Trade Skill Question

[chippydip]

I think there is something else in play then straight percentages.

There are skill up guides which say "take this yellow recepie, make 30 of them and you will have gained 20 points".

I have tried one or 2 of those guides, and found that accurate.  I wasn't being particularly scientific about it.
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This thread over in the bugs forum seems to indicate that at least some skills are not handled by random chance at all. Its certainly possible that some sort of "accumulator" like this is used elsewhere. If this is the case, though, they've done it in a non-obvious way. I know I've seen things like 3 or 4 casts to gain a skill up, followed by a single cast to gain a skill up when grinding some skills. A simple accumulator should never behave like that.

Its still possible, though, that the chance to skill up isn't random at all. It just occured to me that a very good way of making things appear random without actually being so would be to use a pseudo-random number generator and seed it with a specific value for each trade skill. If you then use this "random" generator to determine if a skill up occurs, you may get what looks like strings of bad luck and good, but the sequence would be exactly the same every time. Of course, this is easy to test if you just power level through a skill, reset, and try again.

Anyone know what the cheapest/easiest skill to powerlevel is?