Victory dance
Victory dancing is the repetitive use of actions to distribute skill points.
Useful Info
When you gain experience, any skill XP is put into an XP pool. These points are distributed to skills as they are used, much like post-0.10 automatic training. Victory dancing refers to repeated actions, like casting a spell, in order to set your skill distribution.
While the XP pool was removed in 0.9, dancing is still required to get the first level of a skill.
Strategy
The need for and ensuing annoyance caused by victory dancing were both often overstated. An "average" character would usually not find it terribly necessary to victory dance their main skills, e.g. a melee type would have no trouble maxing their main weapon skill without victory dancing, or a conjurer could easily max out Conjurations and an elemental school without much difficulty. Defensive skills (Dodging, Armour, Shields) would sometimes require some victory dancing to max out, but would usually also rise fairly high on their own. More difficult were ancillary skills; for example, a melee character who decided to learn Haste would find it necessary to victory-dance Enchantments rather excessively to get that spell up to a reasonable failure rate.
While it is true that the XP pool cap caused a lot of experience to be lost for the purposes of skill training, in actuality this was not a huge deal: this only happened to late-game characters, who would almost invariably have enough skills to survive anyway.
History
- In 0.10, victory dancing was removed entirely; all skills are now unlocked as soon as you have an item that can use it.
- In 0.9, the skill system was changed so that the experience gained would be immediately spent on skills, removing the XP pool entirely. You still have to victory dance to obtain the first level of a skill.
- Prior to 0.8, there was a limit to how much XP the pool could hold, meaning victory dancing was necessary to simply avoid wasting experience.
