Memory Lane: Skills

Mists of Pandaria obviously brought a huge overhaul to the player's spellbook and the way we learn our class abilities, but the changes had already begun before then. In today's brief Memory Lane article, we're going to talk about skills.

Skills used to be a separate page in your spellbook, and was replaced by the profession page. It did contain the various professions and secondary skills, but it also included a number of other skills. Three automatically filled bars would be your class skills. Prior to Mists of Pandaria, abilities in your spellbook were broken down into three categories, each relating to the three specializations. For example, Corruption, regardless of whether you were Affliction, Demonology, or Destruction (and yes, Destruction used to have it) would be under your "Affliction" tab. Makes sense, it was an affliction after all.

I think the initial idea of talent trees was that one could focus on one branch of one's spellbook, though there were of course some oddities. For example, Consecration (which, bafflingly enough, was originally a Holy-only talent) was listed in the Holy part of the spellbook, even though this was the spec least likely to use it.

But to return to the skill page, one could imagine a class defined by its class skills. This page would also have automatically-filled bars for your armor types. A level 40+ shaman, would, for example, have skill in cloth, leather and mail armor.

Along with armor skills, there was also the Defense skill, and this was not a guaranteed full bar. Defense, along with weapon skills (which we'll touch on in a moment) was a skill whose maximum level would rise by five points every level. Getting hit (especially by tough enemies) would raise this skill, and in so doing reduce the chance for you to be hit or crit, and also increase dodge and parry where applicable. The now-defunct stat Defense Rating would effectively raise this skill, and having 140 defense skill above your level's imposed cap (for example, 490 at level 70) would give you the critical-strike immunity that is now built into tanking specs.

The interesting consequence of this was that ranged players who could effectively solo without getting hit (or just ran with tank friends a lot) could wind up with very low defense skill, and thus get absolutely clobbered if they did wind up taking a strike with a melee weapon.

Weapon skills were even more complicated. Generally, when you first started a new character, you would have the ability only to use one or two types of weapons. In order to learn to use other weapons, one had to find various weapon trainers at the different cities and pay gold to train to use those weapons. However, that was only the beginning. Once you could equip those weapons, you had to use them constantly to raise the skill level (a skill whose maximum rose just like defense) or else you would find yourself constantly missing. Weapons before Wrath of the Lich King (or perhaps one of the BC patches) used to sometimes "raise your skill in whatever weapon type this is," which had, I believe, the same effect as expertise, which these sort of stats were replaced with.

Unarmed was another weapon skill. If you were disarmed, you would often miss unless such a thing happened to you often. While you did not have to train "unarmed," you would have to train in the use of fist weapons, which also applied to your unarmed skill (making those who used fist weapons somewhat more effective if they were disarmed.)

As I've said before, Rogues had two extra sets of skills. One was the alchemy-like Poisons, where they would use vendor-bought herbs to make their poisons, and the other was lockpicking (to this day, lockboxes have a required skill level, though rogues get the necessary level simply by leveling up now.) Locks used to actually be a much more common thing in-game. For example, the BC-era 5-man Shattered Halls had a gate to the first boss that needed to be picked. If you had no rogue in your group, you had to traverse a sewer filled with hostile oozes in order to progress. Additionally, there were many locked chests in dungeons that would give a fair amount of gold but required a rogue's special skills.

I should also point out that Rogues used to be a very popular class.

This skill page was eliminated in Cataclysm, mainly due to the fact that they simply got rid of the need to level up defense or your weapon skills. It's probably for the best, but the one small loss is the fact that we can no longer be that hunter who doesn't even know how to use a bow or a crossbow (Ordenar, my hunter, used Guns exclusively until he got the crossbow out of heroic Pit of Saron.)