Hi all. After reading a few posts and having found out that anyone can learn anything, I am curious to know...is there a penalty to learning another class' skills? Do the mage spells cost more for non-mages to use? Do Ranger skills cost more to learn for non-rangers? Are there level learning differences?

Thanks

Nope - you're only limited by your level, the number of skills slots and how much money you have/are willing to spend .

That being said, certain skills don't play nice with others. For example, Wards give a huge bonus to their respective elements, while applying penalties to the others. Likewise, the "class" passives can offset each other to a certain extent, so be sure you know what they do to find a combination that's right for you.

Thank you I've only bought/trained one skill from another class and I don't like it really. It's the Ranger gas cloud AOE thing. I read a few posts that mentioned it and that mages do well with AOE stuff so I figured I'd try.

There's an inherent problem with the elemental ranger and fighter skills, which may explain why you're not too thrilled with Gaseous Blast. The problem has a few parts:

1) The damage done by the ranger and fighter elemental skills (Gaseous Blast, Soul Rend, Poison Arrow, etc...) depends directly on your INT score and, to a lesser extent, on gear bonuses. Without specialized gear, you'll almost never do any more damage that you'd do with as simple piercing/slashing build, especially if you use crit/speed. This means there's an incredible lack of diversity in high-level rangers. Almost all the level 100 rangers have a specific set of DPS gear (I'm talking PVE, not PVP, which is completely different). That set consists of a Plate Piercer, Jackalope's Visage, Buffalo Bill's Outfit, Lethal Paws, Skinner's Only Jacket and Ultramarine Sneaks, accompanied by any variety of rainbow rings and amulets.

2) Rangers and Fighters have to actually hit the mob with a weapon (except for weaponless attacks like Gaseous Blast), which requires that the game calculate the chance to hit by comparing the player's Attack Rating vs. the mobs Defense Rating. Then, there's still a check to see if the mob resits the elemental attack AND, if it's a DoT (Damage of Time), subsequent ticks of the spell. Some skills used to be autohit (Holy Roller), but it became a dominant strategy in PVP (especially by mages, from what I've heard), so it was nerfed. So, you have to hit with your weapon, then pass a resist check. That's a double-whammy.

A while back, I floated a couple of ideas that I thought would help to resolve these issues, most notably changing the damage bonuses on class-specific elemental attacks (like Poison Shot and Soul Rend) to depend on each class' respective primary attribute (Str for Fighters, Agi for Rangers). Gear bonuses to DPS for elemental attacks would still apply and wouldn't be affected. Personally, I think this would help to enhance the diversity of builds within each "class".

If you play as a fighter and want skills from other classes, look at the resists and wards that the mage trainer sells. It takes a few levels to get them, but they are nice, nice, nice... or at least I hope so. I'm saving up so I can buy all the wards when I hit 30!

I haven't spent many points in anything besides Intelligence really and what's not spent there has been put into Endurance. Maybe 20 points there so far?

I just got another idea for a thread...going to start that one up. More noob questions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!