SKILLS Improving Skills You have a base competency with all the skills in the game. The only way to master a skill is to succeed in using it. You won’t succeed very often with low-level skills, but if you want to improve, you must keep working on the skill until you gradually start to get it right. Skills are rated from 1 to 100, but a 0 skill does not mean automatic failure, and a 100 skill does not mean you’re guaranteed to always succeed. Skill success can be modified by your applicable attributes, and can sometimes be affected by external conditions beyond your control, in addition to your raw skill level. You can acquire a base competence in a skill by watching an experienced practitioner use the skill, but you can only go so far in a skill by observation alone. NPCs can train you in skills they know, but such training is quite expensive. If you leave a developed skill unused for too long, you’ll start to forget it and your competency will decline, so it’s important to keep in practice. However, mindless repetition is of little practice value, since repeating the exact same action multiple times in a short span of time will greatly reduce your rate of advancement. Also, if you raise several skills to an extremely high level, advancement in one skill will start to produce a corresponding decline in others. Using Skills Some skills are used automatically in appropriate situations. For example, your weapon skill is checked every time you try to hit somebody with a weapon of a given type, and your Magery skill is checked whenever you try to cast a spell. Most skills, however, must be deliberately evoked from the skill list in your Character Window, or from a Macro. You can also evoke some skills by using an item exclusively devoted to that skill – for example, using a shepherd’s crook evokes the Herding skill. Your skill list can be rearranged by clicking and dragging skills, allowing you to put the skills you use most at the top, or to group similar skills together.