DragonSword Ailment Coverage: Who Applies What

Every page on this site reads the roster the same way round: pick a hero, find out what they do. That is the wrong direction for the question team-building actually poses, which is "I need somebody who applies Break — who have I got?" This page inverts the table. It is built from the same hero records that drive the unlock planner — one row per hero, listing the ailments that hero is documented as applying — read from the ailment's side instead of the hero's.

Nothing here is a new claim about any hero. What the inversion produces is a count, and the counts are uncomfortable.

The coverage table

Our combat guide attests nine ailments individually. The hero records use ten labels for them, because Fire and Burn are recorded separately, as are Ice and Freeze, and Shock appears under its in-game wording, Electrocution. Collapsed onto the nine:

Sixteen hero-to-ailment pairings in total, spread across ten of the nineteen heroes. The other nine — Johnny, Cerese, Kalsion, Charlotte, Roxy, Alex, Reina, Sion and Tarte — carry no recorded ailment at all.

Poison has nobody

The combat guide lists Poison among the nine and flags it as the weakest-attested of them, resting on a passing player comment rather than a store line or a patch note. The roster data settles nothing about whether it exists, but it does say something concrete: no hero on the shipped roster is documented as applying it, and none of the four unreleased ones is either. If Poison is real, the hero who inflicts it has not been described anywhere this site has read.

That matters for a specific failure mode. A Signal Skill that responds to Poison would be unusable, because nothing on the roster arms it. Before you build around an ailment you read in a skill tooltip, check that a second hero in your three can produce it.

Six ailments hang on a single hero

Break, Bleed and Shock each have exactly one applier — Castella, Theresia and Ornette respectively — and Burn, Fire, Freeze and Ice each have one under their own label. Practically, that means a Break-triggered Signal is a Castella-shaped hole in your roster: if you have not spent an invitation on her, no other hero in the game gives you that opener.

The contrast with Stun is stark. Four heroes apply it, one of them is Lute, and Lute is free — so a Stun-based chain is the only one on this roster that costs nothing to start. Every one of the other nine appliers is an Exchange hero at one Fate's Invitation each, which the unlock planner prices out in full. Nine of the ten appliers therefore sit behind the invitation economy; exactly one does not.

Half the roster cannot start a chain

Nine of nineteen heroes have no ailment on record. That is not the same as saying they apply none — it says nothing any source we have read describes as an ailment. The nine split into recognisable groups. Alex is built on parry, Roxy on aerial repetition, Charlotte on being simple to pilot, Sion on a placed Relic: kits whose published identity is a mechanic, not a status effect. Tarte is a different case entirely — no primary source documents that hero's kit at all, so the blank is a documentation gap rather than a design statement.

Read against the combat guide's central constraint — that a team of three whose ailments nobody responds to will never chain — this is the number worth carrying into the Exchange. Fielding two heroes from the blank nine is fielding a team that may be relying on one hero to carry the entire loop.

Three places our own pages disagree

Compiling per-hero records out of prose exposed three conflicts, and they are printed here rather than reconciled by guesswork.

Kalsion carries no ailment in the roster data, yet the Kalsion build guide classifies him as a Burn applicator and finisher and builds his gear around Burn scaling. The roster page describes his [Royal Flame] state without naming an ailment, which is how the blank arose.

Reina likewise carries none, while the same build guide describes her as having an Airborne kit when pairing her with Kalsion.

Aria is recorded as applying Fire, but the build guide says Burn. If those are the same ailment under two names, the count for Burn / Fire above is two heroes; if they are distinct, one of the two rows is wrong.

None of the three is resolvable from a first-party source, because Hound13 has never published a hero-by-ailment chart. Treat the table above as the conservative read — what the roster text states outright — and the build guides as a second opinion that is better informed about three heroes and less systematic about the rest. The archetype comparison works from the build-guide side of that split, which is why its Burn lineup is longer than this page's.

What the four unreleased heroes would change

The roadmap names four heroes confirmed as free inclusions rather than paid DLC, and three of the four are described by the ailment they specialise in: Ryza in shock, Jerome in knockdown, Veronica in stun. Logan is described as a shield tank with no ailment named.

Slot them in and the shape barely improves where it is worst. Shock goes from one applier to two, Knockdown from two to three, Stun from an already comfortable four to five. Break, Bleed and the two element pairs gain nothing, and Poison still has nobody. Ryza is first in the release order, which at least means the roster's thinnest genuine element gets its second applier before anything else.

What this page cannot tell you

Which Signal Skill responds to which ailment. That is the other half of the chain, and no source we have read publishes it — the combat guide is explicit that you find a hero's trigger by reading their skill text in game. Nor does it carry build-up thresholds, durations or stack counts, none of which Hound13 has published.

It also does not rank the ailments against each other. A count of appliers measures how easy an ailment is to field, not how much damage the chain it opens will do; for that, the best team comps page documents rotations that were actually tested in a fight. And one last honest note on the underlying data: the roster records classify five heroes as story unlocks, thirteen as Exchange and one as undocumented, while the roster page summarises the same split as eight and eleven. The records keep both numbers visible instead of quietly picking one.