I think it's pretty well acknowledged that tailoring is overpowered in TBC. No other craft has the ability to make so many pieces of gear that leapfrog the raid items in utility.

"You can't ask your guild to drag all of your alts through Karazhan to get gear."

a) We can. I don't get dragged on my alts, I gear them up the best I can and they work their way through.

b) if an alt isn't raiding, why does it need epic raid gear anyway?
 

I don't get dragged on my alts, I gear them up the best I can and they work their way through.

Best you can as in PvP and crafted epics? Or best you can as in 5-man dungeon blue gear class set? The latter is obviously far more of a drag. I don't know how often your guild raids per week, but if they take the time to get every alt of every player completely geared up in Karazhan, when do they find the time to move on to the next level of raid content?

if an alt isn't raiding, why does it need epic raid gear anyway?

Whatever you do with your alt, epic gear is likely to help. The stronger your character is, the faster he can do quests, farm gold, grind reputation, succeed in 5-man runs, do PvP, or eventually level up to 80 in the next expansion. Thinking that epics are only good for raiding is downright silly.
 

I agree that the crafting skills seem over powered but like most things in WOW are just a time sink. I have Alts with each trade skill and although I have 3x70's only 1 has crafted epics due to the time it takes to farm. I don't have time to farm the amounts needed for the trade epics. Would I be tempted by a gold seller? No, but I would understand the time saved if someone did.
 

Those crafted epics used to sale for about 1000 - 1500g each. But now with dozends of epics available through mindless bgs (insanely fast if its Alterac Weekend), people will laugh in your face if you want them to pay more than 500g for them, even if the mats are way more expensive.
PvP somewhat ruins most of the crafted epics. The only epic I know of that is still really useful is Deep Thunder/Stormherald for Warriors.
We had a random world epic in Kara last time, it was an epic dagger. At first I was thrilled, then I realised it was fast attack speed (means: only useful in your offhand) and had 10 dps less than even season1-pvp weapons. All in all this once-good epic is now useless because you can get something better on a medium saturday evening in alterac.

Well, crafted epics have one advantage: If you didn't raid until now but want to start soon and you did no pvp until now but have very much money for some reason you could deck yourself in those epics and have a head start in Karazhan. But unless you bought your character at ebay some days ago together with a pile of money I don't see how such circumstances should come together. *grin*

//sidenote: I'm still not sure if I should like pvp-epics because I can now get epics for all my chars or if I should hate them for ruining a good part of crafting and raiding.
 

???
Crafted epics like Frozen Shadoweave, for the most part, are BOE, and often require something like "Shadoweave Tailor".
And they are also, for the most part, quite useful in PvE, but are only "ok" for PvP (lacking stamina and resilience).
So I don't think that crafting is hurt by PvP epics.
Frankly, you'll typically you'll do better just selling the mats anyway.

And every time "epic gear" comes up, people have to make the claim that there is an epic to be had in a day of AV! Woo hoo!
Well, assuming that one wants a PvP epic that requires AV marks, yeah, that can be done.
But the "dirty little secret" is that in a weekend a Kara run will yield about 20 badges per raid member, and 20 epics, in probably less time as it took for that person in AV to grind out a single epic.
(And certainly in *far* less time that it takes to grind out a single piece of Frozen Shadoweave...)
 

I just completed that set yesterday for my little mage. For me it was "cheap" as I started on the crafting around level 60 and I transmuted most of the Primals needed with my main. The truly overpowered profession is Alchemy ;)

I think leveling Tailoring to 375 is more expensiv than the actual set you craft afterwards.
 

Best you can as in PvP and crafted epics? Or best you can as in 5-man dungeon blue gear class set? The latter is obviously far more of a drag. I don't know how often your guild raids per week, but if they take the time to get every alt of every player completely geared up in Karazhan, when do they find the time to move on to the next level of raid content?

Best you can means a mixture of all those things. Maybe a PvP epic or two, some drops from instances, some epics or world drops from the AH, some crafted pieces. (Presumably I rolled an alt because I wanted to do at least one of those things :) ).

And my guild is quite casual wrt raiding, but I also have friends in raid guilds who organise Kara speed runs for friends and alts when they get bored, so if they need a spare healer and I'm around, I might get poked to bring my new resto druid along to help.

I think you'll find that this isn't uncommon. The raid guilds I know often run off-the-cuff alt-gearing kara runs. The combination of badges, drops, etc makes it very attractive.
 

Crafting the Frozen Shadoweave set took me a lot of time and gold. I would say it is a lot more 'epic' than having a free trip round karazhan and being given 5 or 6 purples by guildies who already have them, and picking up 10-15 Badges at the same time.

Don't forget, first you have to get to Tailoring 375.
What that list of mats doesn't tell you, is the number of times you try and get a skill level by making for example, Imbued Netherweave Tunic, and the dam thing doesn't increase. Unless you are lucky to get a world drop pattern, getting from 370 to 375 is incredibly frustrating.
Not only that, but having a 4 day cooldown on Shadow Cloth is a real pain.

Yes, these days with all the daily quests, earning the money for all the mats is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a lot more primals for sale. When BC first came out, there was a complete shortage of Netherweave, as well as Water Primals (not many people with Fishing 375) and collecting it from mobs was the only way to get it.

For my Belf, I am not bothering with tailoring for the moment; instead I have 2 gathering professions, and I am using the money to pay for my Epic flying mount (lv 66 and so far have 1200 gold, so normal birdy already affordable).
 

Crafting the Frozen Shadoweave set took me a lot of time and gold. I would say it is a lot more 'epic' than having a free trip round karazhan and being given 5 or 6 purples by guildies who already have them, and picking up 10-15 Badges at the same time.

I totally agree, the epicness depends on how much effort you excerted to get the epic. Between crafting an epic with dollar-bought mats and crafting the same epic with self-gathered mats there is a huge difference. But there is also a huge difference between getting epics on a free tour of Karazhan and getting the same epics after a long struggle to kill some boss for the first time. I'm actually happy that Karazhan isn't totally trivial for my guild yet, we often have a couple of wipes even if we succeed, and recently we had a run where we only wiped on Nightbane and never got any epics at all.
 

With an engineer using Zapthrottle Mote Extractor, gathering the primal water and shadow for the frozen shadoweave set was pretty trivial.
 

"ni" is correct.
I guess the joke is on me.
*After* my engineer-shadow priest had ground out the primal waters for a full set of Frozen Shadoweave, Bluzz patched in the engineering EZ mode of gathering primals, and fishing improvements too.
Of course, it is fitting that the one primal I've needed most lately is... fire...
And that since my current focus is PvP, that there is no crafted PvP gear that comes anywhere near the endgame usefulness of the PvE crafted gear...
XD
 

Killing the same elemental 1000 times yourself to farm enough primals isn't really "epic" either, it is just a hard slog. So maybe PvP epics are the better alternative for people who can't go raiding.

PvP epics are a pretty hard slog too. And, if you think about it, raiding isn't too much better. The high end raiders kill Illidan each week hoping for a trinket, or a new chestpiece, or weapon or something. Just like they used to kill Ragnaros each week hoping for some new pants.

"Epic" is just another term. I don't understand why the term picked up; people don't call blue items "rares", why do they call purple items epic? They're about as epic as blue items are rare.

--Rawr
 

Epic is totally related to the effor like you said.

Doing BG or Arena and losing constantly but getting Epics isn't epic.

Running an instance & killing a boss 25 times hoping for one piece of loot isn't epic, its moronic.

Having friends give you all the items needed to craft something purple isn't epic.

Generally WoW isn't epic. They really need to adjust the goals/things you can do at max level in the expansion & get rid of the repeat items.
 

"But the "dirty little secret" is that in a weekend a Kara run will yield about 20 badges per raid member, and 20 epics, in probably less time as it took for that person in AV to grind out a single epic."

I think you're not compairing the right things. A Karazhan-Run like this needs an evening of your time AND nine other people who are all in epic gear, know the bosses and are on a charity mission to get you through. Alterac on the other side simply requires a day of your time.

If you want to make this comparison fair, say you put together a new team, half of them have never raided at all, only 2-3 have some epics from heroics and so on. The average beginner group will get themselves bloody noses on Moroes the first evening, which means you spent your evening getting *one* badge and *one* epic. The epic however will most certainly be of no use for your class and even if it is: There will be an average of two other people who will fight tooth and nail to get it.
I'm too lazy to calculate the chances seriously but I'm sure the numbers point straight to Alterac Valley.
 

A lot has to do with timing:
Six months ago I would have given an edge to getting epics through AV / battleground farming.

But since patch 2.3, with upgraded badge gear and typically 2-badges-per-boss in Kara, the clear advantage is joining a guild with Kara on farm.

A year into TBC expansion, there are many toons with decent gear. That's bad for the AV farmer in greens-and-blues going up against better-geared toons, but good for the budding raider who can quite likely join a good, well-geared guild with Kara on farm.

Getting stopped by Moroes would be a bummer... but more than 30 guilds on my server have cleaned out Kara, so I really don't think an average person who can commit to a raiding schedule for a month will have any problem finding a guild with Kara on farm.

On my BG battlegroup, there is not a clear edge in any particular battleground for either faction, so it's not like you'll always win. There are time-sinks like queue times, turtles, and running into pre-mades -- and while one might counter that you'll get a little something for the "loss", well, yeah! You'd get a little honor for killing an enemy in Crossroads, too. The "free" mark in a loss doesn't excite me much; I've lost count of how many useless extra marks I've just thrown away -- it's the honor that's in short supply. Ironically, I would guess that it's *far* harder to get into a BG pre-made (or good Arena team) than to get into a Kara farming run.

IMO, the equation is simple:

On the raid side: If you're in solid gear, nothing special, and with a group that has few people in good gear, and a good raid leader, chances of success are really good. A lot of guilds on my server are doing just that, and I doubt my server is an exception. Additionally, Kara has been nerfed.

On the PvP side: You're against *other players*, who are not 'static', but a year into TBC are in some very good gear by now. And good pre-made groups, and especially good Arena teams, have a high gear expectation (much higher than the raid side). After all, you're not fighting against a static encounter, you're fighting against other players who are likely experience, and are already geared in some PvP gear (and in PvP, gear is so very important). The counter-argument is that one can PUG BGs, and casually Arena -- true enough. But I'd assert that you'll never ever match the time-per-epic in PvP that you'll get with by joining a guild with Kara on farm.