Active Skills

Active Skills are the mid-combo layer of DragonSword: Awakening's combat system. They sit between Status Ailment setup and the Signal Skill finisher, and they are what the player uses to extend a combo while ailments are stacked.

Role

Hound13's own framing on the Steam store page is precise: "Stack Status Ailments with Active Skills, then chain devastating combos with powerful Signal Skills." In practice that means Active Skills are the tool that applies and extends ailments during the combo, rather than finishing it.

A Hero weaving Active Skills in the middle of a combo keeps damage flowing and keeps the target locked in the combo window long enough for a Signal Skill switch to land. Active Skills are still usable in isolation outside a combo, but the highest damage ceiling comes from chaining them into the ailment-gated loop.

Per-Hero Kits

Because each of the nineteen Heroes has a distinct Status Ailment, each Hero's Active Skill set is built around applying and exploiting that ailment. Active Skill names, individual cooldowns, exact counts per Hero, and resource systems are not yet individually detailed in published material. Active Skills will be revealed alongside each Hero.

Combat Lineage

DragonSword: Awakening's combo system is directly descended from Hound13's earlier mobile title Hundred Soul, which pioneered the switch-action combat style where characters weave in and out of a fight. The Active Skill -> Signal Skill pipeline is the evolution of that switch-action format into the open-world action RPG space.

Related Systems

• Status Ailments - the target debuff the combo is built around.

• Signal Skills - the tag-team finisher that closes the loop.

• Heroes - roster overview. Each Hero's Active Skills feed their own ailment.