Tailor Archive
Thread: Tailoring Without Grinding?
I really dont understand why the requirements are so high, it makes no sense. Novice Tailor items are very low XP yield and not exactly highly sought after items yet the XP requirements for the skill are huge. Armoursmithing I can make and sell in full sets to make cash and get a lot of UXP but the XP requirements are much lower.
I dont have a huge PA providing me with resources and with a large house and factory I can only have 1 personal mineral harvester and 1 chemical harvester so I dont have resources spare to grind with and I often have to buy reources to top up my supply.
Most of the nicer items I can make are from the artisan line so I get GCXP - of which I've got 21k - mostly from tailoring.
I qualified for armoursmith about 5 days ago and I'm already on my 3rd tier of tech, just from making and selling mabari. And I'm really enjoying the natural skill progression - 0 grinding but tailoring seems to be 99% grind all the way to master.
Has anyone made it to master tailor without grinding... if so how long did it take?
Also I've seen no complaints about this issue in the state of the profession reports so I'm guessing either I'm missing something or none of you care that the tailoring skill progression is a dull grind all the way through.
In practise mode I would have to make 266 ribbed shirts just for 1 skill box. Thats a lot of wasted resources and a lot of dull grinding. Why does no-one else see this as a problem ?
You have a legitimate issue that we all have dealt with. Part of the problem is that the most desireable items that sell are further up in various trees and obviouslywhen you are providing "luxury" items color choices are also an important part of the purchase decision, which adds another tree to gain skill in.
If you take the purist approach to tailor, (no grinding) its going to take a long time to obtain master tailor or even specific boxes you need.
In summary, grind ribbed shirts then switch to cartridge belts, Once you get higher up in the trees you can support your expenses selling uniform boots, camo pants, cloaks, dusters and the other items that will sell day after day.
And even though it might be a "grind" very few favor reducing the exp requirements, on most servers there are plenty of tailors,,and making it easier would just expand the problem.
I did it. Went all the way up to master with no grinding. It took me close to 4 months. In my case, I can't grind, I have carpal tunnel and it would have hurt me.
Some of us have complaineda little in the past of the xp requirements, but considering that there are powergrinders that have made Master Tailor in a week or two, the devs are probably not going to listen to us. It's a great struggle if you want to avoid the grind, and the saddest part is that as you advance in the Tailor tree you don't earn much more xp.
Tailoring is a profession of diminishing returns. The higher level you get, the more xp you need to advance. But the higher level clothes often give less xp than lower level things. I think this has something to do with the fact that most high level clothing needs factory components. But as we all know, we only get a tiny percentage of xp from our factories. There are a few notable higher level items that give good xp, and these are the pieces everyone uses to grind. So a craft-and-sell tailor is at a large disadvantage when trying to level. There's greater demand for much of the higher level clothing, but making them gets you less xp.
I hope this didn't sound discouraging, I had a lot of fun working on my skills. It just took too **edit** long. And those folks selling while they level get a much more thorough knowledge of the styles and colors of our clothing. I always thought it was a little funnywhen I was lower level and hadMasters asking me questions that would have been obvious if they'd slowed down just a little...
1. the game basically caters to the powergrinders, and
2. once one *does* reach Master Tailor, one blissfully forgets about the horribleness of Tailoring's XP structure.
I really found it intolerable, particularly the fact that high-level clothing gets you far *less* XP, in general, than low-level stuff! It's almost like they designed the system specifically to force people into grinding.
I was a strict non-grinder for about 66% of the way to Master Tailor - just made clothing to sell, period, and focused on building my business. That part worked great. I've never had to rely on anything other than making and selling clothes to support myself since Domestic Arts III.
But the insanely slow advancement, particularly for the level III and IV boxes, finally drove me to become a part-time grinder. My rule was basically to grind stuff only when there wasn't something more profitable I could be doing to grow my business, and my self-justification was that I was just spending time and money to get XP that rightfully should've been mine already in a sane XP allocation system.
I'm taking my time with it as much as possible; I usually do custom orders when I have a large block of time available and feel like socializing, but I grind out or mass-produce popular items when I have short amounts of time available.
I'm 0/4/1/2 and I've been at it for a month or so now. I don't mind the slow crawl up as much as I thought I would; my main problem is more in trying to gain sales. It's very difficult for one reason or another to generate strong and/or repeated sales in any way, shape, or form. I can only really make creds by undercutting myself a bit and chucking a lot of stuff on the bazaar.
And for that matter, does UXP work? I've never really noticed much of an XP shift, even though my items fly off the bazaar in Bestine.
As I remember early in my tailor career, at one time I had over 100 packs in my house. Eventually I sold most of them, but it took about two weeks. At launch, items such as packs and even lower end clothing would sell fairly well, and at prices that cant be achieved now.
Today, its very rare to sell half of the 25 items I usually have on the bazaar, So the main problem in tailoring is that the market simply wont purchase all the items you make in a crafting session and if you need exp there just isnt enough demand in a day to sell the items. So the part grind, part sell solution is what most use.
If you only make what you can sell in the current time frame, the progress will be much slower, just due to lack of demand and lack of demand relates to the influx of new players not being anywhere near what it was at launch.
But overall, tailoring is one of the few professions that does not have many game breaking issues, For that I am grateful.
Jaela wrote:
Today, its very rare to sell half of the 25 items I usually have on the bazaar, So the main problem in tailoring is that the market simply wont purchase all the items you make in a crafting session and if you need exp there just isnt enough demand in a day to sell the items. So the part grind, part sell solution is what most use.
Wow, I guess there's a lot of difference between our server economies, my bazaar items all still go pretty quickly. I make basic items in black and white, and some of the fancier "pretty" things (like bustiers and hotpants) in purple, red, and blue, and usually sell what I list in a day or two. Anything I have on the baz that lasts longer than that is just in a less-popular city.
My bazaar sales are what helped me make master as fast as I did. That and the fact that I had an extremely thouroughly stocked vendor. 
What I was implying even if you sold 50 items per day, it is still not nearly enough items to allow you to sell what you can make in just one hour of crafting. So its part grind , part sell but you wont likely sell all you can grind.
NancyJ wrote:
I have vendors but mostly people come in looking for dusters and I have to send them elsewhere. There are 4 other tailors in the area, at least 2 of them are now masters.
My biggest suggestion on that is to check the other tailors vendors and see how their selection is. My old vendor was about 2000m from Kaadara, and there were several tailor shops that usually had map-registered vendors on the way. But even back when I was pretty low level I still had repeat vendor customers. If you stock the things you can make in even 4 or 5colors each, you'll probably have some of the others beat on selection of those lower level items. Sadly, that idea really depends on the tailors around you. I got lucky, the folks near me were high level but didn't pay all that much attention to their vendors. They had a good selection of the usual moneymakers, dusters, cloaks, and things, but rarely had accessory type items or lower level shirts or whatever.
Good luck!