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Skills

Lyonspyre runs a tight skill table of 35 usable skills. Twelve skills - Bushido, Cartography, Chivalry, Focus, Imbuing, Lockpicking, Mysticism, Necromancy, Ninjitsu, Remove Trap, Spellweaving, and Throwing - are not available right now and may return in a future update. The seven old craft skills - Alchemy, Blacksmithy, Carpentry, Cooking, Inscription, Tailoring, and Tinkering - are retired into Professions, and Bowcraft / Fletching is retired because all bow work now belongs to Carpentry. The three old gathering skills - Mining, Lumberjacking, and Forensic Evaluation - are retired the same way: gathering now runs on the gathering professions (Mining, Lumberjacking, Skinning), and Forensic Evaluation is removed outright, detective use included. Neither crafting nor gathering uses skills or skill points at all. The standard Skills window hides every unavailable or retired row. Stealth stays in by design.

You pick seven skills to fight with - skill cap 700, individual cap 100, both raisable (see Caps). Use them, gain in them, and that's your character. The realm layers talents, resonance, and specialties on top, but skills are the spine. A Magery / Eval Int / Wrestling / Meditation / Tactics / Resist / Anatomy mage reads as exactly what it is the moment someone sees the bar.

What's different on Lyonspyre

Change Classic baseline Lyonspyre
Skill gain multiplier 1.0× 4.0× (playtest knob, will tune before launch)
Per-gain step size below 80 0.1 0.2 (also a playtest knob)
Stat scaling on displayed skill Value = Base + stat offset Value = Base always (no flickering display)
Skill total cap 700 700 base, +50 via Mote of Mastery drops
Skill loadouts none Saved skill templates you can swap between (see below)
Locked skills trainable hard-locked to 0 on every login
[skillgain on debug n/a Per-attempt gain-chance printout - flip on, see "Swordsmanship: 39.6% gain chance" on every roll

The 4× gain rate and the 0.2-step-below-80 modifier are deliberately generous playtest knobs. Both will tighten once the server goes live, so enjoy the fast progression while it lasts - you're climbing quicker right now than you will at launch.

Caps - total and per-skill

Two caps bound your character, and both can be raised past their defaults:

Cap Default Raise it with Per item Ceiling
Total skill cap (sum of every skill) 700 Mote of Mastery +1.0 to the total 750
Individual skill cap (any one skill) 100 Scroll of Mastery (one per skill) +1.0 to that skill 150

Scroll of Mastery is per-skill. A Scroll of Swordsmanship Mastery raises only your Swordsmanship cap, a Scroll of Magic Resist Mastery only Magic Resist, and so on. Each scroll lifts that one skill's cap by 1.0 - so 120 in a skill takes 20 scrolls, and the 150 ceiling takes 50. Scrolls exist for the core combat, magic, taming and bard skills.

Two things to keep in mind:

  • Raising a cap doesn't grant the skill. The scroll only lifts the ceiling. You still train the points the normal way, now able to climb past 100. Every skill keeps gaining from normal use right up to your raised cap - including use-trained skills like Animal Lore, Meditation, Anatomy, Eval Int and Tracking, which climb to your cap just by using them.
  • The total cap still rules. Pushing one skill to 150 spends 150 of your 700 (or 750) budget - so going tall in one skill means going shorter elsewhere, or spending Motes of Mastery to widen the total.

Magic Resist is the skill players most often take past 100, because every point past GM keeps shaving boss spell damage - up to a 75% reduction at MR 150 (see Magic). It's raised like any other skill: Scrolls of Magic Resist Mastery, +1.0 each, to the same 150 ceiling.

How gain works

Every time you successfully use a skill, the engine rolls against the standard formula:

chance_to_use = (yourSkill - minSkill) / (maxSkill - minSkill)

If that passes and you're within difficulty range, you may also gain. Gain chance is then:

gc = ((cap - total) / cap + (skillCap - skillBase) / skillCap) / 2
gc += (1 - useChance) * (success ? 0.5 : 0.2)     // standard
gc /= 2
gc *= per-skill weight                             // some skills gain faster
gc *= 4.0                                          // Lyonspyre playtest multiplier
gc = max(gc, 0.01)                                 // floor

So your gain rate accelerates when:

  • You're far from your total skill cap (more headroom, faster gains).
  • You're far from the per-skill cap of 100 (the last few points come hardest).
  • The check was on something hard (low success chance feeds the "should-have-been-harder" bonus).

Pets gain at 2× the human rate. The accelerated-skill bonus (NewPlayerTicket / quest reward) multiplies the per-tick gain step by 2-5×.

Skill gain wants you to roam

Repeated checks against the same target in the same map cell stop counting toward gain. The engine remembers your last few attempts; check the same target tile too many times in a row and gain is denied. That's deliberate - the realm pushes you to move between monsters and targets instead of nailing one spot. A hunter who roams still gains; a loop that hammers one training dummy in one cell does not.

AFK macroing itself is allowed (see Auto-Reconnect & Macro Resume) - this rule just means an effective grind loop should vary its target so every check keeps counting. A loop that roams nodes gains; one that hammers a single tile runs but stops gaining.

[skillgain on - live gain chance display

Toggle on with [skillgain on, off with [skillgain off. While enabled, every successful skill check prints a one-line system message: "Swordsmanship: 39.6% gain chance (rolled gain)" - handy for tuning grind sessions and confirming the math matches what you expect. Off by default; the per-character toggle lives in memory and resets on server restart.

Picking seven

The old rule holds: specialise. Seven skills at 100 beats fourteen at 50. And crafting no longer enters the math at all - the trades run on Professions, outside the skill cap, so every template below can also craft. Common templates:

  • Mage: Magery, Eval Int, Wrestling, Meditation, Resist, Tactics, Anatomy
  • Warrior: Tactics, Anatomy, Healing, weapon skill (Swords/Macing/Fencing/Archery), Parry/Resist, Magery (chug-tier 30-50)
  • Bard: Musicianship, Provocation, Peacemaking, Discordance, Magery, Resist, Meditation
  • Tamer: Animal Taming, Animal Lore, Veterinary, Magery, Eval Int, Meditation, Resist (or Wrestling for self-defense)
  • Thief: Stealing, Snooping, Hiding, Stealth, Magery, Resist, Wrestling
  • Gatherer: no longer a skill template at all - Mining, Lumberjacking, and Skinning are professions outside the skill cap, so any build can gather. Fishing is the one harvest pursuit that still takes a skill slot; add Item ID or Arms Lore for flavor and spend the rest on combat

Skill Loadouts (Lyonspyre custom)

Skill Loadouts let you save and swap entire skill+stat templates without losing the work on either side. Grind a Mage to 700 total, save it as "Mage"; later, build a Warrior on the same character and save that as "Warrior". Swapping zeros out the active skills and re-applies the saved one, atomically.

Key points:

  • Peaks are remembered forever. Train a skill to 95 and that 95 is a peak; any future loadout can set the skill back to ≤95 without re-training. Peaks only ever go up.
  • 2 slots per character in v1 (production target 4-6).
  • Swap cap: stat sum ≤ 225, per skill ≤ peak, total skills ≤ your skill cap (700 base, 750 with Mote of Mastery).
  • Atomic apply: validates everything first; if any check fails the swap aborts cleanly with a sysmessage. No partial state.
  • No cooldown / out-of-combat in v1 - those gates are tunable to 12 hours and 5 minutes for launch. Don't get used to instant swapping.

Saved loadouts persist with your character and live in the Skills tab of the Profile panel ([profile). The unified preset system can bundle a skill loadout with a talent build and a resonance setup for one-click full-character swaps.

Categories

Skills fall into the buckets the realm has always used:

Category Skills
Combat Tactics, Anatomy, Wrestling, Swordsmanship, Mace Fighting, Fencing, Archery, Parrying, Arms Lore
Magic Magery, Eval Int, Meditation, Resist, Inscription, Spirit Speak
Healing Healing, Veterinary, Anatomy
Stealth Hiding, Stealth, Stealing, Snooping, Detect Hidden, Poisoning
Crafting Retired as skills - crafting now runs on Professions, outside the skill cap
Wilderness Tracking, Animal Lore, Animal Taming, Veterinary, Camping, Fishing, Herding - plus the gathering professions (not skills)
Social & Bard Begging, Item ID, Arms Lore, Taste ID, Musicianship, Provocation, Peacemaking, Discordance

Skills that appear in two categories (Anatomy in Combat + Healing, Veterinary in Healing + Wilderness, Arms Lore in Combat + Social) are described once on the primary category page and referenced from the second.