overtime.
 * Despite not being capable of applying bleeding to enemies, the Occultist is capable of bleeding his own allies through Wyrd Reconstruction. A worst case scenario is receiving 0 healing from the Occultist's Wyrd Reconstruction and then being applied a bleed on top of it, making the current situation worse.