CRAFTING FOR PROFIT

Silk Headbands and the Bandit Mask

Stormwind or the Undercity / Tailoring 160 / headbands for level 27 / alone

For a week every traveller I meet in the Undercity talks about the White Bandit Mask. A tailor sews it from a bolt of Mageweave, an enchanter breaks it into dust, and the dust sells. I spend two evenings asking where Mageweave comes from. Mostly from creatures above the level cap, it turns out, and the mask needs level 38 to wear on a world that stops at 30. I sew headbands from Silk instead, because Silk is what the creatures I can kill drop.

Why it pays

The Silk Headband takes three Bolt of Silk Cloth and two Fine Thread. A bolt is four Silk Cloth, so a headband is twelve Silk Cloth and two threads. Everyone between level 20 and 30 brings Silk home by the stack, and on the beta it sold by the thousand every day. The headband is a white cap of item level 32 that a level 27 can wear, and at the 7-day medians it sold for more than its silk and thread on all four beta markets, twenty to over fifty of them a day on each. A tailor who makes them to raise the skill past 160 gets the cost back and some silver on top.

Today the headband fetches price unknown and a Silk Cloth price unknown.

What you need

Tailoring 160. Georgio Bolero in Stormwind City and Josef Gregorian in the Undercity teach the headband for 6s 75c, as do a few master tailors elsewhere. The bolt needs Tailoring 125 and costs 4s 50c to learn. Fine Thread costs 1 silver at the trade supplies vendors.

How

1. Learn the headband, and the bolt if you haven't.
2. Compare a bolt at price unknown with four Silk Cloth and buy whichever is cheaper.
3. Make the headbands in one batch while you do something else.
4. Post four or five at a time and put up more as they sell.
5. If a Pattern: White Bandit Mask drops for you, it sells for price unknown. Keep it if you'll still be a tailor when the cap goes up.

What can go wrong

Every tailor between 160 and the next good recipe makes the same headband, so on a busy day the price sinks towards the silk. On one beta market the gain was thin, so read the box before you buy cloth. The bandit mask is the real trap. The travellers' dust figures come from a price addon's disenchanting table, which our data doesn't have, and both the Mageweave and the people who could wear the mask are above the cap. The bolt alone takes five Mageweave Cloth and Tailoring 175.

BASTIAN'S VERDICT A sensible use for Silk while you raise Tailoring. The bandit mask can wait until the cap goes up.