Dodge

When you're diving away from gunfire or ducking under a baseball bat, it's all about reflexes and senses.

The ability to get the hell out of the way when someone's trying to hurt you.

This skill is used automatically every time someone takes a swing or a shot at you. The higher it is, the more likely you are to avoid the attack. This is doubly important when being attacked with ranged weapons, since it's your only defense other than armor.

But I never see myself dodging!

Active dodging only happens if you can't parry the incoming attack. With melee-vs-melee, much of the time you will never see a dodge happen. However, this doesn't mean your dodge skill is useless! Dodge is factored into every hit right at the start, so a high dodge skill makes you harder to hit in general, even if you don't see a message about it. Many also opt to use the skill command grind to actively help raising dodge.

Dodge allows you to negate 100% of damage, as long as it works. Because of this, it is very hard to grind. Most players opt to just buy raws in dodge, instead of grinding it to 6 raw, like other skills. Dodge is also one of the most expensive skills to buy raws in, buying your 15th raw in Dodge may cost more than 12,000 EXP!