GuidesSkills
Skills
Every level gives you one skill point and every level of a skill costs one. What decides what you can learn is the tree: two per class, seven tiers deep, each tier locked behind the ones beneath it. Here is how the points work, how to start over, how much faster casting is now, and what Skill Liberation adds at the top end.
177
skill points at the cap
10
levels on every skill
40%
off every cast time
80
quick slots
The budget
Skill points
You start with one skill point and gain one more every time you level. That is the whole supply: your skill points always add up to your level.
One point, one level
Every skill in your trees goes from level 1 to level 10, and every one of those steps costs exactly one point. No skill asks for a character level of its own — what holds you back is the tree.
You cannot max everything
Each class has between 32 and 36 skills in its trees, which is 320 to 360 points to take all of them to 10. At the level cap you hold 177. A finished character has roughly half its skills maxed, so it pays to decide early which half.
Almost everything is active
Nearly every skill in a tree is one you put on your bar and press. The only true passive in the game — a skill that works without ever being cast — is the Valkyrie’s Summoning Mastery.
You spend points in the skill window: click the skills you want to raise, then confirm. The game asks you to confirm every time, even if you have turned on the option that skips confirmation prompts, because the points stay spent until you reset. A skill that is already on your quick bar stays there at its new level, and a skill at level 10 shows a MAX badge in place of its number. What each class’s skills actually do is on the classes page.
The skill window
Two trees, seven tiers
Your class’s skills are laid out in a grid seven tiers deep, and the grid is two trees side by side, three skills wide each. The bottom tier is open from the start; every tier above it has to be earned.
To put a point into a tier, every tier below it in the same tree must already hold at least 20 points. The two trees keep separate counts, so points in one never open anything in the other. Some tiers have only two skills on a side, which means reaching the next tier up takes both of them to 10. The skill window shows how many more points the next tier needs.
| Tier | Points already in the tiers below | Earliest level |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | None — open from the start | 1 |
| 2 | 20 | 21 |
| 3 | 40 | 41 |
| 4 | 60 | 61 |
| 5 | 80 | 81 |
| 6 | 100 | 101 |
| 7 | 120 | 121 |
The practical shape of a build follows from this. The top tier of a tree costs 120 points of groundwork before you can put a single point into it, which leaves 57 at the level cap for the top tier itself and everything in the other tree. Most characters commit to one tree and dip into the lower tiers of the second.
Starting over
Resetting your skills
A reset takes every skill back off you and hands back one point for every level you have. There are two ways to do it.
The free reset
The free reset button on your Character window resets your skills as well as your stats — both come back in full. It can only be used a limited number of times and up to a certain level; hover the button and its tooltip tells you both. The Stats & builds guide covers the stat side.
Skill Reset
skills onlyUse it from your bag and every point you put into skills comes back; your stats are left alone. No merchant sells it for heim — it turns up in event boxes and event rewards, so keep any you are given.
Neither works while a Dragon Knight is transformed — change back first.
Speed
Casting and skill animations
Skills come out much faster than the game was first built for. Every cast is shorter, Intellect shortens it further, and the animation after a skill is quicker too.
| Your Intellect | Taken off a skill’s cast time | A 3-second cast becomes |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 40% | 1.8 seconds |
| 200 | 46% | 1.62 seconds |
| 500 | 55% | 1.35 seconds |
| 1,000 | 70% | 0.9 seconds |
| 1,400 or more | 82% | 0.54 seconds |
The tooltip tells the truth
A skill’s tooltip shows the cast time you will actually get, with your Intellect and gear already counted, and the cast bar runs to the same length. The casting animation plays at the speed of the cast, so a quick cast looks quick instead of being cut off halfway through its motion.
Less time locked in place
Skill animations play one and a half times faster than they were made, and the animation is the time you stand committed to the skill. That window is about a third shorter on nearly every skill, not just spells. Monsters are unchanged — their wind-ups are exactly as long as before.
Aiming
Ground-target skills
Skills that land on a spot rather than a target put a ring on the ground and wait for you to place it. You no longer have to reach for the mouse to do that.
- 1
Press the skill’s key
A ring appears on the ground under your cursor and follows it. - 2
Press the same key again to cast
The skill lands wherever the ring is. Clicking the ground still works too. If your cursor is over a window or off the ground, the second press is ignored and the ring stays up, so a stray press never throws the cast away. - 3
Change your mind with Esc
Esc cancels the ring without casting.
Fast Cast skips the ring entirely
Turn on Fast Cast under Combat Settings in the options and the first press casts straight onto the ground under your cursor — no ring, no second press. It aims at the cursor, not at whatever you have selected, so you can drop an area where nobody is standing yet. If the cursor is not over the ground at that moment you get the normal ring instead. It is off until you turn it on; the Graphics & options guide has the rest of that window.
On screen
The quick bar, cooldowns and buff timers
The bar is bigger than it used to be, and the numbers you used to have to hover for are now drawn on the icons themselves.
Eighty slots
The quick bar holds four rows, eighty slots in all, for skills and items alike. Which keys fire which row is in Controls & hotkeys.
Cooldowns in seconds
A skill or potion that is recharging shows the time left on its slot. Icons no longer come up greyed out when you log in, as if every skill were still cooling down.
Buffs count down
Your buffs and debuffs show how long they have left on their own icons, which are drawn a little larger so the number fits. Anything longer than a minute reads in minutes, hours or days.
Endgame
Skill Liberation
A Liberation Stone rolls temporary bonuses onto one of your skills — more range, a wider area, more targets, or an extra effect on top of what the skill already does. The window it opens is titled Skill Unlock.
![[Gift] Shining Liberation Stone](/_next/image?url=%2Fart%2Fguide%2Fskills-liberation-stone.webp&w=96&q=75){kind=small}
[Gift] Shining Liberation Stone
rare dropEvery monster in the Chamber of Secrets can drop one, and so can the lucky monsters Edmund, Boca Grande and Seopen Zeiss (levels 150 to 170). It cannot be traded, sold, dropped or stored — it belongs to the character that found it.
- 1
Right-click the stone in your bag
The Skill Unlock window opens and lists the skills you know that can be liberated. Only eight skills per class can be; their tooltips carry the line “This skill can be liberated.” - 2
Pick a skill and press Released
It costs the one stone and no heim. There is no failure — every liberation grants at least one bonus. - 3
See what you rolled
One bonus 65% of the time, two bonuses 30%, three bonuses 5%. They are listed on the skill’s own tooltip from then on. - 4
Use it for five days
A liberation lasts five days, and the window counts down what is left. When it runs out the bonuses are gone and the skill is back to normal.
To see the real odds of the stone on each monster, search for it in the drop-rate lookup. The Chamber of Secrets is covered in the Missions guide.