A tailoring adventure

And you thought that crafting in World of Warcraft was staid and boring...

I haven't played my level 70 mage a lot in Wrath of the Lich King yet, and that won't change anytime soon. But he does have inscription and tailoring, and so I've been leveling his tradeskills. Whenever frostweave cloth was reasonably priced (30 gold or less per stack), I bought it and skilled my tailoring with it. So I arrived at the point where I can make level 80 epics out of the new WotLK specialized tissues: Ebonweave, moonshroud, and spellweave. As you can create those tissues only once every 4 days, I thought it would be a good idea to start making those now.

But then I discovered a small problem with that plan: To make the special cloth, you need to be at special locations. And while you can make all three types with any tailor of the right skill level, you will produce 2 cloth per recipe in the one field you specialized in. My mage had chosen shadoweave tailoring in the Burning Crusade, so now I need to make ebonweave for maximum efficiency. But to do so, I would need to be at the Altar of the Ebon Depths in the Forgotten Depths under Icecrown Citadel, a hard to reach place in a level 80 zone. One would need to be ridiculously stupid to try to get there at level 70, without a flying mount. So, of course, I went.

I made my way without problems to Crystalsong Forest, and entered Icecrown from there. But the only way to get to the Icecrown Citadel from there is to do a huge semi-circle around Ymirheim, crossing a large plains full of level 80 undead armies. So of course I died. And died again, and again, and again. Every time I rezzed a little bit further towards my goal, using blink and invisibility when possible to approach further. After a long and gruesome journey I finally reached Icecrown Citadel and jumped into the Forgotten Depths. But approaching the altar I aggro one of the level 80 lurkers there, and can't get rid of him. No problem, I'll just die once more, right? Unfortunately it turns out that when you die in the Forgotten Depths, you don't turn into a ghost that can travel back to his corpse. You just pop up alive in Ymirheim, a long way from Icecrown Citadel.

At that point I gave up my plan to make ebonweave. The ebonweave epics will be nice one day for my mage, having spell hit rating, but aren't useful for my priest who is already 80. The big change in Wrath of the Lich King crafting is that the epics you craft aren't restricted to the crafter any more. So I traveled to Shattrath, paid 170 gold to change specialization from shadow to moon, got the mats for moonshroud, went to the much easier to reach location in Dragonblight and made the moonshroud there. I also picked up some cheap moonshroud on the AH, and already made the gloves and sent them to my priest. There are only 2 epics of each type, gloves and robe, and in comparison with the AH prices for a single cloth like that, respecialization is cheap. I'll just go back to shadoweave tailoring when I need it.

Nevertheless I'm wondering what design genius decided to make the crafting of spellweave (near Nexus in Borean Tundra) and moonshroud easily accessible for level 70, but making the crafting of ebonweave virtually impossible without at least having level 77. Aren't the three specializations supposed to be equal?