Quote from Maia;368340:
Yeah. Refine is a little hard, but only because it's usually everyones first life skill. I had to do it with over 250 dex -.- Thankfully I had help. Weaving and enchant are/were harder for sure, tailor (now) and blacksmithing are just :T_T: compared to refine lol
Either way, I think refine gets a little nerfed in g14, and doesn't require (as many) fails, if any. So it's not as though nexon hasn't noticed this oddity. Although the failure-potions will be a lot less useful, except perhaps for certain mastery titles.
Weaving's not so much hard as it is infinitely more time-consuming than Refine. Life Skills seem to have an interesting dynamic regarding a relationship between AP, effort, and reward. The more effort required, the less AP for fully ranking it. The more reward gained by fully ranking it, the more AP. The less effort, the less reward. The only exception to this is quite possibly Production Mastery, but that's the core Life Skill for all of them, so its reward is considerably high while its AP and effort are considerably low. Fishing, conversely, has a high AP cost (for a life skill), and offers decent reward for little effort (if you can afk well, you can fish well).
I truthfully find Weaving easier than Refining. The materials are more tedious to come by, sure, but you're not discouraged from reducing your success chance as much as possible for the sake of quick training, unlike Refining. This means dex increases, production mastery, and production parties all have a part to play in improving your success. Also, because you don't have to intentionally go off to a remote area just to gather materials for Weaving like say, you would for refining (Metallurgy/Mining/etc.), as a lot of weaving mats just fall into your lap if you simply pick them up, you have all the time in the world to rank it up.
Besides, Fragmentation makes production skills so much easier, whether you need to succeed at them, or fail.