DragonSword Gear, Runes, Karma and Awakening

The beginner guide lists Runes, Karma, Awakening, substats and reforging in a single breath, which is honest about how the game presents them — four separate upgrade tracks arriving at once, none explained well. This page takes them apart.

A warning before the detail: the sourcing quality here is much worse than on our combat pages. Hound13 documents almost none of this. Most of what follows comes from two signed outlets and two player-written Steam guides, and one of those guides has a two-digit readership. Every claim below is labelled with where it came from.

Runes: five types, five grades

From Destructoid's rune explainer (Franklin Bellone Borges, 29 July 2026), the five rune types and what each does, in their words:

Five rarities, ascending: Damaged, Intact, Refined, Radiant, Perfect.

This is one outlet. It is signed and specific, but it is not independently confirmed — we could not find a second source describing the same five types. The same article's claim that "Resolve and Amplification are widely considered to be the best runes" is that author's read of community opinion, not a measurement, and we would not build around it on its own.

Sockets cost a tool, swaps cost gold

Runes go into a socket, and opening one takes one Anonymous Artisan's Crafting Tool, described as "acquirable via Raids, the story, by completing the Ashen Ruins dungeon, or for 100 Adventurer's Emblems at the Exchange shop." Sockets can only be opened on any 4-star or better equipment piece.

The part worth internalising: swapping a rune out later costs 10,000 gold, and does not destroy the rune or consume another crafting tool. So the expensive, irreversible-feeling step is opening the socket, not choosing what goes in it. Put your tools into gear you expect to keep; the rune inside can change its mind cheaply.

Synthesis, and the rule that changed on 6 August

This one is official and it invalidates older advice. Patch 1.0.7 states plainly: "4-Star Rune Synthesis now yields 5-Star Runes." The same patch expanded rune inventory from 200 to 500 and added a rune quantity display.

If you are reading a rune guide written before 6 August 2026 that tells you four-star synthesis is a dead end, or that you should be selling down to stay under an inventory cap, that guide is describing a game that no longer exists. See our patch history for what else moved in that update.

Karma: the shared kind and the character-locked kind

Two outlets describe the same split independently, which makes this the best-supported part of the page.

Basic Karma attaches to the weapon system and, per Pro Game Guides, "plays a major role in overall damage output." Nerd's Chalk (updated 30 July 2026) adds that Basic Karma can go on any hero, and that its entries want to match that hero's profile — their element, their break pressure, their status ailment. That is not a cosmetic preference: it is the same overlap logic that decides whether your team chains at all, which we cover on the combat page.

Exclusive Karma is character-specific. Nerd's Chalk calls it the piece that "becomes the long-term best-in-slot target for its owner" — an endgame goal per hero, not something you spread across the roster.

Both outlets agree on how you feed the system: duplicates. Pro Game Guides says "each Karma can be ascended multiple times by collecting duplicate copies," and that "one of the best ways to obtain duplicate Basic Karma is by defeating World Bosses." Patch 1.0.4 raised World Boss rewards and added EXP, Emblems, Chronographs and Memory Fragments to them, which is official corroboration that World Bosses are a real farming loop rather than a one-time clear.

The Exclusive Karma recipe, and how thin its sourcing is

One player has published a recipe. We are reproducing it because nothing else exists, and flagging exactly how weak that is: the guide had 39 unique visitors as of 12 August 2026.

Per that guide, you create a Shard of Residual Sample with the alchemist Shanoa in Orbis Castle, from 1 Whirling Thought + 100 Fragments of Memory + 100,000 gold, and "1 Shard = 1 exclusive karma!"

What holds up around it: Shanoa as the relevant NPC and the Tower of Trials as the material source are independently corroborated by Nerd's Chalk. What does not have a second source is the recipe itself — the three quantities are one player's notes, not independently confirmed.

One naming wrinkle worth knowing before you go shopping: the patch notes say "Memory Fragments" among the added World Boss rewards, while the guide says "Fragments of Memory." Those are very likely the same item and we cannot prove it.

Tower of Trials, and what it feeds

Described by the same player guide as "an endgame activity consisting of series of instanced floors with increasing difficulty." Its reported shape:

• Unlocks in Chapter 3, after talking to Cerese and completing her quest
• Three towers, 30 floors each — 90 floors total
• The three towers are each said to lean on a different control axis: stun, launching, knockdown
• Tower shards exchange for Whirling Thought, the item the Shard recipe above needs

The floor structure is single-sourced. What is official is that the mode exists and has a reward screen: patch 1.0.4 fixed the "Tower of Trials reward claim display."

If the three-axis split is accurate, it has a team-building consequence — a roster that only stuns will be badly placed in the launching tower. Cross-reference which ailment each hero applies on our heroes page before you commit to a climb.

Not published anywhere: the enemies on each floor, recommended levels, and the reward table per floor. We looked.

Awakening: at least three tiers, reportedly six

Pro Game Guides describes Awakening as unlocking "new bonuses that can significantly improve their combat performance and even alter how they play in battle," fed by Stigma Awakened Stones at 200 Fragment of Sacred Light each, across six tiers.

Six is one source. What is confirmed at the developer level is narrower but firmer: Hound13's own 1.0.4 notes address behaviour tied to a hero's 3rd Awakening, so at least three tiers exist. We would write "at least three, reported to be six" rather than repeating six as fact.

On the material: patch 1.0.4 raised Sudden Mission rewards to Fragment of Sacred Light ×60. We deliberately are not dividing 200 by 60 for you, because no source states whether that 60 is per completion, per day, or a changed cap.

Gear sets are 3+2, and one slot carries more

Nerd's Chalk describes set behaviour as "a role-defining 3-piece effect plus a secondary 2-piece effect." The practical consequence is the useful part: wearing five pieces of one set wastes two slots. Three plus two is the target.

The same guide singles out one slot — "the chest slot is especially important because it can carry the strongest main-stat value on armor." Single outlet, not independently confirmed, but it is a structural claim rather than a number, and structural claims are the kind that survive patches.

Reforging, and a tool with two names

Once a piece is at max level you can reroll its substats, and locking a substat raises the gold cost for each locked slot. That much both outlets describe the same way.

They do not agree on what the item is called. Nerd's Chalk calls it a Shape Grinder; Pro Game Guides calls it a Stat Grinder and prices it at 25 Adventurer's Emblems. We have no way to tell which matches the English client, so look for the function in the Exchange rather than the name.

Official corroboration that the feature exists at all: 1.0.7 fixed the "equipment reforge display." Patch 1.0.4 also added five Lowest-Grade crafting materials — Monster Essence, Hide, Bone Fragment, Carapace, Claw — to the gold shop, which is the cheapest floor under any crafting plan.

What competes for your Adventurer's Emblems

Three published sinks, from three different articles, all wanting the same currency:

• 100 Emblems — one Anonymous Artisan's Crafting Tool, to open a rune socket
• 25 Emblems — one substat-reroll grinder
• 100 Adventure's Emblems — the Fierce Rhinoceros Beetle familiar

Emblems were also added to World Boss rewards in 1.0.4. No source publishes an earn rate, so we cannot build you a budget — but knowing that a single socket costs the same as a familiar is enough to stop you spending blind.

One player's damage maths, quoted with a warning

The only attempt at a damage formula we found is a Steam guide by Mr. Dr. Professor, 559 unique visitors as of 12 August 2026. It is worth reading and it is worth distrusting, in that order, because the author says so himself: "The confidence of my math is 1%."

His model is ATK × Skill% × F(Def), with F(Def) = -0.0006x + 1.015, and a rule of thumb that "every 100 Defense is about 6% damage reduction, with the first hundred being 4.5%." He also reports no level scaling in the damage calculation, and warns that "the displayed Skill% are unreliable."

The line that bears on your rune choice: "Atk% is also more reliable since crit chance and damage can be resisted." Set that against Destructoid's report that Resolve and Amplification are the community favourites — Amplification is crit damage. Two attributed opinions pointing in different directions, and no verified data to settle them. We are not going to settle it by picking.

Numbers we deliberately left blank

No equipment star cap. No set names, no set effect values. No enhancement success rates. No per-grade stat values for runes. No floor-by-floor Tower of Trials data. No per-tier Awakening bonuses.

None of those are published by Hound13, and none appear in any source that says where its figures came from. They do appear, formatted into confident tables, on the auto-generated wikis this game has attracted in unusual numbers — which is precisely why we are naming Destructoid, Pro Game Guides, Nerd's Chalk and two individual Steam authors on every claim above. You can check every one of them, and disagree with us where we have leaned on a single source.