After leveling my MIN, BTN, and CRP to 60 and slowly...ever so slowly getting my DoH leveled I have to agree with the OP. The drop rate of basic materials from mobs, which are needed in large quantity, in addition to the timed-node gating for other basic materials is too much. We're talking about basic leveling here, not crafting items to turn in for scrips or that are in any way end-game. Leveling should not be this way. I can understand challenge and needing rare/timed items for end-game gathering and crafting scrips and actually making valuable things, but not during leveling. The sheer quantity of items required to make even basic items is in itself enough of a time sink.

Going along with what the above poster mentioned, I can see their rationale being one or more of a couple things.

1. To try to "encourage", aka force, players to purchase more retainers to gather these items reliably and in somewhat large quantity.

2. As a heavy-handed response to what they may have viewed as unbalanced/too-strong retainer gathering in 2.X

3. As a heavy-handed means to slow crafting/gathering leveling as a delaying tactic to give them more time to come up with more content.


It's a sad case when it's more effective to make money to buy vendor items to spam leves to level than it is to actually, you know, make things to level crafting.

Personally, I think it's all three. Given the way gathering and crafting has been designed, I get the strong impression that they didn't have time to really polish it and make considered decisions. Now they're having to find ways to delay us so that they can make the refinements the game needs. At least that's my hope. It would be awful if all of these problems were intentionally designed this way thinking it would be a good thing/conceptually sound.