The thing I find really frustrating is that shard farming gives no real benefit besides gaining them, which is longwinded and simply a big bottleneck for crafters at some point, since I need to spend another few hours lvling the DoL's to get access to the higher lvl nodes and be able to collect materials to progress.

Atm I must 1: Gather shards, 2: lvl DoL's to have access to the new materials 3: craft.

I would like to suggest to combine point 1 and 2, by making gathering shards more beneficial on the XP gain part. Make shards give xp equal to any material that is 3-4-5 lvl's below you. Right on the border of beneficial, you still need to gather quite a lot of them to actually lvl up. But now it would atleast give an earlier respite of the immense grindfest that I (and probably other crafters) have to go through to independantly craft through lvl's. I don't mind spending time gathering, but atm gathering shards feels more tedious and frustrating then it should be.

I would like other people their take on this.

~Kayne