Idea related to skill drain

I love this game but there is only one thing that I actually find annoying and that is skill drain on death. Early game, 5% skill level loss is easily recoverable, but late game, losing 5 levels from 100 is a lot of time lost. Running is the easiest skill to get to 100, but I had also gotten mining up to 100 at one point because I had to mine a lot of stone for my castle. Now that I’m done with my castle and I have multiple large chests fully stocked with stone, I don’t need to mine anymore as I’m also fully stocked on all of the metals. Every time I die now, I lose mining skill and I’m not getting it back because I don’t need to mine, and when I do need to go back mining, it will be at a less effective level. The first time I went exploring the mistlands with friends, I lost skills three times.

Basically, I feel like skill drain just encourages you to focus on a few skills while ignoring everything else. I’ve dabbled through different types of weapons early on, but after I stuck with swords, I’ve just been losing levels on pole arms, clubs, axes, knives, one handed. If I want to try something new again, I need to start at a very low level again, far less efficient than my sword, and if I stick with that new weapon, now I’m just losing sword skill without gaining it back when I die because I’m using something else. Same can be said for a skill like swimming; because I don’t swim often, my swimming skill is always going to be stuck at a very low level.

I think my preferred change, which has already been mentioned, is to just lose progress towards the next skill level.

Another idea I have is to rework how xp is earned. Instead of just earning a base flat amount of xp, make it scale with how effectively you’re using the skill. One hit for 100 damage should give you more xp than one hit for 10 damage. Limit the xp gain based on the enemy’s max health, so that farming greydwarves with mistlands tier weapons isn’t more rewarding than fighting mistlands creatures. The idea behind this is so that as you gain levels, you should be roughly getting better equipment and weapons that also do more damage so that it’s not much harder to get one level at 90 with a mistlands weapon as it is to get one level at 20 with a bronze weapon. 5% skill loss at 100 shouldn’t take exponentially more time than 5% at level 30 if you have the appropriately tiered weapon or tool for it. Edit: block skill would behave in a similar fashion: successfully blocking a mistlands creature should give more xp than blocking a greydwarf.

Also, a nice side effect of this would be faster leveling at low levels if you want to try out a new weapon class with a higher tier weapon. With my high level sword skill, I’m basically just encouraged to keep making new higher tier swords as they are released. But if I can make a mistlands tier knife, it would be great to be able to start leveling faster if my knife skill is only 10.