I'm a serial warrior player. 15-18 hero warriors. TWICE ever in 5 years have I perfected my skills in other ways than just regular lvling. (aka botting dodge/parry/weapons pre 20. and spec skills once I've gotten them.) One of those instances it was an arial assassin so was real quick.

The chars I DID perfect stuff with wasn't much more deadly than my other chars. And it ended up just being boring to do.

Every char I've had have been PKing pre-hero and had tons of fun. The skills have gone up through normal ranking. My warriors that haven't been tanking have taken a bit longer, but still parry/dodge is mastered pre-hero anyways without any "real" tanking in groups.

I am yet to master flurry for example with ANY of my swords specs I've played. The best I've gotten to was 99% after 170ish hours. But then again I've never really tried to except with one char... Got stuck at 90% but I only had 60 hours by then so it's all good.

My fire giant AP didn't TRY to master any skills/spells and yet at lvl 36 I had mastered parry/shield block and ALMOST all my weapons except polearm. At 40 most of my spells were perfected as well but that was from lvl sitting to PK at 36 for 90 hours. I didn't activily try to get my skills/spells up. And Kaer had roughly 80-90 kills at lvl 40. 31 charges on the weapon and 45 in total. So wasn't a failure! Hell I only had sleep at 82% and still slept quite a few opponents. (See Greachem who I killed a few times.)

Jaina my drow-transmuter experiment had perfect almost every single spell at lvl 49 or 50 just by lvling/exploring/PKing. And I sat a bit to PK at 30, 37, 40. No skills/spells % are not VITAL. They help a little bit...