Can some IMM weigh in and let me know if this is actually how things work or if it's all in my head?

I feel I learn skills better on one Dark Guard than any of the others. This is true of specific mobs in many ranking areas.

Am I making this up?

Not really related to the question of whether one mob out of 20 same description mobs is going to give you better learning...

...but being a math loving type of guy wanted to take a sec to talk about skill learning in general.

I find that there's a certain technique to spamming skills. Namely, you want NPC's that have very few 'prog' attacks (older areas therefore work better for this) and it's ideal to have them wield a weapon you know well rather than hand to hand (if you're a tanky class at least).

More importantly, I'm looking at the likelihood of me learning a skill as times I can execute it vs whether its learnable on failure or success only. If I can learn it on only success (like dodge), I want to maximize my chance of dodging (they have lots of attacks for instance with a weapon that's easy to dodge like axe) and dropping my bag and raft to get those dodges up. If I have the option to *fail* and I can learn by failing, then I want to do the exact opposite and maximize my failures - maybe by using berserk on cooldown.

I also vastly prefer an area that I'll never have to leave versus an area that's "a better fit" but also more trafficked.

Just my 2 cents.

One techy question I would like to ask Nep or another imm is whether or not your gain rates use your actual success rate or your 'true' success rate for determining diminishing gain returns? So example, I berserk, my sword goes from 80% to 70%, will I learn sword skill specifically (a skill that you cannot learn on failure) faster than if I didn't berserk?

But some area writers will have copies of the same mob set a little differently to vary up their levels. So while two mobs might have the same desc and theme, they are different levels, and you're going to have a higher chance of learning skills on the higher level one. Make sense?

However - this isn't the case for Organia. There, you're just strange.

n/t

So you tend to learn a bit more from them for those reasons.