Skills can be accessed from the Skill menu or by pressing "K" on your keyboard to open the skill window.
The Skills window is separated into two sections:
1: Class Skills: This section contains the skills unique to your chosen class.
2: Mounted Skills: This section contains the crossbow and spears skills used while mounted.
Acquiring Skills/Skill Types[]
Skills are automatically obtained as you level up your character.
Skills are sorted into two types: Active and Passive skills. Active skills must be used by placing them on your hotbar or by pressing prompts that appear during combat. Passive skills are automatically activated and give your character buffs, new abilities, and add new effects to your Active skills. Some skills can only be obtained trough skill books, which either can be obtained trough the quest series or dropping from Woldbosses.
Skill Ranks[]
Skills become more powerful and "rank up" along with you. Skill rankings will automatically increase as you level up.
Destabilizing Attacks[]
You can reduce the Stability of stronger foes to make them vulnerable to status effects.
Stronger enemies, like most bosses and mini-bosses, have a feature called Stability automatically applied to them. Stability makes them immune to status effects, crowd control and debuffs. In addition, they will sometimes have strong buffs applied to them, such as high health regeneration, which is tied to their Stability. Stability can be removed from an enemy by landing a critical hit with certain skills called Destabilizing Skills. This will allow you to use crowd control on them and remove any Stability-related buffs, but their Stability will return over time.
Charging Skills[]
Certain skills can be 'charged', increasing the amount of damage done to your foes depending on how long they are charged. This is done by holding down the input key for the skill. Different skills have different charge levels--some might have two and some might have three. A skill is fully charged when its bar appears red.
Combo Skills[]
Certain skills can be used multiple times in a row. The higher the combo, the more effective the skills become. You can press the input key multiple times to continue the combo, which is recommended, or you can hold down the input key (which applies a penalty to that skill).
Link Skills[]
Certain skills can be 'linked' together to create a chain of attacks. For example, when you use a link skill, a prompt will pop up asking you to press certain keys to automatically use a second skill. This tends to be faster than normally using your hotbar and applies bonus effects to the second skill.
Follow-up Skills[]
In situations such as when a foe has fallen, a skill may appear which can be used by your character.