Specialty Cloth Tip for Tailors

Having spent the last few months plodding through Tailoring, I've discovered a bit of a trick that I hadn't seen mention of elsewhere. So I'm mentioning it... I hope Blizzard doesn't hate on me. I ended Burning Crusade as a Shadoweave Tailor with the much loved Frozen Shadoweave gear on my warlock Kalli. Suffice it to say, Ebonweave goodies aren't quite the pinnacle of achievement that the Frozen Shadoweave gear was. In fact, the Ebon-flavored gear is the low man on the epic cloth totem pole. I toughed it out for quite a while, but after the Tailoring CDs were removed I decided to put myself out of my misery and respec to Moonshroud.

For those of you who are unaware of the process, you travel to Shattrath and speak with the Tailoring specialists in the Lower City. You must talk to your original trainer to "unlearn" your current specialization. You will be charged 150 gold to drop the specialty. Then you speak with the new specialty trainer and pay an additional 20g to pick up a different spec. The overall cost is 170 gold.

I forgot to mention the trick part didn't I? No worries, I'm just setting the scene for you, I'm working around to the good part. By changing your spec, you gain the ability to receive a bonus cloth when crafting. This means you get two cloth for the cost of making one. So what I've been doing is saving up the mats to make a whole stack of one type of cloth and crank out a bunch. Then I pay the fee to switch specs and make a bunch of the next kind. As a result, I get all of my cloth at the 50% cost instead of just one version. If desired, you can just take mats for all three types to Shattrath and stand there switching specs as you make each bunch of cloth.

I'm sure some of you are thinking that this 170g fee blows any chance of saving money out of the water. But if you're paying typical prices for the mats, crafting 10 cloths and getting 10 extra is actually a 10-20% cost savings even with the respec fee. I wouldn't recommend trying this if you don't plan to work in bulk. However, if you make a minimum of 10 specialty cloth in one go you should come out ahead in the deal.

I have no doubt that other folks have figured this out as well, but I was unable to find any discussion of it. That would seem to indicate that this isn't a widely known tactic, so I thought I'd share in case some of you can benefit from doing this. As usual, feel free to share any other tips you might have on Tailoring :)