Skills training?

[mxb2001]

One thing I'm wondering about is how to use skill points. Mostly I'm playing a Ranger which doesn't have any very high proficiency making it hard to figure out where to put them. There are 5 skills that he gains a whole point in so I've tried keeping those at the same as his level and if there's a spare point to put it into the next best (magic schools are .900 for him). One conundrum is combat, weaponmastery and swordmastery though. He gains 1 in combat, .800 in weaponmastery and .700 in swords. I know that gaining in swords also gains a little in the 2 higher cats but I'm not sure it is equal to 1 whole point as I've not derived the formula yet. It might be 25% of the gain in the child cat and 1/16 of the grandchild but as I say that's a guess based on too little data. So far I've only trained combat and no weapon/swordmastery at all.

[the_sandman]

Specific weapon skills (sword/hafted/pole/axe) give +blows per round at 25 and 50

Weaponmastery also gives +damage and those matter a lot since you get multiple blows per round (see above)

My normal ranger build is usually sword/weapmastery maxed, one magic school (I like divination. Fire is also fun. Others have played with Mana (for shield) and Temporal (for glyph and speed) schools), as much sneakiness as I can get and the rest
into combat or even Magic.