Skinning The War Within

Skinning is one of the most popular professions for earning gold. With this profession, you can obtain additional resources — such as hides, bones, and other useful reagents — from slain animals. After killing an animal, you can skin it to gather even more resources. The higher your profession level and the more knowledge points you’ve invested in talents, the more and better resources you’ll get.

This profession pairs perfectly with Leatherworking: Skinning provides you with reagents, while Leatherworking lets you craft various pieces of equipment from them or create rarer reagents to sell to other players.

You can learn the profession from one of two special NPCs:

Ginnad — Dornogal

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To gather resources, kill any animal in the current expansion and then right‑click on it to skin it.

Unlike other professions, Skinning levels up directly through skinning animals. The more hides you gather, the faster your profession will level. You don’t need to prepare reagents or stand at a workbench to level your skills — all you need is time. Leveling from 1 to 100 takes between 30 minutes and a couple of hours, depending on how many beasts you kill and how quickly you skin them.

To level the profession, you must actually skin the animal — not just kill it. So pay close attention to whether a slain mob can be skinned, as not all mobs are skinnable.

Tools

Besides your profession level and talents, the game features special tools that add stats to your profession and let you get more rare loot. Tools come in green and blue quality. For example, Artisan’s Skinning Knife.

• Green tools can always be bought on the auction house under the Profession Equipment section.
• Blue tools can be crafted via the Order Table. This requires 300 Artisan’s Insight, which you can earn by practicing your craft.

Enhancements and Buffs

The game offers special potions and items that boost your profession stats, letting you get rarer reagents while crafting. To maximize your Skinning gains, we recommend using all of them:

• Clawsteel Grinding Stone
• Vial of Fortunate Seasons
• New Moon Firewater

Some potions and elixirs can be quite expensive, so we recommend using them only after you’ve leveled your profession to 100, equipped quality gear for both your character and profession, and invested some talent points. Otherwise, the cost of potions might not pay off.

Demand and Pricing

If you plan to earn gold with this profession, we recommend keeping a close eye on the prices of all reagents you gather. For example, you can add them to your auction house favorites. Not all reagents are priced equally, and the level of your gatherings doesn’t always justify the price. For instance, you might gather a lot of low‑level reagents that cost the same as high‑level ones if players are in demand of that specific reagent type. You can also process lower‑tier reagents into higher‑tier ones if their sale price is more profitable.

Rare Enemies

There are many rare enemies in the game that are animals and can be skinned. They can appear in the open world, dungeons, and raids. From rare enemies, you can get very rare reagents, the quality of which depends directly on your profession level. You can also summon rare animals using lures from your talents. However, note that the chance of obtaining a rare resource is very low and may not justify the use of rare lures.

If you’re interested in leveling other professions, we’ve prepared separate guides for you:

• Engineering;
• Tailoring;
• Cooking;
• Jewelcrafting;
• Alchemy;
• Inscription;
• Enchanting;
• Blacksmithing;
• Leatherworking.

And also for gathering professions:

• Mining;
• Herbalism;
• Skinning.