Questions about skills.
 

You have to buy the skills as they become available to progress to the stronger ones like in most games. Leveling up skills however is a little more complicated than that as you can decrease its SP Cost, increase the damage it causes, increase its DOT ( Dmg over time ) timer, or decrease it's cooldown. Choosing which to put into which skill is all up to the user and certain combo's of different attributes into ea of your many skills can give a player a really good advantage or none what so ever, it depends entirly how you use your skills and how you base your points around that.

EDIT:
To level up skills simply open the upgrade box VIA the button, left click the skill in the skill menu once, drop it in the upgrade box, and proceed to press the arrow in whichever catagory you wanted to upgrade it in. Choices ar eclearly stated next to each upgrade panel.

I don't know all the answers to your questions but I know some!

I think you have to learn the lower ones first. I haven't tried learning the higher one without the lower one, but when I used the higher one skills, the cooldown for the lower one activates as well, so I'm assuming they're like the "same" but more powerful than the lower one. Someone correct me if I'm wrong though ;~:

I just learnt the available ones since it doesn't require skill points to learn. If you learnt something that's useless, it's not much harm since you only waste a bit of copper. But of course, skills at high levels cost heaps, so I only know it's ok to learn it at lower levels even if you don't have to. :3

I'm not sure which skills you should level up, but you can empower your skills using Skill Empowering/Empowerment Points (which you see in the skills box). You don't get these in every level I think so I guess it's those point that you have to use wisely. The game is down at the moment so I don't remember the exact buttons, but I think you press this "empower skill" button in the skill box, and then you click and drop the skill you want to empower into the next box that pops up, and you can fiddle around with the different type of empowerments and see their effects on the skill before confirming. You can increase skill power, decrease sp consumption, decrease cool down and... forgot the fourth one! But yeah, hope that helps.

Edit: Ah Mujica beat me to it! xD

Wewt? =)

Btw, when you we're talking about the lower and higher level skills activating eachother, i can confirm that. They do share diminishign returns, so you cant spam level 1 then level 2 of something. It's a way of preventing down ranking, like if u upgraded the damage enough on the low rank skill you wouldn't really need the high rank skill to deal pretty much the exact same damage, and then it would cost a significant amount less sp and be alot better to use.

if you empower the lower skill then you buy the next level of that skill how you empowered the lower version of the skill doesn't affect the higher version of it?

Mm.. a bad theory i guess, im sorry, it wasn't completly though through. Yes it should effect every single rank of the skill itself, but, if you wanted to you could do as i stated before and down rank for sp effecieny if possible to upgrade enough to even it out to what the base damage would be of a higher rank. I haven't tryed this yet, so i dont know if it's possible or even beneficial.

Uhm... so what you're saying is that if I did choose the 'lower SP consumption' option on the lower skill, the higher version of that same skill will have the lowered SP? In other words you wouldn't have to 'level up' the higher skill if you've done so to the lower...? :confused:

Yes. They are all the same skill, just different levels of upgrade. Once you add an empowerment to a skill, its attribute would still be there after upgrading it another level.

Thanks! :D

so the question is, whats the most effective way to use skill points?

at first, i was just spreading them out evenly to reduce SP consumption and lower cooldown time, but i had the idea to stack them all up on 1 or 2 skills, for this scenario, we will use aimed shot as an example.

what if you just lowered cooldown and sp consumption on aimed shot a ton so you could spam it like a madman? would that be more effective than using 3 or 4 skills with evenly distributed skill empowerment? i'd think you'd be able to spam that 1 skill much more frequently and use less SP if you beefed it up enough.