DragonSword Combat: Status Ailments and Signal Skills

Your damage does not come from one Hero — it comes from the handoff. DragonSword: Awakening's combat is built on a two-step loop: stack Status Ailments with Active Skills, then chain Signal Skills to cash them in. Heroes switch in and out mid-combo through Switching Signals, so a fight is a relay between team members rather than one character's rotation.

The loop, in order

1. Apply. Use a Hero's Active Skills to stack Status Ailments on the target.
2. Chain. Trigger Signal Skills to chain combos off those ailments.
3. Switch. Heroes weave in and out through Switching Signals, keeping the chain alive.

The official description calls this "endless combo chains" — the design intent is that the chain does not stop when one Hero's turn does.

Why team building is about ailments

Each of the 19 Heroes has distinct Status Ailment abilities. That word is doing a lot of work: it means Heroes are not interchangeable damage values, they are ailment types. A team is a set of ailments that feed each other.

The practical consequence for new players: do not build a team out of your three favourite characters. Build one where the first Hero's ailment is something the second Hero's Signal can use.

What this means in a boss fight

Boss fights are where a badly-matched team shows up clearly. If your ailments and Signals do not line up, you fall back to raw Active Skill damage — which is the slow, unfun version of this combat system, and the usual reason a player says a boss "has too much health".

Still to verify

Which specific ailments each Hero applies, which Signals consume which ailments, and the actual damage formulas are not yet confirmed here. The community has begun documenting this — there is a "Damage 101" guide on Steam — but we have not verified those numbers ourselves and will not restate them as fact until we have.

This page describes the system as the developer documents it. Per-Hero specifics come next.