(bug?) Sage Forging without Master Sect standing do not work

[Soth]

Slowly climbing my way up the ranks of the Fire Sect to become better in Forging. Right now I am Master Forger and Elder of the Sect but did not replace Master (too strong for me).
Killed random bandit. Looted a book "Sage Forging Insight". Was very happy.
Trained Forging to the limit, used a book... Gained only an error without even comprehensible tooltip and that's all. I have a book but I can't use it.
This is just... wrong.

[Chaos D. Calamity]

Hey buddy, I was in the same boat, sort of.... I had used the Guru level forging insight which is the last one offered by the sect Elder. I never found a sage one, If you ask the Fire Elder he will tell you to that the secret is held by the "Ou" Family and that only the beggar sect knows where they are, he basically told me to go ask some beggars, so I went around the world looking for beggars while also chatting every NPC who has forging as an option, progress level was stuck at 99 but i just mindlessly kept going and to my surprise my forging upgraded itself to sage level without the sage insight. so hopefully it works for you too. this game is pretty buggy. I got to sage on Weaving and Forging but got no good blue prints.

[CtrlAltDragon]

Originally posted by Chaos D. Calamity:

....to my surprise my forging upgraded itself to sage level without the sage insight....

The old method of chatting with someone about forging can still give you that final exp to upgrade from Guru to Sage. If you regularly chat with NPCs to increase relationships, that's probably what happened.