What a spell pays the skills it trains, and how to retune it.

Cast XP

Every successful cast of an ability pays XP to that ability's Linked Skills — a heal trains Restoration, a fireball trains Destruction, a blink trains Arcana. It is paid once per cast, in proportion to what the cast actually did, and it is separate from the damage and kill XP a damage spell already earns.

Set it up

1. Open Database → Abilities and pick the ability. 2. On Costs & Effects, add the skill it should train under Linked Skills. No linked skill, no cast XP — and a linked ability's other XP (damage, kill shares) goes to those same skills too. 3. Leave Cast XP empty unless you want a specific number. Empty means automatic: the field's placeholder shows exactly what the cast will pay (Auto (8)), recalculated as you change mana cost and cooldown. 4. Optional — retune the automatic base for the whole world in Database → Skills → XP Rewards (see below). 5. Optional — change the anti-spam window in Database → Combat → Skill & XP → Cast XP Interval. 6. Save, then Publish. A managed server keeps its own database and only sees the change after a publish.

Fields

Field	Where	What it does
Linked Skills	Abilities → the ability → Costs & Effects	The skills this ability trains. Every kind of XP it earns is split evenly between them (each share is at least 1). Empty = the ability trains nothing.
Cast XP	Abilities → the ability → Costs & Effects	XP one full cast pays those skills. Empty = the automatic amount below. 0 = this ability never pays cast XP.
Action / Skill / Base XP / Tier Multiplier	Skills → XP Rewards	What one action pays. The cast_spell row's Base XP is the base of the automatic formula; craft is the fallback for recipes with no XP of their own.
Cast XP Interval	Combat → Skill & XP	Minimum milliseconds between two cast-XP payouts for the same player and ability. Default 2000; 0 turns it off.

The automatic amount

Cast XP = 5 + (mana cost ÷ 10) + (cooldown seconds ÷ 4)

Expensive spells and long cooldowns are pressed less often, so they pay more per press. The 5 is the cast_spell Base XP from Skills → XP Rewards when you have authored one (the starter content ships 3), and the result is never below 1.

Spell	Mana	Cooldown	Pays
Healing	25	0.5 s	8
Grand Healing	300	0.5 s	35
Heavenly Shield	0	60 s	20
Fireball	50	0.7 s	10

What counts as "the cast did something"

Kind of ability	Pays when
Damage	At least one hostile target takes damage. Paid on the first hit — an area burst, a volley of arrows and a piercing beam each pay once, not once per victim.
Heal	It restored health. The payout scales with how much: a heal that tops up half of what it could have healed pays half. Healing a full-health ally pays nothing.
Buff / debuff / status	At least one status effect actually landed. One that was resisted, blocked by immunity or diminished away did nothing, so it pays nothing.
Convert resource	It moved a resource.
Teleport / blink / pull	Something actually moved.
Summon / raise dead	At least one minion appeared.

Gotchas

A spell with no Linked Skills trains nothing. This is the most common

cause of "my Healing skill never levels" — the skill exists, the heal works, nothing links them.

A linked spell no longer trains your weapon skill. All XP from an ability

that links skills goes to those skills only. Before this, casting a Destruction-linked Fireball with a sword equipped sent half of the kill XP to your sword skill. An ability with no Linked Skills still trains the weapon (or its weapon type) as before.

Heals pay for healing, not for casting. Spamming a heal on a full-health

party pays nothing at all.

Casts out of combat pay half. Anything but a damage cast is halved while

neither you nor the ally you helped has dealt or taken damage recently.

The interval is per player and per ability. Casting the same buff five

times in two seconds pays once. Five different spells pay five times.

0 means never. Empty means automatic — they are different values, and the

field keeps them apart.

Procs, chain bounces and channel ticks pay nothing extra. An on-hit

follow-up and every bounce of a chain belong to the cast that already paid; a channel that ticks twenty times pays on its first tick only.

Refused casts pay nothing — out of range, no target, not enough mana.

Neither do auto-attack swings the server fires for you.

World XP boosts still apply — event boosts, premium and xpGain

passives multiply it like any other award.

Publish after changing it. Cast XP lives on the ability row, the base on

the XP reward row, and the interval on the world's combat config — a managed server gets all three from a publish.

Why my cast paid nothing

The game server writes the reason to its log the first time each one happens (and again after a publish): no Linked Skills, Cast XP set to 0, the cast did nothing, or it landed inside the interval window.

Abilities & Skills Chaining Abilities