I noticed that when getting the mortal draw without a shield I was not required to show him the helm splitter before learning the mortal draw. May it be faster to let your Shield burn up at some point in time to skip several hidden skills or does he not teach you them?

Tried this and sadly while it works for both learning backslice (dont need to show shield bash again) and mortal draw (helmsplitter), you need a shield to learn helmsplitter the first time. Since that skill is in-between it would really only save like 12 seconds to let it burn up. Buying a new one will waste too much time I'm afraid :/

Cool idea anyway :D