DragonSword Hero Unlock Planner: Plan All 19

Tick the heroes you already have and the planner above does the arithmetic: how many Fate's Invitations you still owe, how many heroes are still sitting behind story progress, and — once you star a few targets — the order to unlock them in. Ticks are saved only in this browser, nothing is uploaded, and Reset clears everything. The progress code exists so you can move a plan between two machines without an account.

How DragonSword's unlock economy actually works

The important thing to understand before you plan anything is that this economy is flat. There is no shard counter, no per-hero price, no duplicate-conversion currency and no rate-up banner. Every hero in the Exchange costs exactly one Fate's Invitation, and the invitation is the only currency in the transaction. A hero you desperately want and a hero you are indifferent to cost the same.

That is not an accident of tuning. DragonSword launched in Korea in December 2025 as a free-to-play gacha title; Hound13 terminated the publishing agreement and relaunched on Steam as a buy-to-play package with the gacha stripped out. What is left is a roster you complete by playing, on a schedule the game controls. Players report roughly one invitation per chapter through Chapter 5, with the last few arriving from Hero Quests — that pacing comes from a player thread rather than from the developer, so treat it as a rough shape rather than a schedule.

The consequence for planning is blunt and worth saying out loud: the planner cannot save you money, because there is no money. What it can do is tell you what is free, what costs an invitation, and what you have not accounted for. Our full hero roster records the per-hero classification this page reads from — five heroes explicitly noted as story unlocks, thirteen as Exchange purchases, and Tarte, whose unlock path is not documented in any primary source we consider reliable. That page also summarises the split as eight story and eleven Exchange; where the headline and the per-hero lines disagree, this planner follows the per-hero lines and flags what it cannot cost rather than filling the gap with a guess.

Who a new player should unlock first, and why

Because price carries no information here, the only sensible ranking is by what your team needs, and in DragonSword a team need is an ailment need. Signal Skills arm when a specific status ailment lands, so three heroes who each apply an ailment nobody else responds to will never chain a single combo. The status ailments and signals guide explains the mechanism; the practical version is that you want two heroes on the same ailment before you want a third exotic one.

That points a first-time buyer at the Airborne cluster. Astria, Eileen and Aria all launch enemies, all three are Exchange heroes, and any two of them form a chain that works from the moment you own it — the most self-sufficient pairing on the roster. If you would rather build around Stun, Castella and Theresia are the Exchange half of a group that already contains Lute, who arrives free with the story and is the only hero in the game with an on-demand heal.

Two heroes deserve a specific mention. Kalien is the community's standard answer to undead enemies and to anything that gates damage behind burn or shock — Soulwarden Zemoor takes no damage at all until struck with one of them. And Kalsion is worth knowing about precisely because you do not spend an invitation on him: he arrives through the story, and he is one of the few heroes both major English rankings place in S tier without argument, which is unusual on a roster where the two published tier lists disagree with each other badly. Our Kalsion build guide covers the Karma and gear split that turns him into the Burn finisher those rankings are describing. Spending an invitation on a hero who duplicates his role is the closest thing to a wasted invitation this game offers.

If you want a shortcut past all of this, the best team comps page lists working three-hero groups; star the members of one comp in the planner and it will tell you what that comp costs you from where you are standing right now.

What this tool does not do

It does not read your save file — you tick the boxes, which is why it needs no login and cannot be wrong about what you own. It does not predict when your next invitation arrives, because the chapter-by-chapter drop schedule has never been published by Hound13 and we are not going to invent one. It does not cost the four post-launch heroes — Ryza, Jerome, Veronica and Logan are confirmed free and included in the full version rather than sold as DLC, but none of them has shipped, so there is no unlock path to plan around; they are listed on the roadmap page instead. And it says "cost unknown" for Tarte rather than assuming she behaves like the other twelve, because assuming is how the auto-generated wikis end up with a confident table nobody can source.

If you are tracking completion more broadly, the achievement tracker works the same way — local ticks, no account, honest about what the data does and does not cover. And if you came here looking for a redeem code to skip the Exchange grind, our codes page explains why there is no such shortcut and what to farm instead.