After a bit of powerleveling I am level 17 with 8 spells under my belt. This "masterpiece of game design" might've been so if this were a single-player game, but alas, it is not. So you need to tag the mob before everyone else kills it just by auto-attacking and tagging it too. And then you have the well intending but erroneous people who kill it before it finishes its cast, if it even cast it at all (Detonator =\= Self Destruct). And then there's the outright griefers. And if I want to have any semblance of a peaceful time getting those skills, I need to either wait until I'm 50 and can solo the dungeons, or get someone to carry me. I just run-traded my way to Self Destruct.
I really doubt this is the intended way to play it, if nothing else.

I also would've liked a better tell in the spellbook. Ok so this spell is learned in Western Thanalan. Now, Western Thanalan is a pretty big place, with an even bigger level range. So theoretically I'd have had to go each mob and let it use every single one of its abilities on me in order to have a chance to learn... whatever this skill is. And it's not that I can say "oh ok it's not this mob" because if I didn't get the skill, it could just be bad rng.
So either I need to deal with this godawful experience, or I need to 'talk to the community' which basically boils down to reading a guide. So much for that solo experience. And it would've been easy to make it not as excruciating if they just told us more things about the spells. A name would've been ideal but I concede that might've been too easy (and even then it's subjective because not everyone knows the mobs of every area too well). A level range, an element, anything to not make it this much a needle in a haystack.