Revision 9

Sword skills are Echoes of Aincrad's special attacks. Each of the six weapon types has its own pool of around ten sword skills, unlocked as the player progresses through the campaign.

Equip Limit

Up to three sword skills can be equipped on a given weapon at the same time. That limit still forces a real choice between offence and utility, since each slot can be the difference between a reliable gap-closer and a slow-but-devastating finisher.

How They Fit with Combos

Sword skills layer on top of the regular light and heavy attack combos rather than replacing them. They are strongest when used to extend a combo after a successful Parry Slash or Dodge Slash, where the enemy is briefly open to extra damage.

Role in the Combat Kit

Sword skills are the strongest offensive actions in the combat system. They deal more damage than a normal light or heavy attack, and every skill enters a cooldown the moment it is used, so the player cannot simply spam the biggest hit to erase a health bar. The rest of the toolkit, regular attacks, guards, and movement, has to fill the gap between activations.

Pool Size and Equip Slots

Each weapon type has roughly ten sword skills in total across its learnable set, and the player can equip up to three of them at once. The equipped skills are shown at the bottom right of the screen and fire on the primary inputs. Holding the action-shift button does not add another sword-skill slot. Instead it swaps the HUD over to show the current partner's Support Skill and Combination Skill, which are covered in more detail on the Special Skills page.

SP: The Sword Skill Resource

Sword skills draw from SP, a meter that is separate from stamina. Stamina governs regular attacks, dodges, and guards, while SP is spent specifically to fire off a sword skill. SP rebuilds through aggressive play: landing regular attacks on enemies feeds the meter back up, and a specific kind of potion can also be consumed to restore it. The intended flow is that while cooldowns are ticking on your strongest hits, you are still weaving in basic strings to refill SP for the next activation rather than standing back and waiting.

Combining Skills with Normal Attacks

Unlike prior action-title entries set in the same universe, Echoes of Aincrad does not use a dedicated timing-based chain input for linking one sword skill into another. There is no special prompt or cue that has to be hit on the exact frame a skill ends. Instead, basic attacks and sword skills can be woven together freely, as long as the player still has the stamina for normal swings and the SP for the next skill. The pacing of each sequence comes from resource management rather than from a separate chain meter.

Weapon Proficiency

Sword Skills are gated behind weapon proficiency, which rises through use of a given weapon type. Raising it has two separate effects: new skills are added to that weapon's pool, and skills already learned can be levelled up.

That second effect is what makes proficiency more than an unlock track. A player who commits to one weapon ends up with fewer but stronger options than a player who spreads their time, and because proficiency is tracked per type, the investment does not carry across when you switch.

Sword Skill performance was adjusted in a post-launch balance pass, alongside Combination Skills and Support Skills and the attack values of the slash counters. The published notes name the systems that moved without quantifying them, so treat older skill comparisons with some caution. See Update History for the full record.

Named Sword Skills

For most of the game’s life no first-party source named individual sword skills, so the wiki could only describe the system in the abstract. The August 2026 balance pass changed that: it worked through the skill lists weapon by weapon and named roughly thirty of them. The table below records every skill named in official patch notes to date, together with the direction it was adjusted.

Two caveats. This is not a complete skill list, only the skills that happened to need balancing, so each weapon has more skills than appear here. And the entries describe the direction of a change, not absolute power, so a skill listed as adjusted downward is not necessarily weak.

Rapiers are the conspicuous absence. They took a reduction in SP generation in the same patch without a single named skill change to go with it, which makes them the one weapon type whose individual skills remain entirely unconfirmed by first-party sources.

What the Adjustments Actually Did

The upward adjustments fall into a small number of repeated patterns rather than bespoke tuning per skill.

The downward adjustments are more individual. Strike Rain lost damage and ATK correction and gained both cooldown and SP cost, the heaviest single nerf in the pass. Hornet Swarm lost damage and ATK correction. Absorbing Strike had its ATK correction and cooldown adjusted downward.

Read alongside the per-weapon SP changes recorded in Update History, the shape of the pass is clear enough: the two-handed weapons were made cheaper and quicker to use, and the fast one-handed weapons had their best skills and their SP income trimmed.

Interrupting Enemy Attacks

A sword skill used just before an incoming enemy attack lands can interrupt that attack outright, stopping the swing and leaving the enemy open. This is not universal: it appears some attacks cannot be cut through, which points to a priority system where certain skills or certain enemy moves take precedence over others. When the timing and priority both line up, the result is a mid-combo counter that folds into the wider Parry, Dodge, and Reversal Slash family of counterattacks. The two systems share the same instinct: read the enemy, act at the right moment, and trade their attack for damage on your end.

Stat Scaling

Two stats have a direct effect on sword-skill performance and are therefore worth prioritising on any build that relies heavily on them:

Summary of Key Numbers