I hesitate to write this because of the crapstorm that usually is generated by the topic, but it's that kind of day and I'm wearing waders, so here goes.

First off, I prefer any system that rewards ranking and grouping over spamming or working on skills solo. Secondly, I do agree that skills that you use generally do go up sufficiently quickly as you rank. But therein lies the rub - skills you don't use do not go up (short of the occasionaly 1-4% level gain). This means that some skills are either going to require sub-optimal ranking, not going to go up, or must be worked on by spamming. For example, unless there is a better tank in the group, spear spec felar wielding a dagger is sub-optimal. Similarly if my fire giant axe spec is wearing a sword and shield, and doing all the tanking, things aren't as good as they could be.

My thought to work around this is for groupmates to learn off of one another via observation. Similar to the way you learn weapons by fighting them, perhaps there could be a chance to improve at some skills ,defensive ones come to mind most, when your groupmate improves at them (or just uses them)? Thoughts? I know the general imm sentiment is that whenever they check skill percentages for characters, they are about where they feel they ought to be, but how many of those checked have not spent some time working on the skills?

As a trade off, I'd be willing to accept skills going up more slowly when alone, but that might tick off more folks than it pleases.

Basically, to excel as a group, you had to know each other's weapons well. Made warriors nice to have because they knew all weapon types and could tailor what they wield.

What happened, was that if you all used different weapons that each character had little or no grasp of your ability to fight was penalized. You would get in each other's way, you could even, absolute extreme cases, trip up one another or accidently hit a party member.

Warriors had a skill that allowed them to work better with spellcasters, with channellers, and psions. And the only way to improve upon it was to travel with them. Rogues had one that allowed them to work better with warriors.

If your group had large issue with weapon knowledges, the compensation was that you learned a lot about other weapon types, that you could, as you traveled together.

If you all had perfected the weapons wielded by all, you got some neat little progs that went off making your group do some cool combat stuff.

Nice idea you had, but it would have to be put in place carefully and hopefully have some unique style to it.

You don't think getting decent skill %'s is easy enough right now?


wtf.
Jhyrb.