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Awakening
August 26, 2026 at 09:14 AM
Added Ornette to the per-Hero Awakening table: her Holy Cross skill is gated behind the first stage, the earliest stage yet tied to a named skill
Awakening is the per-Hero growth ladder that runs underneath everything else in DragonSword: Awakening, and the system the game takes its subtitle from. Every one of the playable Heroes climbs the same six stages, and each stage changes what that Hero can do rather than only raising a number.
The ladder has six tiers and stops there. Asked directly during the August 10, 2026 developer broadcast whether the tiers would be extended past six, Hound13 said the six-tier system is designed as it stands and that further expansion is not planned in the near term. Additional growth systems layered alongside it are being considered instead.
Character growth itself is uncapped in the sense that no paywall gates it. The materials come out of the main story, growth guides, Mercenary Corps achievements, and exploration, which is the same promise the Buy-to-Play Model makes about every other progression track: nothing meaningful sits behind a purchase.
Awakening effects are written per Hero rather than from a shared template, so the same stage number does different work depending on who reaches it. Patch notes since launch make the shape visible.
Hero | Stage | Effect as described in patch notes |
|---|---|---|
Third | Grants the Air Stomp attack and an aerial re-jump. Patch 1.0.4 cut the re-jump cooldown from three seconds to one and a half, and fixed consecutive Air Stomps failing when performed in place. | |
Sixth | A sixth-stage effect that patch 1.0.9 fixed for multiplayer sessions, where it had not been applying. | |
Sixth | Generates ice props in the field. Patch 1.0.9 fixed an interaction where those props could not be destroyed by a Frozen Burst while Othello's third-stage effect was active. | |
Third | Interacts with other Heroes' field effects, as the Cerese interaction above shows. | |
First | Gates the Holy Cross skill. Patch 1.0.10 removed a camera rotation sensitivity change that fired when it was used. The earliest stage yet tied to a named skill. |
Ornette is the useful counter-example to reading the ladder as a late-game concern: her entry sits at the first stage rather than the third or sixth, so a Hero's Active Skill set is not fixed at recruitment even early on. Because the effects interact across the tag-team roster, an Awakening stage is as much a team-composition decision as an individual upgrade. See Active Skills and Signal Skills for the layers Awakening effects modify.
Some story content supplies Awakening stages rather than expecting the player to have earned them. Patch 1.0.9 reduced the combat difficulty of the Scenario Mode section in Adventure Quest 58, Ghoul Greed, by unlocking Lute, Johnny and Kalien up to their sixth Awakening for that dungeon. It is a useful marker of where the ladder is expected to sit by the late campaign.
Heroes for the roster that climbs this ladder.
Runes for the endgame growth layer that sits past it.
Update History for the per-stage balance changes.
