Artisan’s mettle has a lot of value, and as time goes by, many of you will probably have stockpiles building up, let’s use them for profit!
Enter Insight
Illustrious Insight is an optional reagent that you can use to increase your skill by 30 when crafting a recipe. This can be VERY useful in certain situations, as for many items it is the only way to guarantee max quality.
Imagine getting guaranteed quality 3 for an expensive enchant or optional reagent, or charging more for guaranteed quality 3 primalist gems.
One Illustrious Insight costs 50 mettle to craft, and it can be broken down into 5 Lesser Illustrious Insights. For most region wide tradeable you only need the lesser, so you can get guaranteed quality 3 for 10 extra mettle potentially.
Spec for insight
Obviously to even learn the Insight recipe or to be able to apply it to the appropriate recipe, you need to have the correct node unlocked. This usually the absolute final node you unlock for a given recipe type, so you need to specialize to take advantage of this. For weapon enchants for instance you need 10 points in the final elemental specific node (as well as all of the disenchanting tree maxed pretty much).
Profit change
As we can see here, if you reach guarateed quality 3 on the Shadowflame Tempered Armor patch, the average profit per craft is all the way up to 10 000 gold. Compare that to the abysmal 199 gold loss per craft I get on my leatherworker when relying on inspiration and the raw potential here is very obvious.
Save mettle
You also want to save mettle on the characters you have that have recipes that are good insight targets. That means recipes where you can get within 30 skill of the difficulty, and where there is a significant gap between q2 and q3 in price. The obvious thing is to pay people for the mettle when you craft profession tools. Whenever possible I will craft from my other characters, and use the mettle on characters that can’t effectively use it.
And farm it
Obviously you also want to get the mettle you can every week. The most important is the weekly mettle quest from Thomas Bright, he will just give you a chunk. Outside of that you want to get any profession knowledge you can, prioritizing the weekly quests first, and then farming for the drops if you have time. (The weeklies also give rep, so they are more valuable).