The true cost of your profession (tailoring)

Cross posted from my blog

We all know professions are expensive. Exactly how expensive? Wowwiki says it will cost you about 1200-1500 to skill up to 375 on tailoring. I was hoping I can find something that will give me a break down on how the money would be spent. To my disappointment this data was not readily available. So I decided to rely on myself and plot out the relationship between gold spent and skill gained in the tailoring profession.

Here is how I calculated the base cost. 1). I used WOWWiki's powerleveling guide as the base to plot out how someone would power level from level 0-375. 2). I used WOWhead to look up cost of each components needed to get the skill ups (price is current as of 6/30/08). 3). I plotted skill gain against cost required for leveling up on a XY plot.

This guide is for calculating material cost only. I didn't take into account the money necessary to train on the recipes needed. My eventual goal is to compare resource required to power level all professions. In this regard I imagine the recipe costs will even itself out across professions.

Here is a plot of gold cost against 1-375 tailoring. X axis is skill point, Y axis is cost in gold pieces.


The most striking thing about this graph is that tailoring is incrediblely inexpensive to level if you are only shooting for 360. As depicted by the figure above. The cost of the last 10 points is a whooping 1100 which is majority of the power leveling cost. If you remove the last data point and graph again you will get something like this.
Observe they are serveral dips in the cost structures corresponding to where you can turn raw cloth pieces into bolts of cloth.

If you start graphing running total of tailoring skills against total money spent up to the point you get something like this.

A total of 1300 GP to powerlevel tailoring from 1-375 which is pretty close to what WOWwiki had suggested. Now let's observe the difference with that last data point removed.
Essentially if you will only need to spend about 220 to power level to 360. A bargain comparing to a profession like enchanting which I plan to cover next.