Expedition of the Guild hero skills are fired by hand: you activate each key ability yourself instead of letting the hero decide, and the whole loadout sits on a ten-slot numbered bar, 1 to 0, along the bottom of the combat screen. A floating label names the ability as it is cast, so you can always see which hero is doing what, and every hero keeps their own ability list on the Skills tab of the hero screen, next to their gear.
Expedition of the Guild hero skills on the combat bar
The combat HUD is the same in every fight and it is worth learning once:
- Bottom of the screen — the ability bar, ten numbered slots running 1 to 0, with the key for each of the hero's abilities.
- Left of the screen — the hero portraits and their health bars, so you can see who is still standing.
- Right of the screen — the minimap and the region information, which is where boss location guidance appears.
Everything you do in a fight goes through that bar. Because activation is manual, an ability that is never pressed never happens, and a party that fields the wrong heroes ends up with the right buttons and the wrong plan.
How abilities fire in a fight
Three rules cover the whole system:
- You press, the hero does not decide. Every key ability is activated manually, which means the timing is yours rather than the AI's.
- DPS heroes take turns. Damage dealers unload their burst damage in turns rather than all at once, so damage heroes are worth rotating through rather than firing everything at once.
- Each cast is labelled. A floating name appears over the caster when an ability goes off, which is how you read a fight that is going wrong without opening a menu.
The last point matters most in a boss fight, where the ability names themselves are the log of what the boss is doing. It also decides who you want at the bar: if nobody is holding the front line, the abilities you press will be aimed at the wrong problem, which is why the party composition guide settles the roles before the skill bar does.
The ability names you will see on screen
These are the names that appear in combat over the heroes casting them:
- Piercing Thrust
- Whirlwind
- Thorn Spike
- Multi-Shot
- Flame Rain
- Soul Drain
- Starfire
- Berserk
- Blizzard
- Empower Totem
- Curse of Agony
- Mind Blast
- Chain Lightning
- Thunderstrike
They are the same names regardless of class, and the roster around them is what separates one hero from another: 83 heroes spread across nine classes means two heroes can share an ability and still behave very differently once their gear and talents are applied. In a boss fight those labels are the fastest read on what is happening, and the boss mechanics guide covers how they sit next to the health bar and the damage numbers.
Where to read a hero's skills
The hero screen is split into Heroes, Equipment and Skills, so a hero's ability list sits right next to the gear that changes how those abilities behave. The game also added in-game descriptions of how manual skills are obtained, so the source of an ability is explained in the same place where you press it.
Checking a hero's skill list before you field them is the second half of building a party. The first half is deciding which roles you need and how many heroes to bring — the party composition guide starts from the 20-hero limit and works down to the role each hero has to fill.