It is far to difficult to accumulate Artisan Mettle to level trade skills and secure items based on the required amounts for many. I also find the Artisan Consortium rep grind to be especially frustrating, it is less so now that the contracts are available but still very frustrating. The nerf to obtaining dragon shards exacerbated the mettle availability and widened the gap between players that had more time and luck vs those that got a later start.
Why do we not get Artisan Mettle from our weekly boxes?
Why doesn’t there appear to be any crafting or gathering world quests like the last few expansions? These could reward mettle along with consortium rep.
Why don’t we get consortium rep from the weekly quest to get faction?
Why doesn’t the soup event reward artisan mettle considering it is crafting?
There was so much effort put forward to streamline the experience regarding so many other factions and resource gathering but the revamped trade skill process was left behind.
I hit a wall that I wasn’t expecting. Early on artisan mettle was plentiful, then once it ran out, it was like WAY out. The consortium contracts are enough to keep climbing that ladder, but mettle is a complete bottle neck for me now.
Aside from alchs being shafted from artisan mettle - it being in low supply is a good thing for crafters. It’s what lets us make some decent gold off of craft orders from people looking to use our insights.
The biggest problem I have with the mettle system is that if you didn’t spend time researching what it was and when you weren’t going to get it anymore, you could make dumb decisions.
And yeah, when, as an enchanter/JC, I ground out 5 pairs of margin magnifiers (scribe blue item requiring mettle…) thinking I could put em on the AH (I couldn’t, BOP…), I ended up with 5 bricks that I had to DE for shards and down over 1000 mettle (most of my stockpile) and now I’m stuck unable to afford consortium recipes I have the rep for but not the mettle.
I’ve ground for glimmers (1/4), dragon shards of knowledge (which just don’t show up anymore, I’ve done well over 300 dirt/magic bound/scout packs with zero shards), spammed trade with my first crafts that might be of interest. I can’t use the order system for better tools because no mettle. I don’t mind putting in the work to accomplish something (eg. ground out 600 odd mobs for crusader back in the day, ran BRS repeatedly for major striking, got most of the AQ20 hand chants, had all the mats to 300 JC on the first day of TBC etc), even if I have to deal with RNG junk. But this hard gating where a simple mistake/misunderstanding means that all the positives that come with crafting actually being relative only work for those that spent time researching before hand is terrible. The system isn’t obvious until you make a screw up (similar to people who invested points in the gathering/refining half of their profession and can now only turn out 1 pip pieces of junk no one wants), and there’s no straightforward way to recover.
However, the secret apparently is to drop a profession with a lot of rare (some non existent now) pieces, take up other professions, grind them out for mettle/drop them/rinse repeat until I have enough mettle to take back up my original trade. There is a way around it, it’s just a really crappy one. Give us something where we can invest work/materials in to farming mettle, even if it’s at a low rate.