Skill Up Question

[Amenarra]

I am currently trying different ways to skill up from 189 to 250, or more importantly 200 for right now. Here is my question. Does attempting combines way out of your league diminish your ability to get a skill up? Or does that not matter. I have been making Imbued Enchanted Koada`Dal and I can do so with maily successful combines. It is slighty cheaper for me to attempt Mistletoe Cutting Sickles, only I fail the attempt 99.9% of the time at my skill level. If I can still get skill ups on Sickles, I would like to do a combination of Sickles and Koada`dal to help offset the cost of failed combines. Thanks for your help.

P.S.
I am exploring the option of doing Shadowscream but that's a little tough for me and I flatly refuse to do Acrylia.

[Altanis Blazewielder]

There are a large number of tradeskillers (myself included) that believe that you are approximately twice as likely to skillup on a success than a failure. Most of the data does agree with this, although there are always doubters.

[Balagar]

re: skill up

I've read many times that the closer you are to a trivial the more likely people think you are to get a skill up.

I've found exactly the opposite.

When I was working with baking and making patty melts (triv 191) I was averaging a skill up every 30 attempts until I got to the 170s and then my skill ups went to about 1 every 50 attempts. When I got my last skill up to 191 it took 60 attempts and I was successful on 58 of the tries so I had a lot of patty melts to give away.

I also saw this in smithing. I got relatively easy skill ups until I was within about 10 points of trivial and then the going got harder unless I switched to a different recipe with a higher trivial.

Brewing. . .ditto.

Based on my personal experience (note the word PERSONAL) I think that you have a better shot at getting a skill up on something that has a trivial at least 10pts higher than your current skill. If it went off successful attempts, the closer you got to the trivial then the quicker your skill would go up since you should be making lots more of that item, and I just haven't seen that on any of my characters with any skill.

[Gnarl]

Balagars experience fits with mine (Master in all trade skills but class/race specific ones, and GM Jeweler). However, it's also my observation that recipes that are VERY high trivials compared to your current skill seem to also NOT grant tradeskills... there seems to be a "sweet" spot of 10-ish skill points over your current skill, and this is just a personal observation, I have no data to back this up other than observations I've made when trying an "alternate" recipe out of depseration. ie: I moved to a more difficult recipe that was 50 points (say) higher than my current skill and found that the results were not pleasing... I moved back to the original recipe, the one that was "logically" next, and got skill points....

One observation I've noticed first and second hand: when I get "stuck" at a skill point, switching recipes to one that is slightly harder or slightly easier (but obviously not trivial) often seems to "kick start" skilling up. Another observation is that there seems to be training "inertia." By this I've noted that I'll be training in one skill and getting skill ups, and switch to another skill and get none for 20 or so combines, then all of a sudden I'll start skilling up nicely... again, most of this is very subjective, nothing I've written down and tallied on paper, just things I've noted as I was going through the motions....

GnarliAnna

[Amenarra]

Yes, I think that is my problem. At this moment the sickles I am doing are just a skosh out of my window, that 10-20 point window. I had heard that maybe you had more skill ups on success', but some of my other tradeskill friends noticed they had more skill ups on items they failed at. Not necessaryly all items above them, but a few in particular. I personally dropped Sickles and went back to Koada'dal for the time being simply because I can at least sell Koada and recoup some of my pp.

[OberonMiM]

In my experience the closer to trivial does seem to help skillups

In my skilling up on ethereal bricks from 192 to 212 i averaged about 20-30 combines per a skillup

After 212 it took 50 misc combines (sickles cultural etc all 250+ trivial) to get 213 and ive done over 20 since then

I know its a small sample but it does seem that way