Skills: power, Mastery, Refinement and Proficiency

Skills do most of the damage in a Slayer Legends fight, and half a dozen systems make them stronger. Some raise a skill’s power directly, some multiply its damage, some make it cast more often. This guide goes through each in turn and shows how they stack.

Skill power and level

Every skill has a base value and a per-level upgrade value. Its power at a given level is:

power = base + upgrade × (level − 1)

So a skill with base 110 and upgrade 11 has 495% power at level 36. Growth is linear: each level adds the same amount, so the percentage gain per level shrinks as the skill climbs.

Maximum levels differ a lot between skills. Fire Slash and Demon Hunt go to level 250 (Fire Slash reaches 10,360%, Demon Hunt 25,900%). Most buff and utility skills stop at 20. Wrath of Gods reaches 975%, Warrior Burn 383% and Lightning Body 364%. Meditation caps at 10, and Mantra and Rave at 5.

Skills are either attack, buff or passive. Attack skills trigger either on a cooldown (Hot Blast every 12 seconds, for example) or after a number of basic attacks (Fire Slash every 12 strikes). That difference decides which Refinement options and Skill Stones help them, as covered below.

Mantra is a special case: it boosts ATK and HP in your character stats whether or not it’s in your active preset.

Presets

You can keep five skill presets of ten slots each. Only the active preset’s skills fight, and several effects depend on its make-up. Heart of Fire, for example, needs at least four Fire attack skills and grows stronger with each Fire skill beyond four.

Skill Mastery

Skill Mastery is a ten-page tree. Page 1 is open from the start, and each later page opens once the one before it is full. It has two kinds of node:

• Level nodes add character stats per level: ATK, HP, HP REGEN, monster gold, EXP, and the separate HP AMP and HP REGEN AMP amplifiers. Values rise on later pages, from +20% ATK per level on page 1 to +125% on page 8. With every node maxed, Mastery adds +21,000% ATK and +6,340% HP.
• Check nodes are one-time unlocks. Some give rewards such as diamonds or summon tickets. The important ones multiply specific skills: triple damage, or 1.5× damage with twice the hits. Several need a minimum weapon or accessory grade before you can take them.

Mastery ATK and HP land in the crowded Extra groups (see how stats are calculated), so the skill multipliers on check nodes are often the stronger part of the tree. A few later nodes also change timing: one removes a required strike from the Fire Slash line, another shortens Pillar of Fire’s cooldown by two seconds.

Skill Refinement

Twenty-five attack skills can be refined. Each has three, four or five lines, and each line rolls an option and a colour tier. The tiers, weakest to strongest, are White, Green, Orange, Purple, Red and Aqua. The options are:

Each skill can roll six of the seven. Cooldown skills can’t roll Reduction in Required Strikes, and strike-triggered skills can’t roll Cooldown Reduction. The attribute option targets the element the skill is strong against: Water beats Fire, Fire beats Earth, Earth beats Wind, and Wind beats Water.

Refinement also has an owned effect that applies to your character whether or not the skill is equipped. It starts once a skill has three Aqua lines and grows at four and five. Fire Slash with three Aqua lines gives +2% character HP; Demon Hunt fully refined gives +30% character ATK; Pillar of Fire gives up to +600% crit damage.

Skill Proficiency

Skill Proficiency runs from level 0 to 328 and adds All Attribute damage, which counts for every element. It accelerates hard: +5% at level 1, +58% at 10, +1,935% at 100, +14,975% at 200 and +133,287% at 328. Because element damage feeds skills directly, Proficiency becomes one of the largest skill damage sources in the late game.

Skill Stones

Each stone preset holds three stones: a Cooldown Stone (shorter cooldowns), a Time Stone (longer buff durations) and a Heat Stone (fewer required attacks). Every stone has an element and only affects skills of that element. Type A stones give 4% and Type B stones 7%.

For example, a Water buff with a 20-second cooldown and 10-second duration, with a Type B Water Cooldown Stone and a Type A Water Time Stone, becomes an 18.6-second cooldown with 10.4 seconds of duration. A Fire skill in the same preset is unaffected. Heat Stones round strike counts and never reduce them below one.

Familiars

Twelve familiars come in three groups of four: Weapon (Na, Rion, Ru, Mus), Attribute (Hi, A, Je, Ti, one per element) and Battle (Ku, Pe, Sha, Po). You equip one from each group. Familiars have 0 to 11 stars, and their rarity rises with stars: Common at 0–1, up to Mythic at 10 and Immortal at 11.

Familiar proficiency is a separate track per group. Every level of any group adds +1% ATK and +10% HP. On top of that, Attribute levels add element damage, Weapon levels add Slayer damage and Battle levels add familiar damage. The Mana Altar counts your six highest-starred familiars and levels up from 30 total stars to 66.

Putting it together

A skill’s damage in a fight multiplies its power by your ATK, by crit and death strike, by its element damage and amplifiers, by Refinement and by other skill bonuses. Its cooldown, strike count and mana cost decide how often that happens. The promotion fights guide explains how the analyzer turns all of this into total damage over a 60-second fight. You can build and test presets in the Skill tab of the analyzer.