Active Skills

Overview

Active Skills are the per-Hero ability loadouts at the centre of DragonSword: Awakening's combat system. Every one of the nineteen playable Heroes carries its own Active Skill set, and those skills are what a player presses during a fight to extend combos, keep pressure on a target, and lead into the bigger payoff moves. They are the mid-combo layer: Status Ailments go down first, Active Skills ride on top of them, and a tag-team Signal Skill closes the chain.

Hound13's framing on the store page is direct about where Active Skills sit in the loop: the player stacks Status Ailments with Active Skills, then chains devastating combos with powerful Signal Skills. Read in order, that puts Active Skills at the point in the chain where the fight goes from setup to sustained damage.

How Active Skills Work in a Combo

Combat is built around a three-step rhythm: apply, extend, finish. Active Skills are the extend step. Once a Hero has put their ailment on the target, the Active Skill set is what keeps the combo flowing while that ailment is still up. Used correctly, Active Skills stretch the ailment window long enough for a Hero switch through the Switching Signals system, at which point an incoming teammate's Signal Skill can land cleanly and reset the cycle.

Hound13 has described the action as rhythmic and dynamic, with rapid aerial juggles that keep enemies in the air, heavy knockbacks that send monsters flying, and smooth swaps between the player's three active fighters. Active Skills are the moves doing that work between hits. They are the tools the player uses to juggle, knock back, and keep the target locked while the ailment still applies.

Three Active Fighters

The player's field party is capped at three Heroes at a time. All three can be swapped to mid-combo, and each one brings its own Active Skills to the switch. That is why roster planning matters: a three-Hero team is effectively three Active Skill sets layered over three different Status Ailments, and the player decides how to rotate through them during a fight.

Because the switch itself is how Signal Skills are triggered, Active Skills and the tag system are tightly linked. The player uses Active Skills on one Hero to keep the combo alive, and then the act of switching to another Hero in the three-fighter rotation is what feeds into the next Signal Skills payoff.

Per-Hero Specialisation

Each Hero's Active Skill kit is built around that Hero's specific Status Ailment. Because every Hero's ailment is different, their Active Skills are different in function as well as appearance. A Hero whose ailment locks the target down will have Active Skills tuned to keep the target in place and pile on damage; a Hero whose ailment sets up a burst will have Active Skills shaped to drive into that burst.

The clearest publicly named example is Kalien, the fire Spiritist of the Red Fox Mercenary Corps. Her Status Ailment is Stun, and her combat style uses flame attacks channelled through her fox spirit companion Sur. In practice that means Kalien's Active Skills are the moves a player strings together to keep a stunned target locked in place while fire damage continues to chain. Other Heroes in the nineteen-strong roster use different ailments and so have differently shaped Active Skill sets, although only a handful of Heroes have been individually revealed so far.

Active Skills vs Signal Skills

Active Skills and Signal Skills are both part of the same combat pipeline, but they play different roles. Active Skills belong to the Hero currently in play and are used throughout the combo to extend the ailment window. Signal Skills are the tag-team payoff: they trigger when the player switches to another Hero through the Switching Signals system while the previous ailment is still up, and they produce the biggest single-hit damage in the chain.

Combat Lineage

The Active Skill to Signal Skill pipeline is the evolution of the switch-action combat style Hound13 first built in the studio's earlier mobile title Hundred Soul. In that game, characters weaved in and out of a fight through rapid tags. DragonSword: Awakening carries the same idea forward into an open-world action RPG, with the three-fighter field party and the ailment-gated combo loop doing the same job at a much larger scale.

What Is Not Yet Publicly Detailed

A number of specifics have not yet been individually confirmed by Hound13. These include the exact number of Active Skills per Hero, their individual cooldown values, whether Active Skills draw from a per-Hero resource gauge or from cooldowns alone, and the exact inputs used to chain them. Individual Active Skill names, animation details, and upgrade paths are expected to be revealed alongside each Hero as the pre-launch campaign continues, with the June 2026 Steam Next Fest demo the next major show window.

The Getting Started and Overview pages will be updated as Active Skill specifics are confirmed.

Related Systems

• Status Ailments - the setup layer Active Skills build on.

• Signal Skills - the tag-team finisher Active Skills lead into.

• Heroes - each of the nineteen Heroes carries their own Active Skill set, shaped around their specific ailment.

• Familiars - the collectible companion layer that sits alongside a Hero's Active Skill loadout.

• Co-op - Battle and Raid content where multiple players chain Active Skills together.

• Dragon Riding - the aerial traversal layer, distinct from ground combat and the Active Skill loop.