Gathering Artisan utility PVE/P Skills

I have considered this also but I massively prefer these skills to be on Combat Pets and not on the player, or tied to the player's Artisan level.

Last thing I want to see is a bunch of complaints from PvP players about how they 'have to level Gathering to get extra Alertness skills'.

Whereas activating a Combat Pet with these skills is a risk Tradeoff, 'leveling your Artisan skills' usually isn't.

I've got lots of other more specific opinions on this, but I prefer to get any response you have first.

Make this stuff into craftable items or, as Azherae suggested, into pet abilities and I'd be all for it. This kind of stuff would be super beneficial to pretty much any group of people in any kind of dungeon or narrow location. And that benefit would make this mechanic a requirement, which would only lead to "we have to have a specific class that has this ability with us" kind of thinking, which in turn would remove the individuality of people of that class.

This kind of thing happened in L2 with the "gatherer" class. Parties would be going out to lucrative farming spots and would require a gatherer to maximize their loot. The gatherer class gave nothing to the party itself outside of its ability to gather (gain additional loot from mobs), so it was a non-party member that just tagged along, didn't get xp from the mobs, didn't get loot or money and was just there to gather. They were called the "10th member" (L2 parties had 9 members) and was usually either a guildmate that did this for free or a random player that split the gathered loot with the party.

In most cases those players would never have their own party to farm with and would just live off of the money they got from selling their half of the loot. And quite often this would just be someone's alt, whose gameplay consisted of pressing 2 buttons. And because of that, in later updates NCsoft gave this class a huge boost by making it a semi-rogue, with several dagger abilities and a fairly big dps.

tl;dr give this mechanic to everyone in some way, instead of only having it on special classes/professions.