I finally figured the "deck" thing out. At some point after fiddling with the deck UI my #4 slot in combat mode started flipping through abilities randomly. Not sure what I changed to make that happen, but I just ended up putting useful stuff I'd like to have in combat but had no hotbar room for. If you are in combat you can ctrl-4 to make it switch to something else. Loading the deck up with combat stuff makes it more likely you'll hit some damaging ability rather than something not useful. The #4 slot is also a separate cooldown, so long cooldown abilities can be used back to back if you luck out.
I got to 60 tailoring thinking "Woohoo now I can make all these cool recipes!". But there's skill level and skill rating. Why they did it this way I have no idea. Everything I can make moves my bar a pixel or less. I'm going to have to murder and skin billions of animals to get there.
Saved up about 35k towards a house, but no idea if the money will even be useful.
Looking at the date of this post you prolly figured out the following stuff but it might help someone else.
Skill sets - you create what this game calls decks, which are just a chosen number of skills. Game is limited to 10 skill slots usable at one time. Press 'Y' to open the 'deck' manager. Choose to create a new deck (you can create as many as you want) or modify/edit an existing one. When you place a skill in a slot when creating the deck there is a little padlock icon next to it. If you click it locked then the skill is like most MMOs so the skill is always available and has a reset timer. If you leave it unlocked then a random availability factor comes into play. As you level a skill you can use it in slots up to 4 or 5 times. So for example for skill slots 6-10 you could use all heals and be able to spam heal yourself or others in combat. Or use 4 of your favorite DPS spell and spam that or four of your best melee attack etc etc Two random points :
i) There are combos where you drag one skill onto another to create a more powerful skill. eg drag 'Rend' onto 'Whirling Blades' to create 'Sawblade Sweep' which does AE dmg plus a DoT with increased mana/focus efficiency and makes the two source skills reset faster. There's a list to view of available combos in the deck manager. At least one of the two skills has to be in the deck 'unlocked' so its pops up randomly.
ii) Notice the Glyph window in the deck manager. You have to drag available skills in here which become available for the random pop up skills. You have to put in a minimum number or the game adds 'Slugs' to the deck which are blanks whjich can pop up in the combat bar. If you leave a hot slot open then the game randomly assigns any one of these skills to it in combat. If you use 10 out of 10 skills all 'locked' then this is all irrelevant.
The XP system is new. You have two pools of XP. Adventurer XP comes from quests and killing creatures. Producer (Gathering/Crafting) XP comes from making things or gathering. As you make items repeatedly you get less XP each time so to get to a high level you need to spend a a lot of time gathering. This one pool is used for all the different craft trees - Tailoring, Carpentry, Alchemy etc So you can gain XP from Mining then spend it leveling Cooking, for example.
Something to understand is that the bigger your pool of XP is the faster skills will level. So go out and pool a few hundred K XP from Mining and you will get massively more XP per crafting action. Same with combat skills - lock all your skills from raising, farm a few hundred adventurer XP then you can raise that PITA skill really fast.
Innate skills take a lot more XP to level than individual skills. They are colored silver in the skill trees (Press K to see the skill trees). eg Top of the Blades Tree 'Bladed Combat' takes a lot more XP to level than the individual skill attacks such as 'Whirling Blades'.
Finally you can choose whether to use auto attack or click to attack for default attacks. Options -> Game -> scroll to bottom bottom option 'Use Free Attack' If you use auto attack then innate raise very fast and burn through your pooled XP. As you say once you get to intermediate levels in skills you need to manage which skills are set to raise so be very careful in choosing whether to use auto attack or not.
