I agree that the GP system requires some adjustments.
Same with some of the skills.
For example:
Brunt Force and Deep Vigor.
In a system where you can get to a maximum of chain #3 on normal nodes and chain #4 on nodes with +1 gathering attempt, a skill which grants you 100% success on your 6th gathering attempt (chain #5) is useless.
You would have to use Ageless Words or Solid Reason (both 250GP) 2 times on a normal node, just to be able to get a 100% gathering attempt.
It's much easier to just activate Unearth and Sharp Vision to get 100% success rate AND higher HQ chance for 4-5 gathering attempts instead of just 1 or 2.
Ward skills:
While they are ok for farming clusters, the ammount of crystals and shards is too low for the GP cost.
And don't lie to yourself thinking SE tries to control the economy or the ammount of materials that way.
If they would care about that, they would do something about the bots and hack-users who flood the market with crystals, shards and any other material.
It doesn't matter if a bot can farm 500 or 1000 shards per hour because they gathered 24/7 for months now, and just one of these bots running for 1 week could farm ~120k shards (~1 node every 20s, teleporting between nodes).
Increase GP per gathering attempt from 5 to 10.
Chance Brunt Force/Deep Vigor to chain #2 and only one use per node.
Increase the number of crystals gathered with a ward skill to +3 and the number of shards to +5 with a passive buff of the skill at level 45 (so low level farming bots can't take advantage of the skill).
