Warning: Minor spoiler ahead.
Eruv, my experience mirrors yours. There is an alternative way for training: Teaming up. Last week, for the first time I did train an affliction spell. Same story there. Someone else wanted to train a skill she had way lower than her usual preferred skill. So we teamed up. She did the killing alone while I was afflicting the victim. While her killing went rather slowly I could launch ~12 afflictions of which about 11 were either resisted or utter failures. In ~90% of the cases 1 successfully afflicted the mob for a short time (longest was ~6 seconds) and so I got xp. After the fight I used my healing powers to fill up my teammate. So I was not useless to her. If I had healed up during the fight we would have gotten almost no xp.
To be able to do this you have to find the right combination of skills and fauna or flora to train on.
Eruv, my experience mirrors yours. There is an alternative way for training: Teaming up. Last week, for the first time I did train an affliction spell. Same story there. Someone else wanted to train a skill she had way lower than her usual preferred skill. So we teamed up. She did the killing alone while I was afflicting the victim. While her killing went rather slowly I could launch ~12 afflictions of which about 11 were either resisted or utter failures. In ~90% of the cases 1 successfully afflicted the mob for a short time (longest was ~6 seconds) and so I got xp. After the fight I used my healing powers to fill up my teammate. So I was not useless to her. If I had healed up during the fight we would have gotten almost no xp.
To be able to do this you have to find the right combination of skills and fauna or flora to train on.