It has been a while since I played Revenant, but I am pretty sure those two skills never increase. Either they never got around to implementing those skills, or they took them out at some point during development but forgot to change the UI.

Your butt-kicking potential depends on the Atck and Def values. These in turn depend on your Agil/Rflx stats, character level and (I think) weapon skill.

The manual claims that the Attack/Defence skills increase every time you level up. However, this is accompanied by a screenshot showing a level 13 character with zero points in both skills.

Ok its been a long time since i've played and forgot i even played this game before. Seems i quit it because early on it was bugged and didn't work right. Based on this 4 year old post, early on attack/defense values didn't work which ment yes, you got your butt kicked in melee combat because you had no attack or defense values to make melee combat easier (to hit, not get hit).

But having started it up again in 2020, i now have attack and defense values and hopefully at least melee combat is functional again. Since it didn't work before i just went with a meteor casting mage since melee was broken. This time im playing as a warrior and melee seems fine so far, level 7-8 now, killed the dragon in the tower pretty easy, heading now to the island.

Have to experiment more, i do seem to remember there being stat pages where you could see your weapon, invoke, etc levels but i find that nowhere now. Attack used to be 0/300 etc but now its just a set number. Seems many changes and updates over the years.

I just started playing it a few days ago and am enjoying the feel of the game, but I can already tell it's a bit janky in some respects. Movement is awkward and the main character can get stuck walking in one direction until you let go of the mouse (it also happens under keyboard control). The menu system is somewhat awkward, and there's no tooltips that I can see... not sure if it's because I'm playing on Wine, or just the game itself, but there seems to be no way to tell what potions do when they're in your inventory, apart from their colour.

Strange that they put so much effort into the excellent voice acting, but skimped a little in playtesting.

There is a way: just Ctrl -Right click on any item and the information will be shown. This seems to be a contradiction.

In my experience, even today, 2022, there are no functioning attack/defense skills. At least the values ​​apparently remain at 0/300.

I'm trying to get out of the training area. The teacher shows a Move that includes a kick after a weapon thrust, and I've been experimenting with every key combination I can think of, to get a Kick out of the character, and I can't find it. I'm growing old on that fencing dummy--either that, or I've become the fencing dummy and didn't notice.
How does one get the Character to Kick after a weapon thrust?

Actually I've discovered that the combat controls are labeled incorrectly. The three moves are listed as Thrust, Chop, and Swing. Chop is correct however Swing and Thrust are swapped. The Swing key Thrusts and vice versa. For Jong's training, 'Chop' = Chop key, 'Slash' = Thrust key, 'Thrust' = Swing key. I'll try to post any other bugs or workarounds.

The weapon and invoke skills can be seen by clicking the word Skills in the stats side window, shown as Stats/Skills. Both words are clickable.

The attack and defense skills were probably reworked into stats
before release. They display in the Stats window at the bottom, and go up 10 with each level. The lingering skills still show as 0/300 but but your melee attack and deflect ability does indeed go up with each level producing less glancing blows out and more criticals.

In hindsight tooltips was a HUGE missing feature we should have added. I've seen a lot of posts/comments/reviews retrospectively that the inner workings of the game rules were too opaque for people to make reasoned decisions as to what to choose at any given point.

A weak defense though is that it's pretty clear what the leveling path is for most of the equipment and stats in the game are, so you can generally just go with the next set of things you can use/buy/afford and be fine. The main play testers Vinny and Matt could I think beat the game in about 3-4 hours by straight climbing the stat tree and doing all the required quests only.

As for movement we put a truly huge amount of time into making the movement work well. You have no idea. Direct movement like this in maps with little snags and cul-de-sacs of barriers is always hard. We had code to slide the character to the left and right and to smooth out jaggies in the walk map, and to prevent the character from getting stuck. 2D collision math and cwould have been handy but it still would have been tricky given how the walkmap was a grid of small square columns. Knowing what I know now and having lots of 3D primitives and math available we would naturally have done things differently but a lot of that kind of general knowledge didn't exist back then.