Ceremonial Solstice Robe

[Damuri]

Components:

Embroidering Needle
Gem Studded Chain
Sacred Tunare Silk x 3

The Embroidering Needle is cheap and easy to make and you only need one (it is always returned).

The Gem Studded Chain is expensive but if you have a JCM 3 enchanter friend who will make them for you, they cost about 400PP each. These are returned on a failure.

Sacred Tunare Silk requires about 17PP plus the cost of a silk swatch (on my server you have to pay 10PP to get spider silks in the kind of quantity you need to use this skillpath). So that is 37PP per Sacred Tunare Silk for a total of 111PP per combine. The sacred Tunare silk is expended regarless of succes or failure on the combine.

The trivial for Ceremonial Solstice Robes (CSR) are 335 so you will have about a 5% chance of success up to about 205.

Most people use LoY ribbons to 187 before they start with the CSRs. Therefore if you use CSRs from 187 to 205, your average cost per combine is 131 (111 for the silk and 20 (400 x 5%) for the chain). Your skill up rate at that point is just over 2% (assuming that Tailoring is a "hard" skill).

At 131 per combine times 50 combines per skill-up means that you are spending approximately 6500PP per skillup.

At 6500PP per skill-up, it will cost you over 100K to get from 187 to 205.

Once you get to 205, your costs go up because you have a higher success rate and you expend more chains.

By the time you get to 220 (with a short detour to get your freebie points for ethereal silk swatches at 210), your average cost of a skillup is going to be over 8K.

So I figure you need about 250K to get from 187 to 220.

This is all assuming tailoring is a "hard" skill (and I have every reason to believe that it is). If it is a "Medium" skill, you can knock off about 30% from the expected cost (still not super cheap). If Tailoring is an "Easy" skill then you can cut the cost in half (BTW if tailoring is an "Easy" skill, then the RNG has been extremely ungenerous to me for over a year now).

This is also assuming that you do all your own subcombines and you buy your spider silk for 10PP. If you buy any of your components or you farm your own silks (or get them cheaper than 10PP), your mileage may vary. If you do everything yourself and you farm your own silk then your cost per combine drops to 71PP combine (you basically halve your cost) up to 205.

In any event, be prepared to shell out a lot of cash if this is your skillup route.

In the end there really isn't a cheap and easy way to get tailoring up to 220 and I doubt there ever will be.

[Myrron]

I think this was supposed to be a reply to another thread in here? Maybe?

--Myrron Lifewarder

[Aamdor]

Gag! Nice analysis; think I'll stick to LoY robes as long as I can.

Note, according to the prices on this site, the GSC costs (best price):

Emerald 13.7pp
Ruby 131.3
Sapphire 105.0
Chain ~1.0
---------------
Total 250.0pp

[scarbrowed]

Total 250.0pp

Don't forget to account for failure rate. I'd say based on that raw cost, 400pp overall cost sounds about right. A little more if your enchanter does not have the JCM AA's yet.

[Tweedledea]

I've seen gemmed chains on sale in the bazaar at very reasonable prices. It's worth /telling the vendor to make sure they keep enough in stock for your combines!

[Aamdor]

Don't forget to account for failure rate.

Ah, I did indeed forget. "Thanks" for reminding me

[Niphreedil]

Here is a better cost study: my post.

I tested it (ding 249! ) and it's pretty accurate. I'll post the numbers when I ding 250.

[Aamdor]

Niphreedil,

I don't want you to stop leading those great open PoP raids but I would very much like to see your actual numbers for skilling to 250. If I missed it, then I'm most sorry and will dig deeper for that final report.

[Aalar]

One must keep in mind that these are raw numbers. A very good analysis but it does not account for the plat one will get while farming for various components - if you farm for some components. Of course it cannot account for that variable - it is too much of a variable. I know that farming for velium (which I have been doing of late) in Velk's has increased my bankroll by about 50k AND increased my smithing from 193-210 (so far). I have a knack for nameds popping while I farm. I sell all the nice drops I get.

So don't let that high number scare you. Do at least some of your own farming and it will defray some of the cost. Try to combine exp & farming if at all possible. The spiders in Velk's give me an AA in around 4 hours which is better than nothing.

Aalar

[Silound]

On another note, I think they upped the drop rate on the carrior spiders in EK, I get 2-4 silks off almost all of them now.

With the relative ease of farming spider silk, I can farm 3-4 10-slot bags full in an hour by just rounding up the zone and AE'ing it all (bard AE mind you), I think it's a relatively safe assumption that it's more economical to farm silks if you can get at least 200 silks per hour (that's 100 swatches at 10-20 pp per, resulting in the equivalent of 1000-2000 platinum per hour if you were to farm cash in order to buy silks). Then you can probably lower that cost to about 50p per failed robe, give or take a smidge. That's a considerable reduction in overall cost, the difference being time invested and how. Plus, I found it faster to farm silks in the long run, because I did robes from 187-195 (current on the recent tailor) and netted all of a skillup every 100-140 combines (did in runs of 100, all I could hold on me while I farmed). I think I succeeded like 4 times in all of that.

Point being of you can farm silks at a decent rate, it's cheaper overall, unless you have a "free plat tree" that keeps you going.

[Damuri]

Not fair

Gag! Nice analysis; think I'll stick to LoY robes as long as I can.

/RANT ON

Cultural tradeskilling has always irked me. It gives some players a much easier time than other. At first I was tradeskilling for the shawl quest. Now I am tradeskilling for the Aid Grimel quest and it seems to me that the bottleneck tradeskills are tailoring, fletching and smithing (in that order). On top of all of that, failure on the smithing leg of the aid grimel quest costs you 1K plat to replace the components, failure on the fletching leg is a bit more expensive because of the PoA drops but these items drop plenty of times during a PoA riad as you move from one named to another (so you can probably get these from your guild without having to actually buy them in bazaar). BUT the tailoring leg requires a PoF drop that does not generally drop from mobs that are killed during PoF raids so you either have to farm 3 of these rare drops yourself or pay about 25K each for them, on the plus side, the PoF spider camps are pretty decent XP.

So the toughest tradeskill is also the most expensive to fail at (for the aid grimel quest). Cultural tradeskilling gives everyone an advantage in some tradeskill, but the ones with a tailoring advantage seems to have an inordinate advantage over others when it comes to the Aid Grimel quest (yeah yeah, I know, people tradeskill for a lot of reasons but you are fooling yourself if you don't think that the aid grimel quest doesn't have something to do with the surge of interest in tradeskilling this past year and a half).

Between tradeskilling, the VT key, the VP key, factioning for the VP quests, flagging and all the raiding, I think I get about one AA a month. Now with the new expansion with 5 new levels and tons of new AA (I gave up on the overpriced GoD AA as soon as they came out), I have decided I need to give up sleeping.