Yes, there is skill and what is needed to be skilled changes from game to game and even class to class. It's basically a combination of analytical ability and reaction time.
The faster the combat is in the game, the more important reaction time becomes. The slower the combat in the game, the more important analytical ability becomes.
For example, a first person shooter will require faster reaction time because if you properly analyze a situation and know exactly what to do, someone will still kill you if they react faster then you do. In a game like Everquest, what's usually more important is analytical ability. Knowing where to move, who to attack, what action to take and reaction time is not nearly as important because the combat is slower. The reaction time required to play a melee would be higher then a caster, who can anticipate their next move while waiting on the current cast to perform. Any game that uses a global cooldown, the longer the cooldown between abilities, the less important reaction time becomes. If there is no global cooldown and abilities can be used instantly, reaction time becomes more important.
A perfect example is the guy I gave my Ranger to on Vallon Zek. He made a living playing Street Fighter, and was one of the top ranked players in the world. In Street Fighter he had every move memorized, and the distances between the players in relation to the moves memorized so there was very little analytical ability involved. His skill, and why he was so good, was his reaction time and how quickly he could respond to whatever his opponent was doing. He knew the correct response through memorization, it was simply how long for it to register, and how quickly he reacted to it that him so good.
In Everquest, he took over my Ranger when I joined Afterlife and he routinely died in PVP, even though the Ranger he took over was the best equipped Ranger on the server by far. Everquest simply requires more analytical ability instead of reaction time which Street Fighter required. He constantly made very bad decisions which led to his deaths, even with a big gear advantage.
"Skill" is essentially the tools required to excel at whatever particular game, simply a combination of analytical ability and reaction time. Everquest places a much greater emphasis on your analytical ability because of the relatively slower nature of combat compared to other games. At the end, no matter how good your analytical ability was, things still came down to class balance and a random factor on occasion though but a "skilled" player would typically beat an "unskilled" player the majority of the time, even with a weaker class. The only time the class balance really played a factor was at the top, when two players making very little to no mistakes were playing each other in which case class balance plays a factor. The same is true in games like Street Fighter. Your average players won't see any difference if one character is slightly overpowered, however with the best players in the world, a small advantage like that completely ruins the game and they'll ban that particular character from being used in tournaments. It's also why the vast majority of comments about the pecking order of the classes is stupid and off-base, because the majority of comments are coming from players who never played the classes to their potential or fought players playing the class to their potential. The top players on the server, playing other top players on the server produced far different results then what the masses were seeing based on the difficulty level (how hard it is to make the right decisions) of the classes.
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