Expertise Question

Does Expertise reduce the cost of the touch spells/skills like Shock and Lightning Touch?

Expertise reduces the costs of all Attack Skills, Preparations, Traps, Stances, Rituals, Glyphs, and Shouts by 4% per attribute level. This effect rounds the cost of the skill to the nearest energy, however, so instead of getting a continuous reduction you get several discrete jumps in effectiveness. The following table shows how much energy you'll actually be spending on skills, with different levels of Expertise.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content...sts-id1154.php

No, it doesn't reduce them

A thread with related question...

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=2047

So when they changed the touch attacks from spells to skills, they made them normal skills and not attack skills? That seems odd to me considering they are skills that do damage...

And that thread is talking about elementalist attack spells, which the touch attacks aren't.

The majority of skills that do damage are not attack skills.

An attack skill is a skill that works with your normal attack (e.g. it enhances your sword swing, or your bow damage, or your hammer bash, etc.) You still make your normal attack while using an attack skill (e.g. you still swing your sword, shoot an arrow, etc.) Unless your normal mode of attacking someone is walking up to them and touching them, it would extremely odd to consider a touch based skill to be an attack skill. Indeed, since the game has no unarmed combat, any skill you can use without using a weapon is necessarily not an attack skill.

An "attack skill" is not any skill that causes damage (indeed there are attack skills that do no damage at all, like Distracting Blow), an attack skill is a skill that works with your normal attack.

I guess that it makes sense I just figured anything that wasn't a spell (or a signet for that matter) but did damage just fell into the attack skill category

What was the main drive in changing them from spells to skills?

As skills, they are not as vulnerable to anti-caster skills. Most interrupts won't affect them now, and they can be used without fear through hexes like Backfire or Soul Leech. It's a small buff, but definately a useful one.