We would block ourselves into a corner in the house and just use old school macros that just replayed the same mouse movements over and over to level up casting water elementals in our respective houses. Just keeping that magic at 100% :)
So we would lure an npc to the house and set a macro to cast and walk 1 tile out of sight. Used regents but it was faster due to cancelling and the npc never died.
Likewise if you attacked an npc in a city but not hit. Then walk 2 screens away you could set an in game hotkey for attack which would trigger and cancel causing you to gain exp but not do anything.