Skills

Skills are trainable attributes of a character which are the major factor in determining things like ability duration, damage, etc. Your prowess in certain skills will contribute heavily toward whether you successfully hit or miss your targets as well.

Training Skills
Your skills may never be more than twice your player level and they cost both coin and expertise at your guild trainer or the East Vestry in your temple if you are a paladin.

Combat Skills
All characters possess the following combat skills, which determine a variety of effects including the success of hitting your foe. Most players train the majority of these skills.

Specialty Skills
There are two skills that could be considered specialty skills as they are used in different mechanics in the game.

Swimming
This skill serves a very basic function. If you have a skill greater than 1 in swimming, you will not drown while in water. Not having any skill in swimming will cause you to take damage while in water rooms and ultimately die if you don't find a way to exit.

Riding
The riding skill is used when on mounts. The higher the skill, the less likely you will be thrown from your mount if it gets attacked and also the higher the skill means that you will be adept enough at evading damage while mounted. This was implemented because players were using mounts as shelters to escape aggressive NPC damage as they wandered through the wilderness, which is not the purpose of mounts.

Resource Gathering Skills
Learned at Peeki (Sable) or Foroni (Thrace), characters require this in order to be able to gather resources from the world.

The following resource gathering skills are available:

Guild Skills
In addition to the general and specialized skills above, every guild also has their own set of skills that are trainable which impact everything from ability duration, ability cooldowns, and ability effect.

Spell Skills
Spell skills are also guild skills and only differ semantically from physical skills, being used in the exact same way. The difference is only for roleplay purpose and if it helps, it may be easier to think of them as spell schools, disciplines, or spheres in other games.