Mastery
Masteries are similar to stats in that they modify how a skill functions.
Gathering skills will have a mastery tree devoted to every tier of the skill (tier 1 would be 1-10) for fishing this would be hand fishing. hand fishing would have a mastery tree that is separate from fishing as a whole, only changing how that part of fishing works*. at the time of writing our current plan for gathering mastery is it's based on nodes gathered so let's say I have successfully gathered 10,000 hand fishing nodes, I would be max mastery and be able to select 5 mastery perks, the final one improving my a small amount of my fishing as a whole.
Mastery tiers will be balanced individually but for gathering the tiers should be 10, 100, 1000, 5000, 10000. 5000 may be removed but I like breaking up that 9k grind. the perks for gathering will fit into one of 3-6 columns: speed, speed/quantity, quantity, quantity/xp, xp, xp/speed
I would be okay with removing the combination columns but I like the addition of xp to the speed/gather columns we had last discussed.
I'm not sure if they should be hit based/swing based/or xp based but the requirement would likely be different between different types of weapons.
shortswords would have their own masteries separate from longswords. weapons COULD possibly fit into multiple catagories. shields would have a mastry and so would improvised weapons and unarmed.
combat masteries trees would have 3 trees (which makes me want to keep gathering simple with 3 as well). the first tree would be for cooldown based player buffs(think slice and dice), the second would be for passive effects(think 3% more crit), and the third tree would be for cooldown based enemy debuffs(think kick or kidney shot).