Aerial Roll
Aerial Roll is a Health Skill Tree ability in Crimson Desert that provides a high-speed mid-flight dash for dodging and repositioning, exclusive to Kliff.
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Aerial Roll is a Health Skill Tree ability exclusive to Kliff. While in Flight, you instantly consume Stamina for a high-speed dash. This allows rapid bursts of directional movement while airborne, providing a mid-flight dodge for avoiding projectiles and repositioning during aerial combat.
Property | Detail |
|---|---|
Skill Tree | |
80 Stamina per dash | |
Characters | |
Prerequisite | Flight Lv.1 |
Unlock Cost | 1 Abyss Artifact (after Flight Lv.1) |
Aerial Roll can be unlocked in two ways:
Observe the Crowcaller boss during Chapter 5's main quest "Guest Unbidden." The Crowcaller uses Aerial Roll during both of its boss encounters in this chapter. Watch for the boss performing a high-speed aerial dash, and Kliff will learn the skill automatically. When learning occurs, the screen darkens and a "Learning in Progress..." notification appears.
First learn Flight Lv.1, then spend 1 Abyss Artifact to unlock Aerial Roll from the Health Skill Tree.
Aerial Roll is one of three Flight-related movement abilities. Each serves a different purpose:
Skill | Cost | Function |
|---|---|---|
Moderate Stamina drain over time | Base horizontal gliding for traversal and gap crossing | |
Higher Stamina drain over time | Accelerated gliding for fast long-distance travel | |
80 Stamina burst | Instant directional dash for dodging and repositioning |
While in Flight, press the dodge button to perform an Aerial Roll:
Controller: Circle (PlayStation) / B (Xbox) while gliding
PC: Alt key while gliding
Use Aerial Roll as a mid-flight dodge to avoid incoming projectiles or enemy attacks. The burst of speed instantly changes your position, making it invaluable against bosses with ranged attacks or aerial sweeps.
At 80 Stamina per use, it is cheaper than Swift Flight's sustained drain for short repositioning. Use it for quick bursts rather than sustained travel.
Maximize your Stamina stat early (through the Health or Stamina skill tree) to support multiple consecutive Aerial Rolls. Running out of Stamina mid-flight drops you out of the air, which can be dangerous during boss encounters.
The Crowcaller fight in Chapter 5 is an excellent place to practice Aerial Roll timing, since the boss frequently uses aerial dive attacks that are best dodged with a well-timed roll.
The Focused Aerial Roll is a new variant of Aerial Roll introduced for Kliff in Patch 1.02.00. It is unlocked in Kliff's skill tree and gives him a dedicated mid-glide roll that provides a significant forward boost no other single ability can deliver without burning through spirit.
Focus Level 3
Flight Level 2
Aerial Roll (base ability)
Jump into the air, activate Focus, then press the dodge/roll input while gliding. Kliff rolls forward in midair and gains a burst of horizontal momentum. Each use costs 20 Spirit. With Focus Spirit at Level 8, the ability can be triggered roughly three to four times before spirit is fully depleted.
Focused Aerial Roll functions almost identically to the previously-removed mid-air dash exploit, except it is now a sanctioned skill tied to the spirit economy. The forward boost it provides is larger than what any other single ability offers without a heavy spirit cost, making it the go-to tool for long-distance aerial traversal. It combos especially well with the dive mechanic: start from a high vantage point, glide forward, then chain Focused Aerial Rolls with dives to cover large distances quickly.
A previous patch removed the speed-burst trick where you could glide, activate Focus, and then unleash for extra distance. Player feedback was strong enough that the development team brought back a refined version of the technique in the latest gameplay update. The new move is called Focused Aerial Roll.
To trigger it, glide as normal, enter focus, then tap the dodge button while still in focus mode. You get an immediate forward burst. The interesting part is the chain: keep tapping dodge after the first burst and Damian (or Cliff) keeps dashing forward in mid-air, letting you cover huge distances in a single glide arc.
The cost is heavily front-loaded onto spirit rather than stamina. Each burst spends a hefty chunk of spirit, so you can only chain a handful of dashes before the meter taps out, but stamina is barely touched. That trade is great for crossing large open zones quickly without grounding yourself, and it pairs cleanly with Aerial Roll if you have already invested in the basic version.
Patch 1.04 quietly reduced the value of Focused Aerial Roll. Both the travel distance and the forward movement speed of the skill were cut, while the Spirit and Stamina cost per activation stayed the same as before the patch. Because the cost did not decrease alongside the distance, the skill is significantly less cost-efficient post-patch. A dash that previously covered a large open gap in one Focus window now covers a much shorter distance for the same resource drain, and chaining bursts depletes Focus Spirit just as quickly as it did at the old range.
The unchanged cost is important to understand because the pre-patch value of Focused Aerial Roll was not just the forward boost, it was the ratio of distance gained per unit of Spirit spent. Cutting the distance without cutting the cost rebalances the skill toward short repositioning and away from long-distance aerial traversal. Players who relied on it as a burst-travel tool across open terrain will feel the reduction immediately, while players who used it for tight mid-glide corrections will notice a smaller change.
Patch 1.04 also introduced the new Difficulty Settings system (see Difficulty Explained for the full breakdown), and one of the changes on Hard mode affects every roll, not just Aerial Roll. On Hard mode, the invincibility duration applied to rolls is reduced. The i-frame window during a Roll or Dodge is shorter than the baseline, so rolling late into an attack is more likely to eat damage on Hard mode than on Normal. Easy mode keeps the baseline i-frame window (and in fact widens the parry and dodge timing windows in general), and Normal mode is unchanged from pre-patch behavior.
This change applies to ground rolls and Aerial Roll alike. On Hard mode, an Aerial Roll used to dodge a projectile or aerial sweep has a tighter window to actually avoid the hit, so timing the roll to coincide with the incoming attack matters more than before. Players who spam roll defensively will feel the nerf most; players who roll on read, timed to specific boss telegraphs, will barely notice.
Patch 1.04 also reduced the attack and defense bonuses gained from grindstone and anvil reinforcement on equipment. Because rolling-based survivability is partly backed by raw defense values, this reinforcement nerf compounds with the Hard mode i-frame reduction: you cannot simply out-gear the tighter dodge windows by stacking reinforced armor the way you could pre-patch. For Hard mode players, the practical takeaway is that roll timing against aerial attackers and ranged bosses is now more dependent on pattern reading than on gear buffers.
Focused Aerial Roll is still worth slotting, but its role has narrowed. The skill remains useful for holding horizontal elevation a brief moment longer than a plain Aerial Roll and for gaining a small extra nudge of forward speed while gliding, which can be the difference between clearing a ledge or not. It is no longer the go-to burst movement tool for crossing wide open terrain, though. For long-distance aerial traversal, starting from a higher vantage point and stringing together plain Aerial Rolls often covers comparable ground without spending the full Focus Spirit bar on a single run.
If the post-patch feel is too weak for your playstyle, the skill can also be treated as a positional tool rather than a travel tool: use it to stay in the air just long enough to line up a follow-up attack or to reposition around an aerial target, where the reduced distance is less of a drawback than it is in open-world traversal.
Patch 1.04 delivered a separate buff that sits upstream of Aerial Roll and changes how the skill chains into its focus-powered variant. The buff targets the focus charge meter itself. The charge now fills approximately twice as fast as it did before the patch: a full bar now completes in the same window that previously filled only half a bar. Because Aerial Roll is the entry point that leads into Focused Aerial Roll, the faster recharge has a real effect on how long Kliff can stay airborne when chaining the two skills together, even though the Aerial Roll activation itself does not read from the focus charge resource.
The interaction matters because each Focused Aerial Roll consumes focus. Before the patch, a single focus pool supported a limited number of focused rolls before Kliff had to descend, land, and wait for the charge meter to refill. After the patch, the same aerial window produces roughly twice as many focused rolls because the meter keeps topping back up while the player is still airborne. In practical terms, that means the effective chained-aerial-roll traversal distance per focus pool has roughly doubled, turning the combined chain (plain Aerial Roll opens the line, Focused Aerial Roll extends it) into a significantly stronger long-distance traversal option than it was during the week immediately after Patch 1.04 dropped.
Note that the Aerial Roll skill covered in the rest of this article is unaffected on its own terms. The ability still costs 80 Stamina per dash and still ignores focus entirely. The buff matters here only because of the handoff into the focus-consuming variant: faster charge refill means Kliff's flight budget is bottlenecked less by focus regeneration between rolls and more by the underlying Movement Controls input windows and Stamina economy that govern how fast the player can commit each roll.
Focus charge fill rate - Roughly doubled. A full bar fills in the time that previously covered only half a bar. This is a passive change to the resource meter, not a skill-tree investment.
Effect on chained aerial rolls - When Aerial Roll chains into Focused Aerial Roll, each focused roll still consumes focus, but the pool refills fast enough during the chain that more focused rolls fit into the same aerial window. Chain length per focus pool approximately doubles.
Effect on Aerial Roll alone - No direct change. Aerial Roll by itself still spends 80 Stamina per dash and does not touch the focus charge meter. The buff only matters once the chain transitions into the focus-powered variant.
Effect on traversal distance - Effectively doubles the chained-aerial-roll traversal distance per focus pool, since twice as many focused rolls can fire before the pool drains during a single airborne stretch.
Effect on Movement Speed - Per-roll speed and per-roll distance are unchanged by this buff. The gain is in how many rolls fit into one chain, not in how fast any single roll moves. Combined with the 1.0401 hotfix that restored the Focused Aerial Roll per-roll flight speed, the two changes together produce a noticeably longer post-buff chain than the pre-1.04 baseline.
Stacks with Focused Insight - Any skill-tree or gear source that lengthens the usable focus window compounds with the faster fill rate, since the extra charge that refills during a chain is still bottlenecked by how long focus itself remains active. Players who already slot focus-extending passives get the largest total increase in chain length.
For players who had shelved the chain during the short 1.04 nerf window described in the sections above, the combined picture on the live build is worth a retest. The charge-meter buff carried forward through the 1.0401 hotfix and is still active on the current live version, so the airborne chain is meaningfully longer than it was either pre-patch or during the 1.04 bug week.