Tailoring

Is Tailoring worth taking?

Yes, if you wear cloth. It earns Legacy Points, and the published verdict for Warlocks is blunt: "Almost all of the Best in Slot for Warlocks right now come from Tailoring, making it highly suggested."

For Mages: "Tailoring now lets you craft your own Bind-on-Pickup Rare gear, and is some of the best leveling gear available for how easy it is to access. Starting as low as level 10."

The catch is in that phrase: "You will only be able to craft these pieces for yourself since they are mostly all Bind on Pickup." You cannot buy this power and you cannot make it for a friend.

37 Tailoring items appear in level-20 best-in-slot lists, 30 of them new.

What it pairs with

Enchanting, and Forever strengthened the case: the Bind-on-Pickup gear you make while levelling is exactly the feedstock you disenchant.

Yes, the cloth-drop economy is unchanged: "Tailoring uses cloth looted from humanoids, so it does not need a specific gathering profession." The Forever levelling route does pull in 48 Vision Dust and 88 Rugged Leather above 225, so it is marginally less cloth-pure than vanilla.

What Forever changed

• Cloth gear is now tuned per damage school, which vanilla never did at low level. Six Merchant's Favor lines at skill 60–125, named by school: Shining (Holy), Shadow, Pristine (healing), Pearly (Arcane), Flame (Fire), Silky (Frost), each in six slots. Flame Sash gives Fire spell damage; Shadow Sash gives Shadow. 67 recipes in all, Bind on Pickup.
• Reagent bags at every tier: Linen at skill 5 through Runecloth at 215, Mooncloth at 255, Bottomless at 300, plus a new Felblood Soul Bag at 300 with 30 slots.
• Three crafted tier sets at 300: Conviction (Priest), Demonheart (Warlock), Manaflare (Mage). They need Malleable Essence of Nature from disenchanted raid drops.
• The epics got cheaper in the scarce materials. Belt of the Archmage now wants 8 Mooncloth, 8 Ghost Dye and 4 Large Brilliant Shard where vanilla wanted 10/10/6, but it adds 10 Viridian Dye. Robe of the Archmage, Robe of the Void, Gloves of Spell Mastery and Truefaith Vestments all changed the same way. Bottomless Bag no longer needs Core Leather.
• New Nature Resistance cloth at 285–295.
• Profession perk, new: Cloth Scavenging, which "yields extra cloth from enemies", plus cloak embroidery granting attack power, spell power or Stamina. Both are later-expansion perks arriving in a vanilla relaunch, and Cloth Scavenging is the closest thing Tailoring has ever had to a gathering profession. Skill, values and cost are not published, and whether it really changes the "no gathering partner" calculus is unknown.
• Certification at 300 for 1,000 Favor → the title "the Tailor".

Specialisations

There is no Tailoring specialisation, in vanilla or in Forever. A full search of the beta client returns specialisation spells for Blacksmithing, Leatherworking and Engineering only. Do not go looking.

Levelling it

1. 1 → 43: Bolt of Linen, ~55 crafts
2. 43 → 75: Linen Belt, ~50
3. 75 → 130: Bolt of Woolen → Woolen Cape → Red Woolen Bag → Double-Stitched Woolen Shoulders
4. 130 → 174: Gloves of Meditation, then Azure Silk Cloak
5. 174 → 213: vendor-pattern shirts (Black Swashbuckler's, Orange Martial, Pink Mageweave)
6. 213 → 225: Admiral's Hat
7. 225 → 300: Runecloth Cloak → Runecloth Gloves → Runecloth Cuffs ×53 → Mooncloth Robe

Shopping list to 225: 795 Wool Cloth, 770 Mageweave Cloth, 596 Silk Cloth, 110 Linen Cloth, 257 Fine Thread, 84 Long Elegant Feather, 74 Heavy Silken Thread, 66 Blue Dye, 48 Vision Dust, 30 Elixir of Wisdom.

225 → 300: 2,315 Runecloth, 463 Bolt of Runecloth, 110 Rune Thread, 88 Rugged Leather, 60 Mooncloth, 58 Ironweb Spider Silk, 30 Golden Pearl.

The bottleneck is Mageweave, 174 to 213. That stretch runs entirely on vendor-bought shirt patterns, so it costs gold rather than farming. Above the cap, 2,315 Runecloth and the Mooncloth cooldown are the real wall. It is the cheapest crafting profession to start and one of the most expensive to finish.

What is not known

Cloth Scavenging's rate and skill requirement. Cloak embroidery values. What 57 of its recipes make. Whether any vanilla pattern was removed.