Extended Skills, Hidden Skills, & Group/Solo Skills

Sorry If I am not up to date, have not messed around with any of the Beta Releases.

The Extended skills basically forced a player to level up every single action, so you had Walking 1.0 - 100.0, Running 1.0 - 100.0, Spiriting 1.0 - 100.0 ect.

As a mage (from my last mmo) I was forced to not only level up my base skill "Magic" I also had to level up Acid Arrow, Fireball, Stormblast and it was really slow. Even with no limits I never did get most of those skills over 75, but I didn't care.

It was a very long grind but as my base skills leveled up, I unlocked new skills and as my spells leveled up they would change visually. They looked and felt much more powerful.

I hope SotA considered building on modern idea like this.

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The idea behind hidden skills is that You cannot see your own skills your character can only guess that he/she is a Expert or Master. To know exactly what your skills are you will need to ask a player that has a skill for seeing "potential" in others.

This makes the game a bit less grindy chasing after a number and lets you interact with other players in a more meaningful way.

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One of the things that bothers me in Online games is trying to catch up with friends or help lowbie friends catch up. I would per-fer to have an option that automatically balanced your parties skills so that everyone can share equally in a challenge.

I've tried for hours doing the math for a equation to auto-balance different set skills but still have nothing.
(Guild Wars 2 couldn't even nail this problem and settled for HP moderation based on the area)

Ideally you want encounters to rise to challenge you, but if you have a newer player in your party they could do with a buff like wise if your helping to train them you need a penalty as to not over power their enemies.

Internally I believe that the skill max of the party should be based on whoever leads it. So a warrior with 70 skill leading forces everyone over 70 on all combat skills to drop for a few min as long as they are in the party.

Give players a boost might not work with respect for PvP and the fact that content should not be rushed. I think if we have a party loot system we should be rewarded more on the merit of our struggle rather then the ease of it.

I experience in another game, monsters that would skill up and drop better loot. This happened if you took to long killing them. At any rate I hope we see some classic "skills gaining" even if we have a Level Up based RPG system.