Skills
Skills are the moves your fighter uses in battle. An Avatar's whole combat kit comes from the specialization you field — there's no separate list of skills to learn, and no loadout to slot.
Every class has three specializations — one per role (🛡️ Anchor · ⚔️ Striker · ✨ Mender). Fielding one locks in its core (a builder, a spender, and an always-on passive) and lets you climb its five rungs, choosing a skill at each fork. Whatever the tree gives you, the fighter brings: every active is always castable, every passive always on. There's nothing to equip and no per-skill glyph to cook — you field a spec and build its tree. Each class detail page lists all three trees in full.
Building your specialization
You field a spec from the Avatar's Roster, then climb its tree:
- The core three — a builder, a spender, and an always-on passive — are fielded automatically. They define how the role plays.
- Each of the five rungs is either a Fork (choose one of a few skills) or a Grant (handed to you once your Avatar reaches that rung's Ascension tier).
- Fork picks are bought with glyph currency — the fungible currency you earn and spend to shape a build; Grants are free. You can respec a tree later for a cost.
On top of the tree, every Avatar carries its class meter/passive — the signature Momentum / Permafrost / Soul Shatter engine of its class. It runs automatically in every fight and isn't a skill you cast. See Class Kits & Meters.
Cooldowns
After a cast skill fires, it's locked for a number of the Avatar's own turns before it can be used again. Cooldowns pace your active skills on one clear model instead of a hand-tuned number per skill. Hovering a skill in combat shows the live cooldown for that fighter.
The base cooldown is role-scaled
Each role centers on a base cooldown, and each skill sits above or below its role's target by its weight — a light filler recharges faster, a heavy Area skill or signature takes longer:
| Role | Base target | Range across the kit |
|---|---|---|
| 🛡️ Anchor | 8 turns | ~4 (fast strike) → ~11 (big buff) |
| ⚔️ Striker | 10 turns | ~6 (light CC) → ~14 (signature) |
| ✨ Mender | 12 turns | ~8 (filler) → ~16 (big cast) |
Every skill's base lands in the 4–16 range around its role target — that's what makes a Mender's big team-heal cost more than an Anchor's quick jab. What turns that base into what you actually wait is your fighter, through the two levers below. (A handful of skills are once-per-battle instead — they fire once and lock for the rest of the fight.)
The cooldown ticks down on this Avatar's own turns, not on rounds — so a faster Avatar reaches those turns sooner and, through Speed below, needs fewer of them.
Speed lowers the cooldown
Speed (SPD) does double duty: a faster Avatar takes its turns more often and shaves turns off the cooldown itself — roughly −1 turn per 200 effective Speed, up to a maximum of −6.
- Effective Speed is what counts: your base Speed (from your Essence tier) plus everything your gear adds. A well-grown, well-geared fighter has a lot of effective Speed, so it keeps shaving cooldowns as it grows.
- Because it reads effective Speed, a slow landed on an enemy also lengthens their cooldowns — tempo denial cuts both ways.
Cooldown Reduction (CDR) lowers it further
CDR is a flat cooldown cut that rolls on gear (any slot, 1–2 per piece by rarity) and sums across your equipped pieces. It subtracts straight from the cooldown, up to −4 — past that, extra CDR rolls do nothing (so you can't stack CDR alone to zero out every skill).
Putting it together
Cooldown = role-scaled base (≈4–16) − Speed cut (up to 6) − gear CDR (up to 4), and never below 2 turns.
A fast, well-geared Avatar plays most of its skills near that 2-turn floor; a slow, ungeared one sits close to the base. The build takeaway: Speed helps everything (turn frequency and cooldowns, and it scales with Ascension), while gear CDR is a capped top-up that's handy for a fighter leaning on one big skill. The in-game tooltip always shows the live number for your fighter.
Resource gates — some skills need a full meter
A skill can carry a resource gate: it can't be cast until your class meter has built up enough. These are the big "spend-it-all" finishers, and they stay locked — shown greyed with a "needs N" hint — until the meter reaches the threshold. The moment it does, the skill unlocks and the fighter can spend it.
A few real examples:
- A Warlock's Soul Harvest requires Soul Shatter — it stays locked until the Warlock has banked enough missing-HP, then unloads it all in a party-wide drain.
- A Sky Knight's Skyfall and Cyclone need banked Soaring before they'll launch — the more altitude you've stolen, the harder (or wider) they hit.
- A Servitor of Frost's Glacial Lance wants 3+ Permafrost before you can throw it.
You never manage this by hand — the fighter simply won't pick a gated skill until it can afford it, and falls back to something it can cast. Knowing which of a spec's skills are gated tells you how its meter wants to be spent: build up, then dump.
See also
- Class Kits & Meters — every class's specializations and meters.
- Glyphs — the glyph currency you spend to build a specialization.
- Ascension — the tiers that unlock a tree's higher rungs.