We have been lately working on the airbender class and skills. As the airbenders aren't ready for preview yet, I'll talk a bit about skills.
Skills in Avatar will be mostly the dame as in D&D 4e. The same set, the same utility, etc., with a few notable differences.
The Arcana skill hass been replaced with Elementalism. There is no "magic" per se in Avatar, so Arcana would be useless as a skill. Instead, we have taken the essence of what Arcana represents, and modified it into something appropriate for Avatar. The study of Bending and the Elements went through two states, first as the "Bending Arts". We decided that the name doesn't fit with the guidelines presented by the rest of the skills (single word skill names), so we dropped it in favor of "Elementalism". As a knowledge skill, it covers understanding of bending, bending culture, the elements, the elemental spirits, etc. It also covers any knowledge about the Avatars themselves.
Secondly, the Religion skill doesn't exist in Avatar. D&D "religion" is roughly based on real life Western religious movements, especially the polytheistic ones of ages past. Avatar instead focuses on Asian-style mysticism to cover the idea of religious movements. We toyed with the idea of replacing Religion with Mysticism, but we soon realized that in the Avatar world, Mysticism was part of what the Elemelntalism skill espoused: the study of the elements and the spirit world. Thus, we completely scrapped the whole skill set. Of course, DMs who wish there to be a Religion-type skill in their campaigns may implement it.
Later, when we publish the booklet describing how to place benders in a standard D&D game, we'll reimplement the Religion and Arcana skills, so that a bender may have them. This will include its addition to skill lists per class.
We don't yet have the per-class skill lists, though we'll release those with the full class releases.
We're going to (hopefully) have airbenders finished soon, with earthbenders soon to follow.
