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Stats | Runes | Skills & Powers | Equipment | Classes & Professions
Fighters and Rogues receive 4 skill points each level from 2 to 10, and Mages and Healers get 5. Once you select a profession at level 10, you can add 6 to that number from that point on, so you get either 10 or 11 points per level from 11 to 59, the not-so-soft cap. This will give you somewhere around 550 training points by the time you cap your character... specifically, 584 total trains for a level 59 mage or healer, or 526 for level 59 fighters and rogues, a disparity which balances out when you consider that most magical powers must be trained up from 0 or 1 to the desired power level (up to a possible maximum of 40, "Grand Master"), while most melee powers are generally granted at a fixed and capped power level with no training investment required.
Unlike powers which are either fixed, or have a set cap at 40 or lower, skills can be trained as high as you wish (subject to the Int+60 cap mentioned earlier). The first 10 trains in a skill raise it 2% each, and 1% each for the next 80 trains; going higher than that returns only 1% skill per 2 trains. All skills get a bonus from 2 attributes: Intelligence, and some other stat which varies depending on the skill... Spirit for magic skills, Dexterity for dodge, and so forth. The full formula for untrained skill is 4 + 3*Int/20 + Other/10. You can expect a softcapped character to have raw skills approximately in the 20-40% range depending on how strongly you have invested in the appropriate attributes, with highly Intelligent characters tending towards the higher end of that range; it should take you in the neighborhood of 50-70 trains to take any skill to 100%, required to wear the best armor or weapons. Note that a high-level character will probably want his primary attack skill at around 120 or possibly higher, in order to get good to-hit against high rank monsters and enemy players.
Recommending specific skills and powers for each class is beyond the scope of this guide, but here are a few comments: Your primary attack skill should end up somewhat higher than 100%, as mentioned above. All classes except mages should expect to raise an armor skill to 100. Melee classes should also be training one or more defensive skills (parry, dodge, block) as well as a weapon mastery (boosts both ATR and DEF and grants additional powers) to at least moderate levels. If you can GM stealth, you should; scouts should also GM Detect. Mages have far fewer skills to worry about, and will instead spend most of their training points raising individual powers (spells)... be careful when doing this, though, as mana costs rise as you train a power, and you may find some abilities more useful with moderate or even with no training than fully raised to 40.
Stats | Runes | Skills & Powers | Equipment | Classes & Professions
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Unlike powers which are either fixed, or have a set cap at 40 or lower, skills can be trained as high as you wish (subject to the Int+60 cap mentioned earlier). The first 10 trains in a skill raise it 2% each, and 1% each thereafter.