In short, I have a large stash of money (about 3000g after my epic mount) after two years of Alchemy+Herbalism. My pre-Naxx stash is what supported me through Naxx when I didn't have the time for work, raiding, and farming, and that was going to be the plan for when my guild reached higher TBC content as well. But if the consumable burden is about to be lifted to large extent, then it's time to actually spend it something fun. For a Mage these days, that means Tailoring.

I'm sure there other people like me, who have run after way too many yellow dots on the minimap of the course of their WoW life, and suddenly realize that that effort can be put towards something other than supporting their daily raiding activities.


First question: How much does it cost (in raw gold equivalent) to go from 0 Tailoring to 375 and a 3-piece epic set?

From personal experience, 0-300 cost me about 450 gold. 300-375 I can't give you perfect figures on, but I can say that it costs about 55g to make an Imbued Netherweave Robe, and you need to make 14 of them to get from 360 -> 375 (assuming you make your set pieces for progression).

So that's 770g right there. For the spellfire set, you need:

26 Spellfire Cloth
38 Primal Fire
10 Netherweb Spider Silk

Cloth runs around 70g, the fires average 25g and the silk averages 5g.

You're looking at over 5000g for your set if you buy everything. If you transmute all your cloth yourself you can also trade your extra mooncloth and shadoweave and save money, etc etc.

I'm currently working on my last 4 points and my last set piece -- it's painful but so worth it.

All said and done it took me about two weeks and ~6000 gold to hit 375 tailoring, 3 piece frozen shadoweave, 2 piece spellstrike, and girdle of ruination, all fully gemmed and enchanted. I started with 800g, so as you can imagine it was a pretty busy two weeks. Most of my time was dedicated to either farming primals for use or sale, or shards out of lvl 60 instances.

I used Arcanoweave Robe (from Calculator) to go from 370 to 374 and made my tunic (soon to be a robe) as point 375. I am glad I didn't have to cross my fingers making tunics.


I would estimate 1-300 being 400g, and 300-375 to be 1500g, and your 3 epics being around 1000g.

Running some alts/lowbies through zones for cloth will make the first bit easy. I found the easiest way to get those last points was through the Arcanoweave set, particularly the Robe for the last 5. I heard so much cursing over vent from people trying to do it via the boots, which is only yellow at 370. As for the primal grind, I did mine before the plateau nerf and don't envy you. If you want the set soon, I hope you're not too attached to that nest egg.

With raid loot being re-evaluated you may want to wait until you can preview some of the changes to see if it's really worth the gold to switch professions.

If you have the patience to do some farming, it's not too bad. Farm netherweave at any high level camp of humanoids. Get all the greens you find disenchanted. From there you should have a nice stock of netherweave bolts and arcane dust to make imbued netherweave bolts. I find the spider silk very easy to farm up at level 70. Of course, you can't AH the robes hardly at all, so get those disenchanted into Large Prismatic Shards. Save for enchants on new gear!

I believe I took tailoring from 0-300 the week before TBC. I didn't try to do it all at once, just focused on a few cloth types each night. I found breaking it up like that made it seem a lot less tedious.

Start making your bolts of Imbued Netherweave as soon as you can learn the recipe. You're going to need a lot of them anyways, might as well get every single skillup you can off them. And in the future you need a big stockpile for your transmutes. (You''ll use 3 bolts every 4 days.) I still have about 50 imbued bolts in my bank and it's nice knowing I don't have to go around farming for those as well at least.

Finally, get all the green stuff you made DE'ed. If you're making some of the green netherweave stuff from 310-325 range, that might end up DE'ing into Arcane Dust which you need to make Imbued Bolts anyways.

Look up the Arcanoweave patterns, and see if you can run those instances a few times and hope they drop -- that can be a significant time/money saver.

Make sure you check out the powerleveling guide on the WoW EU Profession forum, it really helped me a lot. Can't really help you with the gold estimate, but if you can do some farm runs in Mechanar it will help because either Arcanoweave Boots or Arcanoweave Robe pattern (or both if you're lucky) will help ease the 360-375 part which is the hardest/most annoying.

I made Imbued Netherweave for the last couple points and got lucky in that I didn't have to make too many extras to get those final skillpoints. In my experience, 370 to 374 aren't too difficult to get without making a lot of extras, and you can then make a Frozen Shadoweave (or equivalent) piece to get that last point (if you don't have the Arcanoweave patterns, which I didn't).

On the upside, disenchanting the Imbued Netherweave tunics/robes often yielded large prismatic shards at best, and arcane dust at worst, and though this is not a money making proposition, the disenchant materials come in useful for continuing tailoring and/or enchanting your gear later on.

Wait... what? Was there some spectacular news I missed in this flurry of new information?

Warlock here who just dropped engineering (by way of mining) for tailoring. I spend about 3000g or so power leveling my tailoring from 0->375 and making the 3 piece Frozen Shadowweave set. Now that they're making it a robe, it will definitely be worth it as I will have excellent damage and won't look like a midget superhero (turn on cloak and hat when you have spellstrike; it's comical).

Some notes:
- I had ~25 stacks of Netherweave Cloth stockpiled. This was laughably not even close to the final amount needed.
- Guild mates provided another 20-30 stacks. Again, needed still more from the AH.
- Burnt through a lot of Arcane dust since I went the Imbued Netherweave set from 370-375 as I didn't feel like grinding Arcatraz for a bloody pattern. YMMV, but I got it in about 10 crafts.
- Have an enchanter on hand to DE the Netherweave stuff. You can recover some of your Arcane Dust costs this way.
- If your friends still need 18 slotters, you can squeeze 5-10 points out of them if they want to send you mats.
- Stockpile Mageweave Cloth early. I had a very hard time finding enough on the AH in one sitting most days. I'd buy it up over time. (Of course, right after I finished with mageweave levels, it was plentiful and cheap on the AH *sigh*.)

Prices I bought things for (won't translate well to other sever economies, but might give you an idea of the cloth requirements since I didn't keep careful track of that):
- Netherweave Cloth: 4-6g/stack
- Arcane Dust: 25-30g/stack
- Shadowcloth: 59-65g each (24? total)
- Primal Water: 19-22g each (38? total)
- Netherweb Spider Silk: 5-10g each
- Runecloth: ~2.5g/stack

I probably spent another 300g or so on Living Rubies to have our guild JC to cut into Runed Living Rubies for the set.