DragonSword: Awakening Heroes

Heroes are chosen for their ailments, not their damage

You field three heroes and control one at a time. Each carries 2 Active Skills and 2 Signal Skills — the producer's own framing is "up to 4 skills, making 12 total skills in play."

Signal Skills have no cooldown. They arm when a specific Status Ailment lands, and then one of two things happens: if the responder is on-field you get a button prompt, and if they are off-field an icon appears on their portrait and switching to them fires the skill as they tag in.

That single rule decides team building, and it is not obvious from the character select screen. Three heroes who each apply an ailment nobody else responds to will never chain, however good their individual numbers are. You are picking overlapping ailment coverage, not complementary damage types.

What that looks like in practice

The most self-sufficient chain in the roster is the Airborne core — Astria, Eileen and Aria all launch enemies, so the chain feeds itself without any setup.

The most forgiving is Stun, because Lute applies it and is also the only hero in the game with an on-demand heal. With no natural HP regeneration and only two consumable slots, that matters more than it sounds.

Beyond those, players consistently build around Bleed, Burn, Shock, summons and defensive control. There is no in-game compatibility chart — the way to work out a team is to read each hero's skill text and find its trigger.

On tier lists

The two most-cited community rankings disagree with each other on nearly half the roster, so instead of adding a third opinion we compare them side by side and flag the handful of placements they agree on. Read that page before spending Fate's Invitations on someone's S tier.

Elements also gate damage outright

Some enemies take no damage at all until struck with the right element. Soulwarden Zemoor is the standard example, and the game signposts it with a note on a nearby staircase. Kalien is the community's default answer to undead.

If a fight feels like your damage is being ignored, read the environment before you rebuild your gear.

The nineteen, by name

Hound13's own FAQ states the count plainly: you can "obtain all 19 playable characters (at launch) through story progression." The launch roster is Lute, Castella, Aria, Johnny, Dana, Kalien, Roxy, Alex, Theresia, Ornette, Sion, Tarte, Kalsion, Cerese, Reina, Astria, Eileen, Othello and Charlotte. The full list as a set comes from guide coverage rather than one official document — but thirteen of the nineteen names also appear scattered across Hound13's own patch notes and trailers, which is as close to official confirmation as the roster currently gets.

Getting the full roster

Eight heroes join through the story. The other eleven — Eileen, Reina, Astria, Roxy, Alex, Kalien, Dana, Theresia, Tarte, Sion and Charlotte — are bought in the Exchange with Fate's Invitation tickets.

There is no gacha, no paid characters and no drop chance — the Steam release deliberately stripped all of that out after Hound13 terminated its Korean publishing agreement and relaunched as a buy-to-play package. The game hands out enough invitations to eventually collect everyone, so an early purchase is not a permanent loss.

Four more heroes are on the roadmap — Ryza, Jerome, Veronica and Logan — and the producer stated explicitly that these are included in the full version, not paid DLC, and will be developed regardless of sales.

What is not documented — and what 1.0.9 just fixed

Tarte's playstyle, Johnny's weapon, and the full kits for Othello and Charlotte do not appear in any source we consider reliable. Neither does the exact chapter or quest that grants each Fate's Invitation.

Those entries stay blank rather than guessed. The auto-generated wikis will give you all of it in a confident table; they cannot tell you where the numbers came from.

One long-standing gap closed on 13 August 2026: the 1.0.9 patch made the in-game Codex show where each hero is obtained — the authoritative answer to "where do I unlock X" now lives in your own Codex, which beats any wiki table this site could publish. The same patch expanded team menu slots from five to seven: two more saved compositions to build ailment chains around. Details on the patch notes page.