Skills Overview

Skill cap: 700 soft, 720 hard

700 is where every character starts — the soft cap, the total skill points you can hold across all skills at once.

720 is the hard ceiling. Nothing takes you past it. You close the 20-point gap with Skill Cap Balls, one point per ball.

UO Sagas features the classic UOR-era skill set. Every character can train any skill — your build is defined by which skills you raise within the overall skill cap. The caps, gain rates and training rules are all further down this page; Skill Masteries is the PvM specialization system layered on top, and Stats covers Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence.

Two columns in the tables below:

Cap — the highest that skill can reach. Everything starts capped at 100; the 30 skills that have Skill Scrolls can be pushed to 120. You cannot scroll them all: the budget is 120 bonus cap points per character, so at most six skills reach 120.
Mastery — whether the skill has a Skill Mastery, the PvM specialization track with perks and an ultimate proc. 19 of the skills do.

Combat

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Swordsmanship	Hit chance with swords and axes	100	Yes
Mace Fighting	Hit chance with maces and staves	100	Yes
Fencing	Hit chance with piercing weapons	100	Yes
Archery	Hit chance with bows and crossbows	100	Yes
Wrestling	Unarmed defense and attacks	100	—
Tactics	Scales all weapon damage	120	Yes
Anatomy	Bonus damage and weapon special moves	100	—
Parrying	Blocking attacks with a shield	100	Yes
Arms Lore	Weapon insight, passive swing speed	120	Yes
Healing	Bandage healing, curing and resurrection	100	—

Magic

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Magery	Casting spells from the eight circles	100	—
Evaluating Intelligence	Spell damage scaling	120	Yes
Meditation	Faster mana regeneration	120	Yes
Resisting Spells	Reduces hostile spell effects	120	Yes
Spirit Speak	Communing with the dead	100	—
Inscription	Scribing scrolls and spellbooks	120	Yes

Tactics, Evaluating Intelligence, Meditation and Resisting Spells keep their scrolled points only outside PvP — while you are flagged, anything above 100 is ignored.

Bard

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Musicianship	Playing instruments — base for all barding	120	Yes
Provocation	Turning monsters against each other	120	—
Peacemaking	Calming aggressive creatures	120	—
Discordance	Weakening a target's stats and skills	120	—

All four feed the Barding song system.

Rogue

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Hiding	Vanishing from sight	100	—
Stealth	Moving while hidden	120	Yes
Stealing	Taking items from others	100	—
Snooping	Peeking into other backpacks	100	—
Lockpicking	Opening locked chests	120	—
Remove Trap	Disarming chest traps	120	—
Detect Hidden	Revealing hidden players and traps	120	—
Poisoning	Applying poison to weapons and food	120	Yes

Crafting

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Alchemy	Brewing potions	120	Yes
Blacksmithy	Forging weapons and armor	120	—
Carpentry	Building furniture and woodcraft	120	—
Cartography	Drawing and decoding maps	120	—
Cooking	Preparing food	120	—
Fletching	Crafting bows and arrows	120	—
Tailoring	Sewing clothes and leather armor	120	—
Tinkering	Tools, jewelry and clockwork	120	—

See the Crafting Overview for the shared crafting model.

Gathering

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Mining	Digging ore and gems	120	Yes
Lumberjacking	Chopping wood	120	Yes
Fishing	Fishing, SOS bottles and sea treasure	120	—
Skinning	Harvesting hides from corpses	120	Yes

See the Gathering Overview for veins, regions and luck.

Animals

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Animal Taming	Taming and controlling creatures	120	—
Animal Lore	Inspecting creatures and pets	120	Yes
Veterinary	Healing and resurrecting pets	120	—
Herding	Directing animals	100	—

Utility & flavor

Skill	What it does	Cap	Mastery
Tracking	Locating creatures and players	100	—
Camping	Campfires and resting	100	—
Item Identification	Appraising items	100	—
Taste Identification	Detecting poisoned food	100	—
Begging	Asking NPCs for coin	100	—

Skill caps

The overall skill cap is 700 points across all skills.
The overall cap can be raised up to a maximum of 720 using Skill Cap Balls — each consumed ball raises your total skill cap by 1 point.
Every individual skill is capped at 100 by default.
Selected skills can be raised beyond 100 — up to 120 — by consuming Skill Scrolls.

Raising a skill above 100

Each Skill Scroll is bound to one specific skill and raises that skill's cap by 1 point, so going from 100 to 120 takes 20 scrolls of that skill.
You must be a Grandmaster (skill at 100) in the skill before you can consume its scrolls.
Raising the cap does not raise the skill itself — you still have to train the points the normal way, all the way to 120.
There is a shared budget: a character can hold at most 120 points of scroll cap increases across all skills combined — enough for six skills at 120, or any spread you like (twelve skills at 110, and so on). Once the budget is full you have to lower another skill's cap first (the floor is 100) before more scrolls will apply.
In practice the 700/720 total skill cap is the tighter limit: six skills at 120 is exactly 720, so a fully scrolled character has room for nothing else.

Skills that can reach 120

Only skills that have Skill Scrolls can be raised past 100:

Type	Skills
Animal	Animal Lore, Animal Taming, Veterinary
Barding	Discordance, Musicianship, Peacemaking, Provocation
Combat	Arms Lore, Tactics
Crafting	Alchemy, Blacksmithy, Bowcraft/Fletching, Carpentry, Cooking, Inscription, Tailoring, Tinkering
Exploration	Cartography, Detect Hidden
Gathering	Fishing, Lumberjacking, Mining, Skinning
Magic	Evaluating Intelligence, Meditation, Resisting Spells
Thievery	Lockpicking, Poisoning, Remove Trap, Stealth

All other skills — including the melee skills, Magery, Hiding, Healing, Anatomy and Tracking — cap at 100.

Tactics, Evaluating Intelligence, Resisting Spells and Meditation are a special case: they feed damage, defense and mana regeneration directly, so their scrolled points count only while you are not PvP flagged. For as long as the flag is up anything above 100 is ignored — see Skill Scrolls.

Skill gains

Your chance to gain on a successful or failed skill use depends on how close you are to the skill's cap and how challenging the attempt was. Some things to know:

Skills below 10.0 gain very quickly (multiple points per use).
Combat and magic skills gain slightly slower as they approach 100.
Crafting skills gain noticeably slower — Alchemy, Inscription and Cartography in particular are much harder to raise than other skills. A dedicated crafter is a valuable (and profitable) character on Sagas.
Citizenship town bonuses can grant extra gain chance for specific crafting or gathering skills.

Where you train matters

Skill gain speed is modified by the region you are in:

Region	Gain rate
Overland (wilderness)	Normal
Dungeons	20% faster
Guarded towns	10% slower
Player houses	20% slower

Special rules apply on the newbie island Adena and in the Caverns of Adena: skill gains there are doubled, but skills can only be trained up to 70.0 in those regions. See Young Players for more about starting out.

Skill items

Skill Scrolls — raise an individual skill's cap toward 120.
Skill Cap Balls — raise your overall skill cap from 700 toward 720 (+1 per ball).
Skill Scrolls can be stored in a Skill Scroll Almanac, available from the Vault of Eren Vendor — see Almanacs.