Thoughts on Tailoring and Cloth drops

Gameplay Professions
1

Thinking about making all my alts tailors just for the passive cloth drops.

How has everyones experience with Tailoring been this expac? Do you like the new system? Do you think it will stay?

Any thoughts appreciated?

2

So I knew that tailoring would require a character capable of mass killing humanoids in beta. This was bothersome to me because my tailor, who has been my tailor since BC, is a disc/holy priest. Not exactly the best at aoe.

I made a new character before the expansion started, a hunter (for tankiness and aoe DPS), specifically to be my “cloth gatherer”.

I also knew blizzard was going to have to nerf the drop rate for a lot of mobs in the world. The problem is a lot of humanoids are quest mobs in the world. Previously in beta you could mow these guys down and get thousands of cloth easy. But you’d also be disrupting people questing.

Also I noticed that delves just didn’t have the mob density to really farm cloth.

So that meant there were two ways cloth was going to be mass farmed–hyper spawns in groups or follower dungeons. And blizzard just kept nerfing the hyper spawns, even the ones that weren’t quest mobs. Why I do not understand. Similarly in follower dungeons drops are less common due to the fact that you are “sharing loot” with the followers-- only the fact that you could kill so many more mobs per hour evened this out.

If blizzard is going to continue with this model, they’re going to have to relent on one of these fronts. Cloth remains one of the most expensive “basic mats” for thaumaturgy (Weavercloth, bismuth, mycobloom, storm dust). The reason for its relative expense is that the gather rate per hour is not sufficient.

So imo this needs improvement. I think follower dungeons are an excellent out of the way place to farm cloth that won’t disrupt questing. But they need to increase the drop rates there by a factor of 2 to be equivalent to the other basic mats.

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3

To me the drop rate is just hideous for my Warlock Tailor/Enchanter

Starved for materials: cloth and also dust

Repeating follower dungeons Dark Cleft up till first boss (but not killing) just to get ‘some’ cloth.

4

Dust is fine tbh. Because you can use thaumaturgy to get it and still break even on the exchange.

5

priory is good one since it also drops duskweave and dawnweave.

I run it on follower mode and just blow throw the instance.

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6

True. I do enjoy priory because it has leather skinning as well. But it is dwarfed by darkflame cleft in terms of cloth found per minute. Also every location drops similar amounts of dusk weave and dawnweave. The two are just (imo) too rare so in one individual trial you might only see one of them.

Here are the numbers (averaged over 5 trials)
If you do priory before boss 1 and skip as many mini bosses as possible: 7.6 cloth per minute

If you complete priory up to the last boss: 7.8 cloth per minute

If you complete darkflame cleft up to the first boss: 12.3 cloth per minute

If you complete darkflame to the last boss (don’t do this): 3.7 cloth per minute. Note that the last section does not drop cloth so this drags the whole average down.

Open world (multiple locations): 7.5 cloth per minute

(All tests done in S1 with the same character).

So cloth is not by any means “hard to get”. It’s just not in line with other basic materials for thaumaturgy purposes.

7

I don’t mind it per say, but I do think there should still be some drop for non-Taylor‘s, or a notable increase in the drop rate. It feels a little under resourced compared to my mining and herbalism and skinning characters. Or they could roll it into skinning as well, give that prof some love outside of just leatherworking.

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8

Well. I mean… It is quite nice selling weavercloth that just seems to pile up by itself… Cough I just sold 20k worth… Back when anybody could pick them up they were pretty worthless.

9

Yeah, that’s why I’m broadly in support of it. It just seems like the drop rate is on the lower side without dedicated farming runs. My big problem is that it’s a gathering skill, tied into a crafting prof. If you aren’t someone who benefits from cloth armor, it’s really not a great pick. I feel before this change most tailors were casters, who generally aren’t known for sweeping up mobs in large numbers.

Tailoring has a history tied to skinning, so I feel this would be a decent way of making the gathering effect still a gathering profession, and would mean that skinning would serve two craft profs, putting it on par with the other gather profs.

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10

Totally agree. My holy/disc priest has been my tailor since BC. I have the renowned tailoring achievement on her. I have no idea how to play shadow. So before this expansion came out I had to make a hunter tailor just to gather.

But this is why I think they should really lean into follower dungeons, as they have a tank and you can be a squishy healer type. I feel that if they could increase the drop rate there to make it more obvious that this was the place to get your cloth in large quantities (as opposed to open world quest mobs) that would alleviate some of that.

I do kind of like this idea as well. Skinners do actually cover multiple professions as they do fishing lures and extra meat. But tbh I would prefer a cloth tree over meat carver (which is pretty useless).

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11

Same with my mage. A Tailor since early vanilla. She has so many rare recipes, and I just haven’t enjoyed playing her in a long while.

One tree for leather collecting, one tree for cloth collecting, and one tree for lure’s and meat gathering

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12

Would also need to address that the last few expansions, tier 2 cloth is made with enchanting dust. Maybe it’s fine to leave it that way, or if they switched it to being a cloth reinforced with leather, then it would make full use of skinning prof.

13

It has a longer history … imbued nether weave from BC, imbued frostweave from WotLK, imbued silk weave from Legion all required enchanting dust as you recall.

They really tried to go back to those early ideas in DF… like going out to the table out in azure span was a clear callback to making mooncloth at moonwells…

Anyway… I just worry that they’ll stick something else in its place if you remove it. They’ve also done elements too historically. Can you imagine if all the exquisite cloth needed leyline residue, for example?

14

I kind of like this idea as well

15

Just returned to the game a month ago started working on my old tailor/enchanter from long long ago. Got my enchanter to skill 80, but my tailoring is just stuck. I am lucky to see 1-2 cloth drops over the course of an actual hour of killing. Every open world farm has apparently been nerfed into the ground. How exactly do they expect people to skill up this profession? I’ve spent around 3 hours farming and have seen a total of 10 weavercloth. 10… that ammounts to very few skill up which at this rate im days of farming away to hit skill 25 and be able to unlock the required drop rate specilization.

This feels way way undertuned and over nerfed. Its to the point either i just mindlessly farm for days or i level a new character up to be a miner and mine for cloth from webbed mining nodes…

Something isn’t right about the balanceing here and needs to go back to the design phase because something here is insanely broken.

16

It really depends on where and what you are farming. They had to nerf the drop rate for mobs that are related to quests, because farming activities were interfering with questing. They also nerfed hyperspawn locations and mobs.

Other than those spots, open world farming is not terrible, just less efficient than spamming follower dungeons.

I’d recommend spamming Darkflame Cleft follower dungeon for cloth farming. It’s a bit more cloth per minute and you can infinitely reset it. Clear the rooms up to the first boss. Then leave. Repeat. When specialized in cloth gathering, you can farm 12.3 cloth per minute or 740 cloth per hour in this way.

If you’re not specialized I’d just buy mats off the AH until you can put points into it. Until then your rate is half that of someone who is specialized and you won’t pick up rank 3 mats or bolts. You also won’t pick up specialty cloth like dawnweave and dusk weave.

It is not particularly difficult or expensive to level tailoring, even without specializing in cloth gathering. Oftentimes the bolts, especially the rank 2 bolts, are sold at less than the cost of the materials so even if you gathered it yourself, you’d be wasting gold making those bolts yourself. No tailoring recipe uses the raw cloth except unraveling. Almost no recipe uses the weaverthread spools. So you might as well just buy the bolts from the AH.

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