Active Abilities -- How do they work?

[Jaradakar]

How do Active Abilities work? Do you ever get a strat line options to say use one over others?

What determines when your gladiator will use them?

Does higher ranks in the talent increase your odds of doing it? Or how often you do it? Or both?

I'd love for more information. Is it bad to pick up all the basic abilities at 1? Or does that just confuse your gladiator so he does not know which ability to use?

[Dainoji]

It has been my experience that the higher the skill the more often it is used and the better its effect, however I think there is a cool down timer on them because I've never seen certain skills go off more than once per round. I've also noticed that if I have defensive skills but I'm using more of an offensive style I don't use them as much if at all, so I think one way to influence what skills your guy uses is to match them up with your fighting style to some degree.

I don't know if there is the concept of confusing your gladiator but if you only have one skill then you'll be using that one for sure, right? But since I think there is some kind of cool down mechanism having more skills can be good because while one is cooling down the others ones can kick in. I haven't tried just putting 1 point in a bunch of skills but since it gets harder to train as you go up in ranks I'm pretty sure each point gives more then the previous and since it is pretty much free to get 1 point in a skill I doubt it is very powerful.

[Jaradakar]

I sure hope they don't get confused, because if that's the case it seems like you should be able to unlearn an ability! I hear you on the cool downs, which does give advantages to picking up a single point in the base abilities (which is what I ended up doing). I'd love to know for sure if that is optimal or if I should avoid doing so to help my Gladiators to focus on just doing the abilities I really want.

[Dainoji]

I know there is discussion on being able to do a respec. In the Suggestions forum there is a thread on it. Nate wants to introduce this at some point but is holding off until a good design is in place due to the nature of the roulette style of training which makes one point not equal to one point across the board. Reasons you might not want to throw a bunch of one pointers around is you are capped on how many skill points your gladiator gets in his lifetime, so if you spread them out too much you may not be able to reach the bottom skills and or train them up to their max. Once a respec is in place that might not matter as much.