Tailoring
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Insider Trader: When good patterns go green
Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Nothing interrupts a peaceful night of crafting like a lunatic guildmate ranting about learning a coveted new pattern, only to find that it's already green in skill level – nothing, that is, except that sickening feeling in your stomach as you consider what you'll do when your favorite patterns go green. Skilling up a profession can be a rollercoaster ride, if you don't hit the right patterns at the right time. (Of course, all the professions have those infamous "dead zones," when skilling up seems to be based on either unfathomable luck or unfathomable finances – or maybe both. But we'll cover dead zones in another installment.)Skilling up in a profession can happen when you create an item that's listed in green, yellow or orange in your tradeskill window. Items listed in grey will not give you any skill points for creating them; red listings anywhere means you don't have the required skill level. Just as it does with creatures you fight, pattern color indicates difficulty and skill-up potential. Green items raise your skill occasionally, yellows about half the time and oranges every single time. (The exception to orange skill-ups occurs in skinning, in which successfully skinning an orange creature does not guarantee a skill-up.) As a burgeoning crafter, your goal is to find patterns that are relatively easy to get the materials to make while providing a solid shot at skilling up. While orange patterns offer a guaranteed chance of gaining a skill point, the best bang for the buck is often a yellow pattern.And that's where things start getting murky ...
Insider Trader: Sock it to me -- a little respec
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. One of the questions you'll generally always come across on the first page or two of the Blizzard profession forums is The Respec Question: How do I respec from X specialty to Y specialty? With drastically varying procedures from profession to profession and scattershot updates and changes from patch to patch, it's hard to know when you've finally come across an accurate, definite answer – yet if you get it wrong, you could be wasting hundreds of gold and hours of skillups. Bindar of Aggramar has compiled a guide covering specialty respecs for all professions. We'll take a look at the basics right here for you. The first thing you need to know about changing your profession specialty is how to drop your current spec, a spot where a surprising number of players run into a brick wall. Don't get your netherweave in a twist – it's just a technical difficulty, easily remedied. If you speak with the appropriate NPC to unlearn your specialty and select that option only to find that nothing happens, it's almost certainly an add-on conflict. Open the World of Warcraft folder on your computer and find your interface folder. Rename the whole folder with a temporary name, which disables all your add-ons. Then hop back into game and try the dialogue again; you should be back in business. (Don't forget to go back and rename your interface folder to its original name when you're done.)
Insider Trader: For the orc with everything
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.LFGear? Insider Trader has tallied up some tidy little tailored items this week for both cloth-wearers and non-clothies alike. Why would you use tailored gear if you're not a cloth wearer? As they say, "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man ..." The stylish man of means has a shirt and suit for every occasion, and tailoring's where it's at. We've also discovered some nifty little utility pieces for the 70 Who Has It All™. (Oh, and if you're a tailor, these items are definite contenders for Auction House action.) Also this week, we'll look into mana loom locations. Sorry, we don't have a long list of little-known locations to pass along -- but at least we can confirm the few known locations and perhaps dispel a few questions about where mana looms are not.For the 70 who has it all While not noteworthy for the most space-pressed or epic-focused of players, these tailored items can be handy conveniences for the PvPer or the level 70 who has it all. Azure Silk Belt Boosts swim speed by 15% -- useful when farming, PvPing near water, or swimming to Onyxia. Spider Belt Removes existing Immobilizing effects and makes you immune to Immobilizing effects for 5 seconds; can be helpful in PvP. Netherweave Net Captures a target up to 25 yards away in a net for 3 seconds. Unreliable and short-duration though it is, can be handy in PvP.
Taking the production out of itemcrafting
Here's an interesting suggestion from Mystic Worlds: take the production process out of crafting.When I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, the crafting setup was my least favorite part of the game-- it seemed like crafting materials were expensive, the crafting process took way too much time (I having long conversations with others standing around the crafting area), and the stuff you made (at the early levels anyway) just wasn't that great. So WoW's system may not be perfect, but it seemed like a breath of fresh air after that-- materials come from actually playing the game, and putting things together is something you can generally do as an afterthought rather than as, well, a profession. The gathering is the important part.So Mystic Worlds says, why not make the gathering the whole thing? You still go out and get mats from the world, crafters turn those raw mats into usable mats, and then you'd actually take the bolts and gems and tanned leather that crafters made to NPC crafters, who would turn them into items. That way, if you want a Robe of the Void but you aren't a tailor, you just take the mats to an NPC tailor who can hammer one out for you.
Forum Post of the Day: Blizzard customer service smackdown
Poor Amulet. He transfered servers and complains on the customer service forums that when he transfered, his 375 tailoring skill vanished. Ouch. After crafting that spellfire set, I can see just how painful that could be. He's complained to GMs, who have refused to fix the problem. Double ouch. You can't help but feel for the guy -- right up until Blizzard rep Kaone jumps in:I believe you may now be misrepresenting this issue as our fault. Looking at your petition history I notice that you made a ticket to a Game Master shortly after your transfer to the realm of Misha: I just unlearned the wrong skill, i meant to unlearn mining not tailoring, please plase let me have it back i worked so hard on my spellfire set Yikes. Apparently you shouldn't make up stories about your interactions with Blizzard on Blizzard's own forums -- they'll call you on it.[Via Wow_ladies]
Insider Trader: What the ! -- In-game trade product searches
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader, your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.How can you pimp that hawt new epic if you don't know what gems and enchants exist to put in it? And once you find out what's available, how can you find a craftsperson who can do it? What used to be an excruciating hunt-and-peck process is easing up, thanks to several mods growing in popularity among crafters. These mods allow customers to whisper a tradesperson and run direct searches for specific types of products -- a direct peek into what that crafter can do for you and your gear.First popularized by jewelcrafters and enchanters, these handy mods are now available for other trades as well. If you like to ponder the possibilities without feeling like you're tying up a crafter's time and attention, you'll love the power of running your own searches. It's all handled via /whisper, so there's no public spam and you won't bother a soul. Rifle through what's available by stats, gem color, enchanting reagents required, gem rarity and more, all via the tradesperson's mod -- you install nothing to be able to use it. It really is that simple!
Breakfast Topic: Meanwhile, back at the farm...
Whenever I hear the phrase in that title, I think of one of my very favorite children's books.ANYWAY, this Breakfast Topic is entirely selfish. Lately, I've continued to try and build up enough gold to get my epic mount, as well as bring my alchemy skill up, so I've been doing lots and lots of farming lately.And I've come up with a few tips for doing it-- watch a movie while I'm at it, make circles around zones that have exactly what I want (Felwood, Un'goro, and Hellfire Peninsula have been great for Herbalism, but I've never done Mining or farmed for Tailoring items or Motes), and make sure to pick up bags meant for crafting items, so I have enough room to haul what I need.So what tips have you picked up for farming? Some people are crazy about it-- I know my guildleader has done it for hours, getting both mining mats and herbs for our guild-- and surely they know lots of inside stuff that us casual players take a long time to pick up. What would you recommend to someone who heads out into Azeroth and Outland looking for nature's gifts?
The red-headed step-children of crafting
Today I made my first two pieces of Shadowcloth. It's quite an accomplishment for my level 62 warlock, with the somewhat dangerous trek out to the Altar of Shadows. As I was feeling the roaring winds of the air elementals snap at my behind as I rode, I began to wonder if I shouldn't have chosen one of the other two paths instead. It's a lot of work to jog on out to the Altar, and you take your life into your hands every time you do. Somehow the three disciplines seem somewhat uneven. Had I chosen Mooncloth tailoring, my travel time would include a small jaunt out to the Cenarian Refuge and a dip in the Moonwell.
Phat Loot Phriday: Battlecast Hood
For a crafted item, this caster hood is pretty darn sweet. It won't be cheap, but you get what you pay (farm?) for.Name: Battlecast HoodType: Epic Cloth HeadpieceArmor: 145Abilities: +43 Stamina, + 28 Intellect (those are what it will be after 2.1 gets put in, anyway), which points towards a warlock, or a mage or shadow priest who wants to stay alive in PvP +43 damage and healing (see next point) Two sockets, one red, one blue, and a socket bonus of +3 spell crit rating. Glowing Nightseye or a Potent Noble Topaz work great (as does almost any good caster jewels), at least until you can find an epic Jewelcrafter to make the even better stuff. Is part of a set with the Battlecast Pants, which grants +5% resist to spell interruption (like Kick) and spell pushback (which is what happens when you take damage while casting a spell). Wear it with another epic tailoring set for much ownage. How to Get It: It's craftable at 375 Tailoring, and since it's BoE, you either need to be a tailor or just know one. The pattern drops off of Warlord Kalithresh, the last boss in the Steam Vaults (in Heroic mode, as well) at at very small .4% drop. The pattern itself is BoP, but there's enough of them floating around that if you need one, some time in any /trade channel will probably get you to a tailor who can make one.And then there's the matter of mats. It's not cheap at all: 12 Imbued Netherweave, 8 Primal Might (eeyow!), and one Primal Nether (actually, that's not too bad). The Might will be the hardest to come by-- you've got to farm 8 of each Primal element and then find an alchemist to transmute them for you (each transmute has a 24 hour cooldown, so you've got 8 days to farm everything at least). The others aren't real hard-- Netherweave requires a Mana Loom, some cloth, and a lot of Arcane Dust, but it's comparably easy. Primal Nether drops from the end bosses of dungeons (a chance in Normal, and guaranteed in Heroic), and the problem with that is that it's BoP, so the tailor has to have one, not you. Get the mats, get the crafter, get them all in one place and boom, you're ready to go Battlecasting. Then again, you could just buy it-- since it's BoE, you'll find it on the AH sometimes, usually for upwards of 1000g (more like 1500-1700).Getting Rid of It: You probably don't want to-- even if you have something better for raiding, this is probably still nice PvP gear. But if you're just that leet and you want to toss it, a vendor will give you 3g 10s 6c for it. Which makes me ask: Why can't crafters dissemble their products to get some of the mats back? Seems like such a waste, considering they already spent all that time and money leveling the profession...
Insider Trader: When you want what they've got
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Want to make a completist crafter crit in his pants? Give him a good whiff of something he may not even have know existed: Alliance- and Horde-only patterns. "What?!? They've got stuff I don't have?" That's right -- each faction enjoys a variety of profession patterns available only to that side via quests or faction-specific vendors.While most of these patterns are low- to mid-level frills, plenty of entrepreneurial crafters find them meaty (or profitable) enough to be worth jumping through hoops for. Beyond the satisfaction of having literally all of the available patterns in a particular trade, craftspeople may actually carve out a niche crafting items for players on their faction who don't normally have access to them.The neutral Auction Houses are a crafter's bread and butter when it comes to finding these patterns, although having a friend on the other side is even better. Almost all of these patterns (and the items they create) are tradable, although you'll find a pair of Alliance cooking patterns listed that remain stubbornly marked Bind on Pickup. But most are available for cross-faction movement via the neutral auction houses. There aren't many new Burning Crusade-era patterns to track down and agonize over, though -- just one lone Draenei pattern (listed after the jump). It seems that the bitter tears of Horde herbalists pining for Herbalist's Gloves washed the faction-specific pattern trend right down the drain.Read more for a list of faction-specific crafting patterns.
Insider Trader: New mooncloth on Monday
Each week Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.As stats on tailored cloth sets ricochet between the developers, the PTR and tailors buzzing like angry bees at the prospect of changes, healing clothies continue to click through their cooldowns to create two of the best healing sets in the game: the Primal Mooncloth set and the Whitemend Wisdom set. Primal mooncloth tailoring is where it's at for healers -- and it offers some tasty treats for PvP casters as well as anyone who wants more bag space.Just how good are the healing sets? Most priests swear by their phenomenal +healing, mp5 and set bonuses, considering them clearly superior to Tier 4 and rivaling Tier 5. Patch 2.1 will buff the Primal Mooncloth set's overall stats and ease the component requirements. As a package, the Primal Mooncloth/Whitemend combo is weak on stamina (and some say the two sets don't complement one another as well as they could), but most healers compensate with other pieces, swap in stamina gear for specific fights or rely on enchants and gems to reach their preferred stats balance. There's been some QQing over the fact that primal mooncloth gear is BoP and the complementary Whitemend Wisdom set requires the wearer to have a 350 tailoring skill to get the set bonus. Some players say these restrictions make tailoring "required" for cloth healers. Still, most priests feel the primal mooncloth's set bonus -- 5% mana regeneration during casting -- takes the sting out of upgrading away from their beloved Transcendence three-piece set bonus. But before we /moon you with the details of mooncloth tailoring, what if you're not the healing type? PvP casters might be tempted by the Unyielding Girdle or the Resolute Cape (buffed to 349 armor in 2.1). And just about everyone craves more bag space. The 20-slot Primal Mooncloth Bag delivers, for a mere 72 Netherweave Cloth, 8 Arcane Dust, 40 Motes of Life (4 Primal Life), 40 Motes of Water (4 Primal Water) and 4 Netherweb Spider Silk from a mooncloth-specced tailor. (Well, what else were you gonna do with all that extra gold and farming time?)
A case for patience on the PTRs
You'll forgive me for trying to inject a little reason into a nerf debate (an impossible task, probably), but that's what I'm about to try and do anyway.Yesterday, mages, warlocks, and shadow priests were up in arms about the changes on the test realm to the tailoring epic outfits. Blizzard was experimenting with adding ability stats to the armor while nerfing spell damage, and tailors went ballistic over the changes. And so, within a matter of hours, Eyonix announced on the forums that the changes had already been reverted and would not go to the live servers.Now, yesterday I said the nerfs weren't that big a deal, and since then, I've seen some good points that say they were-- lots of people spent lots of time and gold getting just these recipes together (some even leveled tailoring for just these pieces), and it definitely presents a problem to make serious changes to gear that people have already sacrificed a lot for.On the other hand, there were good reasons behind the changes as well. As even a few tailors have said, these crafted pieces matched up to the Tier 4 and 5 pieces, and I see problems with basically requiring clothies to be tailors to be competitive in the endgame. Many warlocks cried the most about the changes, but because +spell damage doesn't translate directly to most of their DOT spells, in many cases, they would actually be the least affected (Update: In hindsight, I shouldn't have judged how affected anyone was by this change. But that's not the point of this article-- read on.)But my point now isn't to argue whether these sets should have been changed or not. What I want to point out now is that being outraged on the forums and yelling at Blizzard about something that's happening on the test realms will actually impede the developers' abilities to make good changes on the live ones.
PTR Notes: Angry tailors vs. Blizzard
Sorry, clothie tailors -- today's not your lucky day. As Mike noted early, word from the PTR is that two of the BOP tailoring sets -- Frozen Shadoweave and Spellfire -- have been significantly nerfed, at least according to their users. As a set, Spellfire gains 29 int but loses 34 damage and 5 spell crit rating, while Frozen Shadoweave loses 34 damage and gets 24 int. The stats on the Primal Mooncloth set seem to be unchanged. As expected, tailors are not happy about this. While it was widely acknowledged that some of the crafted sets were superior to Tiers 4 and 5, and were a big reason why mages, warlocks and shadow priests were out-DPSing melee, many tailors thought buffing the raid sets instead was the solution. Selected comments from the threads include "gg blizzard i hate you all", "this is a pathetic attempt by blizz to fix their raid game", and "This patch makes me want to kill a cat. Lots of cats. Kittens, even." However, a few casters are okay with the changes, mostly because they calculate it as a minor loss of DPS in exchange for int. I'm not a clothie or a tailor, so I really don't have an informed reaction to this. What do you think? Is this a needed change, or is it a bait and switch for tailors who put a lot of money into their profession? Update: Looks like angry tailors win.
Blue Notes: Profession tidbits and new Darkmoon cards
The game changes are starting to come in faster and faster, as 2.1 approaches (my bet's on a PTR next week). From the European forums we have two new and interesting blobs of information. Ommra: Jewelcrafting: The cooldown times on Earthstorm and Skyfire Diamond transmutes have been reduced to one day. Herbalism: The chances to find a Fel Lotus while picking an herb have been increased. Tailoring: The Spellfire and Shadoweave tunics have been changed to robes. Primal Nethers may now be puchased from G'eras for Badges of Justice. These changes will take place in the next patch, 2.1.0.The previous cooldowns on Earthstorm and Skyfire Diamonds were two days, so this halves that cooldown. Fel Lotus is the new Black Lotus, in that it's used in all the new flasks. But unlike Black Lotus, it doesn't have its own plants. Rather, it has a small chance to spawn off any plant in the Outland. That chance is currently 1-2% depending on the quality of the plant you're picking. In theory, more Fel Lotus should mean cheaper Fel Lotus, which in turn should mean cheaper flasks. The Spellfire and Shadoweave changes are something tailors have been asking for ever since BC's release. And as for the Primal Nether change, it's...interesting. I guess it'll give me something to spend my badges on once I get my trinket. I wonder how many badges they'll cost, though. Edit: word on the street is the exchange rate will be four Badges for one Nether.And secondly, Aeus brings us news that the Darkmoon Faire will be offering new and better trinkets for new types of cards: After the upcoming content patch you will have the chance to find additional Darkmoon cards (Lunacy, Storms, Furies and Blessings) on high level creatures in Outlands, which you can turn in to the Darkmoon Faire to make powerful new Darkmoon card trinkets. This is nice, because the Faire is somewhat useless currently for level 70 characters (although I know at least a few people that are still using Twisting Nether cards). I wonder if they'll convert all the current card drops in Outland to new cards -- I've gotten quite a few old-world cards that I've just vendored because they're relatively worthless now.
Is tailoring necessary for clothies?
The forums of the famous Horde raiding guild Elitist Jerks are home to possibly the most intelligent, respectful and creative WoW micro-community out there. (Amusingly, their Alliance counterparts, Death and Taxes, have one of the most vicious and mind-numbing forums out there. Coincidence?) They're deep into theorycrafting and gear questions, so it should come as no surprise that they've created one of the most intriguing threads about caster itemization I've ever seen. Basically, according to Mearis, the BOP crafted tailoring sets -- Primal Mooncloth, Frozen Shadoweave, and Spellfire -- are actually superior for raid DPS and healing to Tier 4 and 5. For example, here is the Tier 5 priest damage gear, compared to the Frozen Shadoweave Vest. The Frozen Shadoweave offers significantly more pure shadow damage, and the spirit and crit on the Tier 5 isn't that great for shadow priests. A warlock I talked to also rated Frozen Shadoweave above lock T4, and checking out the gear in general, the crafted sets seem to feature nearly double the damage increase (for a certain class of spells) of the tier gear. Mearis says this has two negative effects. First off, it makes tailoring nearly mandatory to stay competitive in early end-game DPS, and by having early access to seriously powerful gear, it allows mages, locks and priests to do much more damage than comparative physical DPS classes -- and leads to more nerf cries from rogues and warriors. I talked to a warlock in the top raiding guild on my server who has the full Frozen Shadoweave set. He said that he considered the tailored items "amazing" and that they probably did contribute to cloth-wearers dominating the damage charts early on. However, he added that he noticed rogues and warriors catching up to mages and locks in damage as they began getting more pieces of their Tier 4 and arena gears, while the clothies weren't replacing their BOP crafted sets yet. And since tailoring was pretty much a money pit before TBC, he didn't mind that it was now suddenly powerful for raiding. "I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon and say that the crafted is overpowered because it is expensive to make and may be replaced as early as 4-piece Tier 4," he said. "And I'm happy to see tailoring be a worthwhile prof while it lasts." Plus, the caster pieces don't have a ton of stamina, which is important on certain boss fights. A shadow priest in my guild with Frozen Shadoweave and Battlecast added, "They're not overpowered -- the T4-T5 sets are just weak." Personally, I like the idea of crafted sets that are equal to raid sets, and think the tailoring clothes and the blacksmithing items are a step forward for the game. Now if only leatherworkers and engineers could get nice things ...
Get rich quick in Outland
And I do mean quick, because these prices likely won't stay this way for long. MBAzeroth points to a forum guide written up by Fanfan on the Mal'Ganis realm forums (that link, strangely enough, doesn't work-- did Blizzard take it down or move the thread somewhere else?) which he says netted him a shiny 1,000g in just two hours.All of it relies on the Primal motes of Air, Fire, Water, Mana, and Earth-- those mots can be combines to make the Primal elements used in all kinds of professions, from Leatherworking to Tailoring and Enchanting. Since everyone is currently working on making their way to 375, sales of this stuff are huge on the AH, and with droprates the way they are, you can net a pretty penny with just a few hours of grinding in these places. Of course that means the more people that find out about this (and the more people that finish their profession leveling), the less it will be worth. But if you get moving on this in time for the weekend AH rush, you could likely make a good headstart on your epic flying mount.The entire guide after the jump.
On the topic of farmers...
My priest has been, for some time now, looking for a pattern for the Truefaith Vestments - the epic crafted priest robes. While I would occasionally see a Robe of the Archmage or a Robe of the Void pattern, I've not seen any of my own. However, over the past couple of weeks, I've seen more and more Robe of the Archmage patterns - as seen above. The cost has dropped dramatically, as well - what once sold for a hundred gold and up is now, as you see, more often selling for 30 to 40, when they sell at all.This has started to puzzle me, as the pattern drops off of Pyromancers in lower Blackrock Spire, of which there are few, and difficult to get to. I've gone with a number of groups that refuses to attempt the pull with the Pyromancers, simply because it's large and difficult. So where then, do these patterns come from? Several commenters on Thottbot claim that you can solo your way to the right area with the use of stealth or invisibility potions, and one poster goes into some detail about two rogues taking the group down with timely use of sap, vanish, and evasion. But even if the pattern can be acquired with the efforts of one or two players, this doesn't explain the sudden appearance of so many in the marketplace. It's possible that the drop rate has been increased, but it seems unlikely that the drop rate of one of the epic robe patterns would go up while the other two remain the same. In my past experience with the game, a sudden flood of rare items on the market has been an indication of a new farming technique or hack, allowing farmers to now easily acquire something that was usually difficult. (For an example of similar circumstances in the past, see this old Dire Maul hack.) However, at present, there's no evidence one way or the other - so this remains simply an oddity...
