Is there any way to know what the tempering difficulty of a template will be? I can temper bladed weapons that are challenging to craft, and I'm almost 200 ranks past when I was able to mastercraft somewhat challenging recipes, yet I failed three times in a row to temper a cutlass. (All items from the same workability material).

Hmm, it's worth double checking, but it should have been 99 quality material. I made all three items out of the same ingot but this would hardly be the first time two ingots have gotten mixed up. I'll go appraise the item.

So I went and checked my logs, Squanto wins the prize. I'd never noticed that the first 'put item on the forge' has a chance to generate an alternate outcome (shovel/bellows). So it was just the cutlass actually having that occur multiple times in a row, and one missed step was enough to fail it.