Thought process triggered by reading the skill branches suggestion. This is a totally different take, though.
Right now, the 12 skills you can learn are based completely on your starting class. What I'm suggesting instead is creating the following groups of 3 skills each (see below). Each character gets two of those groups automatically from their class (6 out of their 12 skills), but may choose any other two groups to get their remaining six skills.
Revamping the 36 existing skills into logical groups of 3, removing some redundancies, and adding a few new skills, I get the following 10 groups. (Note, this is just a preliminary/rough pass... probably needs more evaluation.)
Life: Heal, Revive, Drain Life [revamp Revive to make extra skill ranks worth something]
Element: Lightning, Fire Storm, Ice Storm
Aura: Blessing of Vitality, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Power (+mana, +m/s) [revamp to eliminate self-buffs but provide scaling party benefits]
Buff: Focus, Evasion, Iron Blood
Sustain: Taunt, Restore, Meditation [Restore/Meditation need to be more powerful than existing, stack with party buffs]
Debuff: Break Armor, Blind, Cripple (slow) [single-target effects]
Malign: Nightmare, Weakness, Confuse (stun) [AoE effects]
Melee: Stomp, Slash (composite of all slash skills), Daze (stun)
Range: Blast, Freeze (Frostbite/Thorn Root), Repulse
Control: Beckon, Thorn Wall, TBD
The automatic packages for each class would be:
Bears: Melee, Sustain
Birds: Buff, Range
Elves: Life, Element
A skill respec could conceivably allow a character to rechoose all four skill groups.
