guidance requested...

[Impudent]

I am a lvl 65 HIE Cleric. I have just completed my 6th shawl from Thurg. (yeah me)

I am looking to work my skills up to have a decent chance at success in my 7th shawl.

My current trade skills are:
Pottery 121
Fletching 135
Brewing 62
JC 199
Tailoring 147

I know with the exception of tailoring, all my other skills can be increased by vendor purchased items.

But tailoring has left me... Puzzled.

I don't have the bank account of Donald Trump, nor do I have the efficient capabilities to solo farm a whole lot. (Efficiently meaning.. I'd be farming for the next year)

After reading through the last 15 PAGES of all the tailoring topics (grats to all the new 250 tailors), I am left befuttled and depressed.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

[Velurian]

First, get those last 11 points to 158. Wu's is major pain in the wrist, but it's better than the alternative.

A lot of people stop there, and it's generally the 6th shawl (which trivials over 200) that is the hurdle, not the 7th. Given that you've already covered that, you may just want to stop at 158 and take your chances.

If you really do want to get your tailoring higher, you have four main options (as a high elf, you don't have a cultural tailoring option):

Acrylia Studded (to 188): while you say that you don't have great farming abilities, you should be able to farm rockhoppers in DSP for pelts as a 65 cleric. Farming acrylia might be a bit more difficult, at least in any quantity. You might be better off buying your acrylia in the bazaar when possible. If you limit yourself to the salable items (cloak, tunic, maybe a couple others), you can actually turn a profit doing this, though these are usually the items that require lots of studs, so this will slow you down if you're just doing acrylia.

LoY ribbons (to 187): these are easy to do, but do require foraged items, which will keep things slow unless you can corral a couple friends into helping you with that part. Also expensive -- the platinum ribbons will cost 100pp per attempt, and have almost no vendor sellback. Probably not a practical path for you, as you say you don't have a lot of cash.

Velious armor (to 250): You can likely farm arctic wyvern pelts in CS and velium in CC, both with relatively little trouble. It'll be slow, but this shouldn't be difficult. Also keep an eye out for both the pelts and the velium on (NPC) vendors.

Solstice Robes (to 250): Farming silk in EK should be trivial for you. You'll need to find a Tunare cleric/druid to imbue emeralds, and a jeweller to make the gem studded chains for you. If you can find both of those for not much above cost, this might be worthwhile for you.

The upshot here is that there is no cheap and fast way to skill up tailoring beyond 158. Most people end up doing a mixture of the above. What you might want to consider is doing acrylia studded tunics and cloaks as the supplies become available, and using the profits from that to finance one of the other options. (For that matter, if you have a high tolerance for tedium, make money selling Celestial Essences or Heady Kiolas and use that money to finance your skilling up.)

If you are just doing this for the shawl, I'd finish Wu's and stop there. It's honestly not worth the aggravation to avoid the fairly small risk of attempting the 7th shawl (or, for that matter, the 8th) at 158.

[Mahlig]

Well, East Karanas is where you should go. You may not be the best soloer in the game, but we are talking about level 10-18 mobs. 1 Virtue + 1 Upheaval + Lots of Running = lots of silk. Then head up to Highpass and brew up some heady kiolas. Then purchase a few vials of viscous mana (they are as low as 8pp on Stormhammer) and make some Wu's armor to 158. That *really* is high enough to get you a reasonable chance at making the 7th shawl. If you do not think so, you can head to Western Wastes and kill velium hounds. Yes, they hit in the 100s and fast, but if you have good channelling, you can root, back off, nuke. They do not have a lot of HP though adds are possible (I like to hunt them near DN zone). silver thread + velium hound fur = soft leather padding (or something like that) and trivials in the 170s. It is also used in the 8th shawl armor, so preparing early coupled with working skill. And if you plan on doing the 8th shawl, you may need to work on smithing as well.

[Impudent]

Velurian, thanks for the response.

After this past weekend of making 364 kiola's in a single day.. I am pretty tired of Wu's (go figure), but I press forward the 11 more points.

As Cleric of Tunare, and a 199 JC'r, I think I'll also look into the robes a bit more.

Again, thanks for the insight. I am no where near as depressed now

Also, thanks Mahlig, I do hunt in WW quite often, and never seemed to care about the 100's of furs I let people loot (DOH!!)

[kiatek]

re

word of caution about gem studded chains for solstice robes: they are hard to make. At 199, you can count on having a low (as in less than 20%) success rate. THat means you will be eating alot of plat.

I strongly suggest that you either A) get your skill to 250 where you will get a 50% success rate (still expensive~500 pp per chain) or B) find an enchanter with JC 250 and the AA JCM 3 which increases the succcess rate dramatically.

I have a JCM1 enchanter and I consistently get 80-85% success on gem studded chains.

Otherwise those are some really great tips. I personally got two skill points off velium hound fur when getting them for my 8th shawl. that put me at 162. Then I did oodles of solstice robe combines. I failed alot-but that is actually good, since the main cost factor in robes is the chain and you get a chain back when you fail. If robe prices suck on your server (as most do now) then you probably won't want to succees very much.

If you don't have alot of money to blow, choose items to make that you can try to sell. Check your bazaar and prices on items.

Good luck!

[Meirril]

If you really do want to get your tailoring higher, you have four main options (as a high elf, you don't have a cultural tailoring option):

Umm...high elves can do LoY cultural robe combines. I think that counts as cultural tailoring, and I'm jelouse.

Start looking for the 2 ingredients (I belive their cinimon sticks and elven berries, but you'd be better off looking the stuff up.) and find someone that dose research to help make the ribbons. Stick with the silver ribbon combines and that should take you over the 200 mark IF you want to go there. If you don't just skill up to 158 on Wu's and leave it at that.

Oh, and hunting Velium Hound fur for skill ups is an excellent idea, as you'll need at least 8 soft fur padding to do your 8th shawl.