ahh I have no nobles left. A series of unfortunate events. My mayor is a legendary shield user, in the army, who refuses to pick up a weapon no matter what I assign.
I have a few dwarfs like that. They go out into battle, boldly wielding a bronze shield, just to bash critters with the shields. Even directly assigning a specific weapon, they just won't pick it up. I've verified the weapon is available (either in a stockpile, laying around, and unforbidden) and it just isn't happening. The arsenal dwarf is doing his job; I can see that dwarfs are automatically getting assigned higher quality weapons/armor as they become available, for the most part.
Anyway, sadly, the game crashed. Too many dwarfs in a single tile wide passage; maybe it had to do with constant battle reports. The fps went down to about 12 and then the elven caravan arrived and this I think proved to be too much.
So I reloaded, got another forgotten beast almost immediately, and it was one-shotted through the skull with a simple iron spear. I am working on getting the quality of weapons up, but it seems that I have a few problems:
If I set the proficiency level of *any* shop to above dabbling, no one will go to it. At the beginning, I had a clothier make an artifact and go legendary, and her shop is the only one that seems to honor the skill settings.
With the ability to learn skills from other dwarfs, I have very many dwarfs with dabbling armor smith/weapon smith etc skills.
I have to constantly monitor shop use and disable skills of dwarfs that I do not want to use the shop. I am considering going through all 100 dwarfs or so and find who has what and disable as appropriate.
None of my dwarfs are any higher than talented, and usually only in one smithing area, so the solution may be to make multiple shops and assign shops specifically for one dwarf.