Skills in +1 Forge Blade Loot
The confirmed skills in +1 Forge Blade Loot are bound to your sword: Q casts a rapid slash, R dashes you forward and slashes. Their observed effects, cooldown and damage readings, and what is not confirmed.
Two skills are confirmed in +1 Forge Blade Loot, and both are bound to the sword you hold rather than picked from a character menu: Q, a rapid slash attack, and R, a dash-and-slash with very long range and very high damage. How many you can cast depends on the blade itself — an early dungeon sword at Rare tier carries only the Q skill, while a later sword carries both: "this sword has 2 skills, both Q and R skills."
One caveat up front: no skill menu, no verbatim in-game skill names and no complete skill list appear in the gameplay this page is based on. The two skills are therefore identified by their keys and their described functions — "rapid slash" and "dash and slash" are the player's spoken descriptions of what each button does, not transcribed in-game labels — and anything that could not be checked is left out below rather than guessed.
How skills work
- Your sword decides your skills. The early Rare-tier dungeon sword has a single skill on Q; a later sword adds R. The sword's own info also displays per-skill stats — on a Region-tier katana, the player notices "it tells me how much damage each skill does."
- You cast them mid-fight with the keyboard. Q triggers the slash; R triggers the dash-and-slash on swords that have it.
- A second player's run backs up the multi-skill setup. That creator fights with two castable "specials" that visibly hit — "this special is even stronger than the other one," and "the spells here really have an effect" — but names none of them, so it corroborates that multiple skills exist, not what they are called.
The confirmed skills at a glance
| Skill | Key | Observed function | Where it was seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q skill | Q | A rapid slash attack — the repeat damage tool in dungeon stages | An early Rare-tier dungeon sword (its only skill), and the Q slot of a later two-skill sword |
| R skill | R | Dashes you forward and slashes; very long range and very high damage | A later sword that carries both Q and R |
Q: the rapid slash you lean on in dungeons
The Q skill is the damage button you press over and over in dungeon waves. On the early Rare sword it is weak — "my skill isn't very strong at all" — and it can miss, so the observed player dodged between casts and saved it as a finisher when health was nearly gone ("I don't recommend melee if your health is this low"). On stronger gear the same key becomes something you can simply spam: in one endgame stage the player stood in place and attacked, noting that "using skills multiplies damage by hundreds of percent."
R: dash and slash with boss-beating reach
The R skill does exactly what its description promises — "it really dashes and slashes" — and its range is what makes it stand out: "skill R has a very long range. And it's very strong too." That combination produced the standout result of the recorded runs: the stage-18 dungeon boss, gated at 2,000 trillion power, was cleared with dodging and timed skill use, in the player's words "you don't need 2,000 trillion power to fight; you just need to dodge well and time your skills right." That was one observed attempt, so treat it as proof the trick can work, not as a rule that works at any power level.
Aiming is the skill system's weak spot. Against the tower's tiny Shadow Lord, "my skills barely hit it. Skills are really hard to aim in this map." Expect skills to shine against waves and large bosses far more than on small, hard-to-hit targets.
Cooldown and damage the game actually displays
| Where the reading comes from | What was shown |
|---|---|
| A Region-tier katana's skill info | Damage per skill is displayed; one of its skills listed a 9-second cooldown and up to 400% damage |
| An endgame dungeon fight with Celestial gear | Skill hits landed around 100,000 trillion damage (the player's own estimate) on a cooldown of about 9 seconds; skill use multiplied damage by hundreds of percent, with damage depending on current stats and equipment — that run's Shadow Lord boss went down in under three minutes |
Both observed readings landed near a 9-second cooldown, but these numbers come from a single session on specific weapons — the 400% figure was read from one Region-tier katana, not measured across weapon tiers. Recheck values like these after any balance update.
What is deliberately left out
- Official names and a full index. Only the Q and R sword skills are documented; anything beyond them would be a guess.
- Costs, ranks and unlock requirements. No source shows a price, rank tier or level gate attached to any skill.
- A separate character skill system. One line says "this sword has 2 skills," while an endgame remark refers to "the character skill" — whether that points to a second, character-owned skill track is unresolved.
- A resource cost for casting. Energy was only seen regrowing during a fight after specials were used; whether skills spend anything to activate is not documented.
Because skill count rides on the equipped sword, a better blade was the observed path from one skill to two — the swords reference covers the blades themselves. For prerequisites and the step-by-step process, the how to unlock skills guide picks up where this reference stops, and the combat guide covers the dungeon and boss fights where these skills do their work.