I don't get the big deal with Primal Nethers. If you're in a good guild then nethers would not be a problem.

However the gold you have to put out for the numerous blue cloths and primal mights is extremely significant. My shadoweave will take 38 shadowcloth. At present AH prices on this realm, I'm throwing 2500g into three pieces of gear.
Nethers might be a seriously preferable alternative to all this cloth. Course if you can't get successful heroic runs done then it's different.

I understand your points and all, but is blue cloth really better than primal nethers?

Not if you are in a guild that does lots of Heroics, but most players (counting the entire playerbase) likely don't do many Heroics, so that makes the assessiblity of LWing set lower.

My Shadoweave set cost me about 1000g, but then I made it about 2 months ago; nowadays prices for the materials are much higher.

At least the problem I'm having (as an officer in a Karazhan-clearing guild, with Maulgar down and Gruul close) is that if I'm online, I'm raiding, and if I'm not in the raid, everyone else in the guild is, so I can't run a heroic then anyway. Actually doing the heroics is not the problem, the problem is time to do the heroics in. I get home from work 15 minutes before raid start and log off when raid ends to go to sleep, and I don't play WoW 7 nights a week.

Yeah nethers are an issue for crafting some of the better pieces. I am one of the people on the server who can make girdle of ruination and the demand is really high. I offer 2 payment options: 150g for the nether or run me through a heroic. Nobody has ever run me through a heroic, so I spend a lot of time trying to find a heroic group with my guildies, but oftentimes I cannot justify taking a nether so that I can sell a crafted item over a rogue or warrior who wants to make their arena weapons.

To address the thread more appropriately, however, I am really irked by the fact that I chose to go primal mooncloth tailoring and now I have about 100 less spell damage that I can get than guildies who went spellfire.

Why as a mage would you choose to go primal mooncloth? Wasn't it pretty well known beforehand that primal mooncloth was for healers, spellfire for mages and shadowweave for frost mages, locks and priests?

It would be good for Blizzard to let people respec their spec choices, although who knows how they would deal with the gear. I guess for the BOP put requirement: specialization on it.

For tailoring you can "respec", just you have to start at 1 skill again and pay 20g once you hit 350 to change specs.

All of the BoP items do have the specility spec requirement on it already.

Blue cloth is better for non-raiders. Most raiders dropped another profession and powered through levelling and getting all three pieces, so of course we're going to pay a significant amount, since we won't be getting all the cloth at the 2 for 1 rate. If you took the time to transmute all the cloth yourself, it'd take almost two months, but you'll save a ton of mats, plus the farming will obviously be spread out over a much longer time.

please tell me you made yourself the spellstrike set before swtiching specialization

Figured the primal mooncloth market was going to be huge due to them being required in 20 slot bags. I hadn't actually seen the spellfire or shadowweave sets before I chose my specialization. Big mistake that I can never undo now that I have almost every rare pattern.

I'm actively wearing a full Ebon Netherscale set. It's pretty damn good for a MM Hunter and the setbonus helps me drop more hit for crit/AP (Surefooted does the rest). I just got my Tier 4 Legs which is probably the only piece I would have spent DKP on, though I'm curious to see if it will get an overhaul as well.

It does mean I'm quite envious of the Tier 5 casters get on my server however :/. My biggest moneymakers are both armor patches with riding crops a distant third (most folks have one by now), I'd almost kill for a Spell-/Shadowcloth version of the Cured Rugged Hide so I could generate some profit.

I'm interested to hear that prcies are gooing higher on shadowcloth, this is what I observed on my server.

Shadowcloth was highly desired and was selling for ludicrous amounts like 130g. Spellcloth with a much lower demand was fairly cheap.

As most warlocks, spriests and frost mages hit shadowcloth prices started falling dramatically. As people completeed thier sets spellcloth prices started to rise in the order of 30% as people started making spellstrike in ernest.

As more and more people finishes their shadowcloth sets the price is plummetting and with girdle and the physical dps cloak as a soak the trend seems constant. Spellcloth has stabilised.

Mooncloth has always been fairly low.

How did your server go?

The problem with shadoweave and spellstrike, ruination and other such items (shadowpriests quite commonly use bracers of havok/cloak of the black void as well, which makes it a total of 8 pieces of your gear coming from tailoring until mid-ssc) for me at least is that instead of being an alternative to gearing up through raiding they have become the main avenue of gearing up, which if not followed will result in a severely undergeared character.

Someone wearing spellstrike+shadoweave+ruination+havok+cloak of the black void has 107 more damage and 6 more spell hit raiting compared to someone wearing the best shadowpriest drops up to mag (t4 chest+cho'gall hood+t4 shoulders+leggings of the seventh circle+boots of foretelling, maulgar belt, bands of nefarious deeds, shadow cloak of dalaran). There's also the spellstrike proc I didn't consider.

That's really a hefty advantage, especially considering it is possible even if quite time consuming (or not if he uses gold buying) to think that someone would make all those crafted items, while it's very unlikely someone has enough dkp/luck to have all those drops, so the usual gap is even larger, propably around the +150-200 damage range, which is honestly huge.

Couple that with the fact that a lot of other upgrades for shadowpriests don't come from raiding either (trinket-heroics/offhand-heroics/rings-heroics+quest/spirit shards/wand-5 mans or shadow wrath) and you are wondering why should a shadowpriest do raiding apart from the pleasure of seeing new bosses and content.

After examining the loot tables up to mag, which is the end of this tier, the only things I would like is mag's trinket (which I wouldn't if I had nef's trinket and it's unlikely to go to me because my spells don't get resisted that much, only 1% of them in fact), mag/attumen gloves and the neck that drops from Karazhan trash mobs. A grand total of 3 items I want from an entire tier of bosses assuming I am a tailor. I could add a weapon, if the arena one wasn't better, but let's add doomwalker/prince dagger just for the sake of it.

I am not even looking for drops from raid instances to make those tailored items, they are completely irrelevant to the raiding game, they only need tons of primals to make. It feels like the situation where various people complained that they needed to raid to have top gear has been reversed and now in order to get good raiding gear, you have to do anything but raid.

Which is annoying, because it feels like you have a double job and honestly I don't have time to follow a busy weekly raiding schedule and spend 2 hours per day farming primals.

I did and I got my money's worth out of the patterns. I made about 3000 gold off of them before dropping.

I've seen a handful of decent guilds start making it a REQUIREMENT that dps casters have tailored their own end-game sets in order to be considered for an app. I think it's just wrong that tailored items are leaps and bounds above the rest of the items available right now that guilds are resorting to this.

Blizzard did a great job of providing raid-equivalent gear with tailoring, it is fairly trivial to get an entire set in 2-3 weeks especially with alts/friends. Its too bad they didn't provide a clear upgrade path (even if its insanely difficult, like 10 nether vortexes per item) since now I have very little desire to raid beyond a few times to see the encounters.

Once T5 gets changed with the major patch, I think a lot more people will be wanting to switch from the tailoring sets to T5. We saw what the warrior chest would be changing, and if similar things happen to the other classes than T5 should win out, not to mention T6.

Not a chance for priests, so long as Shadow and Holy DPS have to be on the same set.

Why do people talk about tier 5? Logically, and by Blizzards own comparitive stuff, the BoP specialist tailored sets should be equivalent to tier *4* at best, not tier 5. It's pretty ridiculous that for most players the cloth drop off Magtheridon is wasted.

That may be truth for blacksmithing, but as far as I am aware there are no upgrades from tailoring on the way, so that's all that tailoring gets for bc. So it does make some sense that it's better than t4, even if the materials for it make no sense at all, as for some of it you don't even need a nether.

There is some evidence of nether vortices being required in some tailoring patterns. No word on what the stats of these items will be like however.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30183

I'm a bit confused here - are those patterns linked from WoWhead items that have been datamined but that have not yet been discovered? Is that why the pattern and materials are known but the end result isn't? Or if not, where did the information about those items come from?

With reguards to switching specializations, is there any hint that Blizzard will be adding a quest to do this soon? Blue Tracker hasn't turned anything up and there are multiple broken 500 post threads on the WoW Professions forum asking for it. Had I known I would be spending so much time in shadowform during 25-man raid content, I wouldn't have chosen Mooncloth specialization.

Datamined during beta. Perhaps the 2.1 patch will shed more light on them.