I'm working on a top down game like Diablo. My question is how are attacks usually done in terms of hitting the enemy. Is it physics based in that if the weapon/sword collides with the enemy it registers a hit? This seems like it could be error prone and cause issues. What are other ideas to register a hit in a game like this where things aren't actually targeted?

OK, so I could find all enemies within an bounding box in front of the character for melee or where the spell hits and if you are in that box you are registering a hit. That makes sense. Thanks

ones that tend to be 'physically' based, tend to have some sort of collider that emanates out with the animation, usually much larger than the weapon / fist / spell. For a game like Diablo, it could just be, "When attack is initiated determine hit-miss-result based on stats/random results, display results when 'strike' frame is played'

You have probably already realized this, based on the 2 posts and your own, but just in case you didn't:

There are 2 separate ideas at play here:

1. Determining what the targets are.

2. Determining if the targets take damage (or how much).

For most diablo type games, number 1 is based on either a "collision template" or a function that does the same thing ... the goal being to have a quick method to determine what enemy (or set of enemies) is within the potential "hit box" (which can be a cone/sphere or whatever) ... for non-AOE weapons, the "nearest" such enemy is usually selected. For AOE weapons, all such enemies are usually selected ...

And then the logic passes the (hit / potentially hit / targetted) units to the part of the code that computes / applies the damage ... which takes into account things like resistence, etc.

Then the output of this function is used to generate sound/graphic/particle artifacts (so that blocked attacks sound different than crits, etc) ...