Granted, I am not an authority on this, but here's my understanding.
For the chance to get a skill up, the higher of INT or WIS is what is used. IIRC, the stat only affects your ability to skill up on a failed combine (i.e. a successful combine will typically create a skill-up; your stat just mitigates the chance of no skill-up on a fail). The highest stat also has no effect on the success or failure rate of the combine, only your skill level in that tradeskill does (plus trivial level of the item you're trying to make, of course).
For a couple of professions, there's an alternate stat that will be used if it's higher than your INT or WIS. For Blacksmithing, that's STR. For Fletching and Poisonmaking, that's DEX. So for Blacksmithing for example, it uses the highest of your STR, INT, or WIS.
For max skill levels, I don't think they changed in Kunark or Velious unless I'm mistaken? I believe a few months after vanilla launch they patched it so that you could choose a tradeskill to take to 250 and all others were capped at 200 (with the exception of racial or class-specific tradeskills, which you could take to 250 in addition to one of the other general tradeskills). I'm pretty sure 250 was at least the cap through Kunark, but not sure about Velious. I know eventually it was changed so that you could take one tradeskill to 300, and any others you wanted to take past 200 required AAs; I'm just not sure if the cap was raised to 300 in Velious or not.
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