Insider Trader: Tailoring Q&A
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.
This week's Insider Trader will be devoted to addressing some of the reader mail that I've been receiving recently. Surprisingly, many of the questions and requests have come from Tailors who are confused about some of the changes made in Wrath.
Here are some of the questions that have been shot my way:
Why can't Tailors make bags bigger than 20 slots? We were making those in BC!
Why can't Tailors make Tailor-only bags?
Where do I go to make the specialty cloths?
Northern Cloth Scavenging gets us scraps right? Why can't we turn those into cloth the way Leatherworkers can turn their scraps into leather?
I'm not satisfied with what I can make as a top level Tailor. Should I keep it?
Hefty Bags
When I first stepped foot in Northrend, I ran with arms open to the nearest Tailoring trainer. I have to admit that I was less than enthusiastic when I realized that I would be working towards a "new" bag, the Frostweave Bag, that sported the same number of slots as the now outdated Primal Mooncloth Bag.
The materials were not cheaper, either. Twelve Infinite Dust and (currently, although it used to be more) six full stacks of Frostweave Cloth? Haris Pilton was actually looking like my best option. So, I headed onto the 'net in search of bags. Surely, there had to be a dropped pattern or a faction willing to allow me to better my situation.
Enter the Glacial Bag, and prepare to kiss up to the Sons of Hodir if you'd like to construct them. This is another 22-slot bag, and although it means that you can skip that trip to Shattrath, it isn't cheap to make. You would need four cooldowns, or roughly 12-16 days to complete on your own.
You might do best to either purchase some of the cloth from the Auction House, or seek out some fellow Tailors and purchase their cooldowns.
Bags for the cool kids only
Many professions have profession-specific bags. Although they are extremely large, there is a catch. You can only store items related to that profession inside. In effect, you lose a bag or bank slot, but if you really store that much profession-related junk, then you actually gain space in the end.
I would have to say that the main reason that Tailors do not have such bags is that we have less junk than other professions. Aside from cloth, we use mostly Enchanting materials, threads, dyes, spider silk and Eternals. Since storing threads and dyes is not the best use of your bag space, the issue seems to boil down to one thing.
The other professions bags are not actually profession-specific. If I wanted to equip a Mysterious Bag, I could do so. Why I would want to store 32 stacks of Enchanting reagents is beyond me, but it could be done. I've known Engineers to set aside three bank slots, one for an Engineering bag, another for a Mining bag, and the last for a Gem bag.
Either Tailors would end up with a bag that holds only cloth, spider silk, dye, Infinite Dust, and thread, or we'd all end up with a 32-slot bag to hold all of our Eternals, cloth, and reagents for our Enchants.
In essence, it would either be too useful for everybody, and used as a bit of a cheat, or simply not necessary.
That being said, because I am too cheap to acquire Infinite Dust on a regular basis, I do indeed have a backlog of cloth. I do not personally see the reasoning behind storing 15 stacks of Frostweave Bolts on one character, so I tend to keep them in the Guild Bank, on an alt, or in my Mailbox. I would not be jumping on the bandwagon if such a Tailoring bag were available, although you never know what Blizz is up to!
Navigating the Shrines
When your cooldowns are up, it's time to snag some Bolts of Imbued Frostweave, Eternal Shadows, Fires and Lifes, and head on over to Dragonblight.
If you are manually flying down from Dalaran, then the Obsidian Dragonshrine will be your first stop. It is located to the North of Agmar's Hammer. You will see some very hot looking ground, with fire and lava, and a giant cave. You need merely to rest in the cave's doorway in order to get down to business.
Next, you will want to fly to the South of Wyrmrest Temple, where you will find the Azure Dragonshrine a bit to the West and the Emerald Dragonshrine a bit to the East. You may land anywhere within those borders and begin making cloth. I often stop on rock out-croppings or in trees to avoid wandering mobs.
You Scavenger, you
There seems to be some overall confusion about what it is that Northern Cloth Scavenging does for you, the Tailor.
The ability does not grant you Fur Clothing Scraps or Thick Fur Clothing Scraps. These are just random, gray-quality items that we all get from time to time.
Instead, the ability grants you the opportunity to loot more cloth from a body than a non-Tailor would. In fact, after your groupmate has looted his or her humanoid, you may find that the corpse will begin to sparkle for you, and you will find hidden cloth that wasn't available to your non-Tailoring buddy.
Yearning for more
Professions now are not like they were in The Burning Crusade, and Tailoring is especially different. A cloth-wearing class used to be almost forced into the profession in order to progress in the game. The epics that could be produced with the various specialties would last through a fair amount of end-game content, and really help you get ahead.
Now, Blizzard is trying to shy away from this, so that no one should ever feel like they have to take up any specific profession. Of course, this means that the epics that can be crafted aren't even necessarily worth crafting. If you have a slot in your guild's raid roster, and you've done a few heroics, you can get by without them, and it is much cheaper and less time-consuming to do so.
There is still a lot to love about Tailoring, though! You can make a nice profit constructing frost resistance gear, and in fact make your own set for Naxx at a fraction of the cost.
Because you collect extra cloth, you can make a killing on the Auction House selling it to other players, along with the profits from your specialty cloth cooldowns. If you'd like, you can even craft yourself a ton of blue PvP gear!
My advice to someone who is genuinely not satisfied with this is to switch professions. Choose something you'll enjoy, because I don't think Blizzard is going to retrace its steps and decide to put in Tailoring epics that you'll require. They want you to explore new things and have fun!
Each week, Insider Trader takes you behind the scenes of the bustling sub-culture of professional craftsmen, examining the profitable, the tragically lacking, and the methods behind the madness. Check out the Best of WoW Insider, with highlights from the column's entire run to date.
