{Caveat: if things have changed such that the following is no longer valid then feel free to disregard.}

I'm okay with skills taking longer to perfect. I'm okay with skill percentages being tied to rank, hours played, etc. What bothers me, and what I think may represent poor design, is that there are certain skills for which the "ease" of practice varies *drastically* depending on when the skill is practiced.

Defenses are one example. Say you're a non-tanking class, but one for which defenses are useful in PK. Maybe you're a healer or a warrior with two offensive specs. You have a choice. Spend 2-5 hours at 15 in a contrived fight with tons of puny mobs or skip that and take your chances. Suppose you hero and feel like going back to practice. You're screwed. It's much harder to tank a reasonable number of "easy kill" mobs at 51 than it is at 15. We're talking about stuff you ranked on at approx. lvl40. Even if you're a combo that tanks well, it's hard to have more than 2-3 such mobs on you for any extended period of time.

Another example is disarm. Either you're cheap and get a PC buddy to train with or you need a certain type of mob. It needs to have a weapon. It either needs to last a while in combat or you need there to be lots of them. Also, you need it to not damage you so much that you have to rest all the time. It's fairly easy to find mobs like that at rank 15. Not so much at 51.

Even worse is unarmed defense. Not so bad to master at 15. Nasty, if not impossible, at hero. Also throw in backfist. Cutoff and parting blow also come to mind.

My idea: level the playing field. Either raise the required mob strength at lvl15 or lower the required strength at lvl51. Ideally it would be a linear change so there aren't "sweet spots" where people would be motivated to stop and practice. If the strength were dropped down one level from "easy kill" at lvl51 we'd be talking about things like arial prisoners. That doesn't seem so unreasonable.