How Abilities Work

Understand the two ability slots, how to get and activate abilities, cooldowns, leveling through PvP, and where abilities are blocked.

Every player carries two ability slots: a secondary and a primary. Each ability has exactly one passive (an always-on perk) and one active (a power you trigger yourself, which then recharges on a cooldown). That is all any single ability has: one of each.

So with both slots filled you have two abilities in total, giving you two passives and two actives across the pair, one passive and one active from each. For example, if your secondary is Hydro and your primary is Blood, you get Hydro's passive and active plus Blood's passive and active.

On top of those two slots, admins can hand out special event abilities for server events. An event ability sits in your primary slot while you hold it.

The two slots

  • Secondary: every player always has one. A brand-new player is given a random secondary the first time they join (the odds for each ability are configurable in abilities.yml). You can swap it for a different random one by right-clicking an Ability Shard. Secondaries reach level 3. See the full roster on the Secondary Abilities page.
  • Primary: you choose this one. Craft a primary's ability item (see Crafting) and right-click it to bind it. If you already had a primary bound, the old one is handed back to you as an item. You can also unbind from the ability menu to get the item back. Primaries reach level 5. See the full roster on the Primary Abilities page.
  • Event: admin-granted only, never crafted, and always at full power. See Event Abilities.

Activating your powers

  • Primary power: tap F (the "swap item to off-hand" key, by default).
  • Secondary power: hold sneak and tap F.
  • Without the key: run /spark primary or /spark secondary. The command also has the alias /ability.
⚠️
On **Paper** servers, the bare `/spark` command is taken by a built-in profiler plugin. Use the `/ability` alias instead (or `/ascendsmp:spark`). On Spigot there is no clash. See [Commands](/docs/commands/) for the full list.

Cooldowns

After you use an active power, it recharges for a while. The HUD above your hotbar shows a live countdown for each slot. If you try to activate a power that is still recharging, you hear a short denied sound and see a "not ready" message; the cooldown does not restart, so spamming the key never punishes you.

Every cooldown length lives in abilities.yml and is fully configurable. See Balance.

Leveling up

Abilities level up by killing other players. Each kill raises the level of both your equipped abilities: secondaries up to level 3, primaries up to level 5.

Each level makes an ability better in two ways (defaults, configurable in abilities.yml):

  • The cooldown gets 10% shorter per level.
  • The effects get 15% stronger per level (damage, durations, ranges, and so on).

Anti-farm rules

You cannot grind levels off one friend. By default:

  • Repeat kills on the same victim only count a limited number of times per hour window (2 per 60 minutes by default).
  • A totem pop does not count as a death.
  • If you damage someone and they die to the environment shortly after (void, lava, a fall), you still get the kill credit, within a short window (10 seconds by default).

All of these rules are configurable in abilities.yml.

Where abilities are blocked

Abilities do not work everywhere:

  • In spectator mode (and optionally in creative mode, depending on the server's settings).
  • In any world the server has listed as disabled.
  • For a short grace period right after you change worlds.

When a cast is blocked you get a clear message instead of a silent failure.

Explore the rosters