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?

I'm actually in the middle of this right now. There are some excellent guides right on the official profession forums, but the short answer is: getting to 350 is nothing. Getting to 375 is fairly costly.

I think the final estimate was on the order of 2200 netherweave for the final phase.

Make sure that, as soon as you hit 300, you make netherweave bolts until they stop giving you points. Then, make imbued netherweave bolts until they stop giving you points. Then netherweave robes, then imbued netherweave robes to 370. (Do your transmutes while they're yellow; since you'd do them anyway, you might as well get skill points.)

The last 5 points are the tricky bit. The best option, I hear, is Arcanoweave Boots, the pattern for which is a BOP, low percentage drop from Pantheleon. Otherwise you're pretty much stuck doing more Imbued Tunics with your fingers crossed.

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.

If your guild lets you make soulcloth pieces, those can level you up and are fairly easy to craft.

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.

Yeah, I'm going to see the full item changes on 2.1 PTR before I do anything, but the lack of Tailoring notes in the recent profession update made me start planning ahead.

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.

I somehow managed 5 skill points with 5 robes from 370-375. While that was quite the relief, realizing I still needed to come up with a truckload of primals and spell/shadow cloth was not.

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.

arcanoweave boots from 360 to 373 is the way to go. I only made 2 that did not net skill ups.

Planning on doing this myself when I get closer to 70. I've been stockpiling lower level cloth, though I still have a very very long way to go. I'm sort of confused about exactly when I should switch from herbalism, though - earlier, because of the 4 day cloth cooldowns so I can get started on making those ASAP, or later, so I can continue making money from herbalism for as long as possible? I'm not really willing to just buy my cloth - too expensive. I guess maybe it just depends on how long I'm willing to wait for my set, but I was hoping to minimize "time spent as a tailor without possessing the BoP epics".

Not to nitpick, but you would have had to be 375 Tailoring already before you could make your Tunic (soon to be a Robe).

BTW, <3 for Robes.

There's no confirmation on the US forums and there better not be. Anyone wanting a robe has plenty to choose from. Tailors have always had a tunic at 375 and it should stay that way (or at least be an option). In fact there are 22 epic lvl70 cloth chest pieces. If this change went thru, there would be 21 robes and 1 tunic. You can see how insane that is. I'll never wear robes because I hate their graphics.

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/en/275607940.htm

Glad I switched out of herbalism a LONG time ago. On KJ like 1.5 months ago or w/e, I went from 1-375 tailoring and made all 3 pieces of spellfire for 3k gold in a day. But then again, between all the gems and enchants I had to get I spent another hefty chunk of gold (6 runed living rubies, 20 dmg to gloves, 6 to stats). Honestly the money and time you're going to spend all depend on your AH (back when I made my set, I got all my additional spellcloth for 45-55g, now the prices are like 75-80g), the patterns you supplement yourself with, and how generous the WoW gods are when you have to make an item that isn't orange in your tailoring window.

I do run Mechanar a lot. Will I be able to pick up one of those patterns before switching?

Also, let's say I have access to some Soul Essence. How would that change things?

I'm in the same position Hamlet, but as Beef said i'm waiting until the PTR goes up before I make up my mind.

My mage was in the same position. I also now have 3pc Spellfire and 2pc Spellstrike.

But if I were to do it again, I'd drop alchemy--Transmute Master hasn't been good to me. You'll want the herb money to bring in some income while you burn it tailoring


edit: I didn't keep logs, but I believe I burnt ~3.5k gold on the stuff. I still fly a 60%, but so do the Power Trip guys, so I don't feel so bad.