In shadowfang keep there are some mobs that will randomly cast Forsaken Skills on you, causing you to lose 100 skill points in a random thing, such as 2-handed axes or daggers. What I'm curious about is what the non-weapon skills do, such as Forsaken Skill:Shadow and Forsaken Skill:Holy. Does anyone have any experience with these doing less damage or less healing? How much was it?

I know most of you are in naxx and beyond, but it's always interested me.

Aren't those just relics of the pre-retail days when you had actual skill values in areas besides weapons and defense?

I'm not sure, but they are still applied today. I got -100 shadow skill on my rogue, which weirded me out.

Yeah, I know -- I'm just saying that SFK is an old old old instance and they never went back to change the abilities.

I believe Praetorian is correct. I've seen debuffs corresponding to several spellbook categories for various classes.

Kind of a shame that such a clever idea didn't show up in some form in later instances (beyond Unbalancing Strike, anyway).

I thought that fire, shadow, frost and skills to that nature leveled up in a similar way that stealth works, where you do get +5 per level but you get it right away and you don't need to "level up" the skill.

I remember old, old beta shots of mages leveling up 'fire skill' and I think that was done away with and changed to just a background skill.

Iirc you get the same effect as hitting a mob 20 lvls higher than you if you get forsaken skill in your damage school. Was a long time since I did SFK though, could be wrong.

It's level times 5 basically. I can definitely remember that the original Open Beta of WoW displayed "Your Fire skill has improved by 5", "Your Frost skill has improved by 5" and "Your Arcane skill has improved by 5" every time you gained a level as a Mage.

The first one is cast on young priests as they hit level 58 or so, and their only resort is to "raid spec." After a certain amount of time, though - depends on resist checks - the debuff will fade, and then they'll get hit with the other. It induces face melting, from what leading research shows.

I missed beta, but I would've supposed (missing that knowledge) that the spell just random(sizeOf(skills)), and this behavior is due to a very unintelligent (that is, algorhythmically uninformed) decision making process (as before). As it doesn't break anything (oh boy, you got a free pass on a minor debuff in a leveling instance many people will never ever go to, on a minor trash mob), I imagine if it is known, it isn't viewed as worthwhile to complicate (especially since the complexity of a system is directly tied to its failure rate...)

Given the beta idea that [school spell] skill leveled with you, I imagine that now they're just flagged as 1's to show up in your skill book (for some, fundamentally aesthetic reason?), so they'll still return in a random(sizeOf(skills))... but at a guess, it's an integer type (-32k <-> 32k) since values clearly go larger than smallint (0...255), any non-zero value is probably fine and insignificant - 0 = off, -99 is just as not-zero as 1 is. Insert generic "for sufficently large values of 2" joke here (please).

Edit: If it is a hidden skill value (automatically level*5), then at some point, it could be checked (as above) and unintented consequences (negative resists, anyone?) would occur. It makes more sense to me that if they dropped it as a functional skill, they'd 1 it out in the design docs, specifically to avoid crazy issues due to unchecked things (see: Judge's Gavel in PVP, negative resists...)

Did the skill level with you in the beta, or did you have to cast spells to raise it?

I'm just glad I didn't have to spend days casting True North, Conjure Food and Burst of Flame over and over and over and over...

From what I can remember from beta two years ago (doesn't time fly ;)) you gained the 5 points automatically when you leveled up, there was no grind cast spell x component.

I wouldn't be surprised if this method is still very much in place just hidden and -100 holy skill would, for example, make your smite spell effectively be cast as a 20 levels lower priest.

I hadn't thought about these mobs for a year but now that they're mentioned I think these are the development ancestors for Emperor Vek'nilash. Encounters which debuff skills in this fashion could be very interesting, a shame it hasn't been more widely used.

The problem with trying to run any tests on this is the word "periodically" in the debuff description, it might be an intermittent debuff only happening on some of your spells which would make most 5m test results (if done with a lvl 45 caster vs the local lvl 25 mobs) anecdotal.

Very very rarely you get "You X magic skill has improved by X points" on levelup as a caster/hybrid. I saw it once on my old shaman and my brother just had it happen on a low level alt a month or so ago.

Ah I stand corrected, I only joined the game during the end of open beta.