Expulsom by the numbers (rough math analysis)

As a tailor I've been working toward crafting my 385 BoP gear and... I'm starting to lose hope. I ran mythic dungeons no problem to get my hydrocores and craft the 355s. I've been running Heroic Uldir to farm Sanguicells and was able to craft my 370 pants, getting the pattern for my 385 pants. And then, I was out of Expulsom.

Let's recap: in order to craft a 385 BoP item, tailors and leatherworkers need to spend 120 expulsom for one item and 150 for the second (blacksmiths have it considerably better, requiring only 70/100). This includes the cost of crafting the 355 ilvl piece, the 370, and finally the 385, since the only way to get the pattern for the higher ilvl piece is to craft its lower-ilvl incarnation.

So, 120 and 150. Those sure are numbers, but without context that doesn't really *mean* anything. So let's do some math, shall we?

There is no reliable way to farm expulsom. You'll wind up with some by leveling up and replacing gear, and many of us diligently hunt WQs that reward trinkets just for the sake of scrapping them. Aside from that, the most reliable way to generate expulsom is widely held to be crafting bracers en masse and scrapping them.

I generate roughly 1 expulsom per 5 bracers scrapped (this is a *very* rough figure; I just scrapped 24 bracers and only got one expulsom, but have gotten better values previously). Tidespray Linen is going for about 20g a piece on my AH right now, and it takes 10 to craft each pair of bracers. This means that generating 1 expulsom costs roughly 1000g if you're buying your mats at AH. To craft the BoPs, that's a total cost of 120,000g or 150,000g to craft the 385 ilvl items.

Alternatively, say I tried to farm the linen myself. I farmed about 100 in an hour; that value may vary for different classes and different players, of course (let me know if I'm terribly inefficient here). That means that in order to generate the expulsom to craft the 385 items, you'd need to farm linen for 60 hours or 75 hours per item. That's about two full work weeks of straight farming.

Personally I think these values are a little ridiculous. BoEs are selling at comparable rates on my server (cloth sells for less; plate for more), but I believe the cost to craft a BoP profession item should be *substantially* less than what that item would cost on AH; that estimated cost does not account for weeks of farming Sanguicells nor for the effort invested into skilling up your professions. If these BoP items are supposed to be seen as a perk or reward, they happen to be a very expensive one.