Skills

Skills are a highly varied form of progression that stands in sharp contrast to the neat, packaged whole of attributes and powers that Classes make up. Skills themselves are simple, nuanced abilities tailored to initially do a single thing, beginning quite weak, but through a process known as refinement (detailed below) they can be empowered to do some truly incredible things.

Skills effectively trade attribute progression - granting between 2 and 5 points in a small set of attributes that align with the skill - for a dizzying set of possibilities in regards to the sheer variety of uses they can have. Skills are split into two broad types, known as Active Skills and Passive Skills, and they're exactly what you'd expect - passive skills are always active and are usually less powerful as a result, while active skills require usage to work but have very potent effects.

Refining skills is core to the progression of a skill-based Corewalker; it can be done 10 times - going from Refinement 1 to 10 (it starts Unrefined) - and each time it improves the qualities of that skill; more damage, more range, more magia and stamina efficiency, and so on, but in addition to that it also adds major, significant additions to the skill itself beyond simple number bumps. Below is the general progression path for a skill's refinements.

Actually increasing the refinement of a skill requires constant usage of the skill to gain Experience with it, until the System offers a Quest to improve the refinement tier. This quest typically involves demonstrating mastery of the current variants of the Skill.

Every 2 refinement tiers of a Skill counts as one Core Level (though because Core Levels cannot be halves, there is a minimum of Core Level 1 for a brand new Skill-based Corewalker), but only Slotted Skills (see below) apply their Core Level to the Corewalker (so if someone had 200 Skills each with Refinement 10, that doesn't count as any Core Levels unless they are Slotted into their slots, at which point they'd count as Core Levels of half their Refinement value (5 each in this example), up to the maximum number that can be Slotted).

Investing into Skills as a progression path - be it the primary or secondary one of a Corewalker - offers a single new secondary attribute that gradually improves over time with refinement of skills. This attribute is called Skill Rows (SR), and it defines a set of one Active and one Passive Skill Slot. These slots are typed, with only skills of the correct type fitting into a slot of that type (a Passive skill cannot go into an Active Slot), and anyone who invests into Skills starts with 2 such skill rows.

Acquiring more skill rows is simple enough in concept; it requires that two skills (one active, one passive, no variation is possible) are increased to at least refinement 5, after which the System Exchange offers another Skill Row for acquisition. There is a maximum of 8 additional skill rows available in this manner, for a total of 10 available skill rows, but certain Perks offer additional rows too (typically, the very rare perks that offer progression-specific benefits).

The maximum number of Skill Rows does not begin at 10 however; prior to surpassing the first Core Limit, the maximum is 4 and Perks cannot add more, and after the first Core Limit it increases to 8. Only after surpassing the second Core Limit does the limitation get increased to 10, and only at that point can Perks add extra rows.

That said, while there is only a max of 20 skills for the rows (10 passive, 10 active), this doesn't tell the entire story. As a secondary path, the skill rows do define the limitations of skills a Corewalker can learn (if a Corewalker has earned 3 skill rows as their secondary path, they can only have 3 active and 3 passive skills in total, no more than that), but as a primary path, this is not the case; the skill rows instead only define how many Skills can be Slotted into them, and as such made available for regular usage. Skills can only be Slotted over a period of 4 hours spent in deep sleep, referred to by the System as a rest period, and only once Slotted does half of their refinement tier count towards the Core Level of the Corewalker, as described above.

The actual maximum number of skills that can be learned is 40, but each time a new Skill Row is unlocked, it expands by another 20, for a total of 200 Skills at the maximum number of Skill Rows, before Perks add more potential rows to contribute more Skills. That said, the flat number of Skills isn't the whole story; skills must be learned and then bought from the System Exchange or other Corewalkers - or earned from Dungeons and Quests - first, and there cannot be more than 1.5x Skills of one type compared to the other type. For example, if a Corewalker had 10 Active Skills, they cannot have more than 15 Passive Skills.

Each progression path has a progression limit built into it that completely blocks further progression until it is overcome, detailed more in the progression paths article above. For Skills, this is Core Level 40, or 8 max-refinement Skills (as each contributes 5 Core Levels to the Corewalker) Slotted into a minimum of 4 Skill Rows, and it acts as a hard limitation on learning any more Skills, with new ones being unlearnable until the limit is surpassed, and preventing new Skill Rows from being acquired.

Surpassing the Skill Core Limit requires the completion of a Quest that aims to show proof of mastery over all learned skills, irrespective of if they're Slotted or not. Once done, the Core Limit increases to Core Level 80 (or 16 max-refinement Skills Slotted into 8 Skill Rows) and the same thing must be done again, only this time for any Skills learned after the initial Core Limit.

Once this second Core Limit is surpassed, the Core Limit for Skills is completely removed, but the nuances of how this works results in people either learning the bare minimum number of Skills for their Core Limit or learning everything they could possibly want to learn before the first Core Limit and then cruising to the second, as the more they learn, the harder a roadblock the Core Limit becomes. Only once past the second Core Limit do the majority of skill-based Corewalkers learn a lot more Skills.