Trade Skills
Trade skills are an important part of the development of every Vah Shir; for beastlords, tailoring is essential, and fletching may also be attractive. With any trade skill, you can put in practice points to raise the level to 21, and no further; unlike other skills, the first practice point only ever takes you to 1 in the skill. With some skills, such as jewelry, putting in the full 21 points is strongly recommended; this doesn't apply to the Vah Shir skills. Don't bother to train tailoring. If you have access to Absymal Sea or Crescent Reach, ignore training points, and just do the quests, which will give you up to 54 skill in any trade you choose (or all of them).
Tailoring is useful to make patchwork armor to fill in the gaps at newbie levels; it can also make weight reduction bags at higher skill levels. However, a skill in tailoring is essential to make the beastlord claws, and later will be required to a high level to make the sonic wolf bane weapons and the Champion's Cape. As silk threads are a no fail combine, you should use these (recipe is to combine two shadeling silks in your beastlord tailoring kit to make one thread) to raise your skill level to 15 before attempting anything else. Then use the threads you have created to make first bandages, then your handwraps. Bandages should become trivial at 21; handwraps have a much higher trivial (probably 25 or more). Then use purchased patterns, from the merchant in Shadeweavers, to make tattered hopperhide armor for yourself and friends from damaged hopperhides, to raise your skill to 26. Save all quality (low, medium and high) hopperhides for later stages in the quests.
By this time you will have started the tailoring quest from Broker Fahaar. The rough belt strap requires a medium quality hide, and trivials at 31 (??); unfortunately, the belts don't stack, so you can't just churn these out until the trivial is reached, while saving them for the next step of skilling up. Skill raises seem to slow as you approach the trivial, so swap to other items with higher trivials. I'd suggest collecting spider silk (Upper Guk is a good place from your mid 20s up to gather these, East Karana is considered to be the best place to farm spider silks, 30+), and making raw silk armor to 36. The next stage from the quest is to make a black chitin belt and a bone beaded belt. These require items from the pit and from Hollowshade Moor; and will boost skill to 41?? and 56?? respectively. The grimling finger bones seem to drop rarely from any grimling in Hollowshade. Before making these, try the thin leather straps required for the beastlord claws quest from Kery Miann (trivial > 41); these require high quality pelts. The best approach to follow depends on how many of the various hides you have accumulated; to add to the mix, the most useful other tailoring recipes for skilling up in Shar Vahl are weight reducing tailored bags: a large bag needs skill level 41, and uses a medium quality hide plus a silk cord (combine three silk threads to make the cord). At trivial level 88 is a tailored backpack - this can sell in Bazaar for 40 - 100pp, so treasure any you make, and try to use other recipes to skill up on; a backpack requires a backpack pattern (from the Shadeweavers vendor) plus a high quality hide. Probably the best way to skill up involves hunting greyhoppers in Marus Seru. Make greyhopper hide armor - masks will take you to 86?, and boots to 95. At this point you will be well up to the trivial needed for the next stage in the tailoring quest, which is using owlbear feathers, sonic wolf hides and shadeling silk threads to make owlbear feathered leggings (trivial 95). The next step, making six owlbear tunics, isn't too bad a way of getting to 135 (which is their trivial point). It will involve a lot of hunting of owlbears in Hollowshade, but you stand a chance of getting some of the drops from the war, and also of getting the perfect owlbear pelts required for making a Rallic pack, which sells for a reasonable price in the Bazaar. Given that the alternative skill up for this stage is making wu's armor, which is far more complex, I am surprised that more tailors don't get the faction to do this.
The other tailoring items with higher trivials for the tailoring quest require the Hollowshade Moor zone to be in a stable state - something that never happened the first time I ran through this sequence. However, now that the war has been fixed, it is much easier to collect the necessary drops.
See the next section for details of the fletching quest.
As always, try to start these quests at a stage when you will gain experience from collecting the items required - otherwise the more standard way of skilling up on Norrath, which involves buying all the ingredients, will be more attractive. Tailoring is especially frustrating in this regard, as the only possibly path to skilling up involves collecting drops, and tailoring drops are especially rare - grimling finger bones, for example, drop rarely from any grimling, and I have seen a grand total of under 5; and this despite running the Hollowshade war for a week solid, involving mass destruction of grimlings.
For pottery, brewing, and most likely fletching, baking and smithing, a judicious mix of quest skill ups and purchased item skill ups will give the most satisfaction. Treat the skill quests as a way of substituting some (a lot) of your hunting time against the shortage of money in the Shar Vahl area. As well as www.eqtraders.com, see the trade skills guides written by Xanthe, at www.geocities.com/shadowknight57/.