Skinning

Skinning is one of the most popular professions for making gold. Thanks to this profession, you'll be able to collect extra resources from slain animals in the form of hides, scales, bones and other useful reagents, and after the kill you can additionally skin the animal to gain even more resources. The higher your profession is leveled and the more knowledge points you invest into talents, the more and higher-quality the resources you'll receive.

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

You can learn the profession from one of three special NPCs.

Tyn — Silvermoon City, The Bazaar

Mathreyn — Silvermoon City, The Bloodmarch

Kuvahn — Zul'Aman, Amani'zar

To obtain loot, you need to kill any animal across the current expansion, then right-click on it — and you'll skin it.

By leveling the Find High-Value Beasts talent, you'll be able to track especially valuable animals — they're marked on the minimap with a knife icon. Killing and skinning such a beast rewards you with rarer and more expensive resources.

You can kill and skin all across the region — from Eversong Woods and Silvermoon City to Harandar, Zul'Aman and the Void Storm.

Unlike other professions, Skinning is leveled by skinning itself. The more hides you skin, the faster you'll level your profession. You don't need to prepare reagents or stand at a workbench to level your skills. All that leveling requires from you is your time.

Leveling from 1 to 100 takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how many beasts you kill and how fast.

To level the profession you specifically need to skin the animal, not just kill it, so pay close attention to whether the mob you've killed can be skinned, as far from every mob can be skinned.

Tools

Besides your profession level and its talents, the game features special tools that add stats to your profession and let you obtain more rare loot. Tools come in green and blue quality. For example, the Thalassian Skinning Knife or the Sun-Blessed Skinning Knife.

• Green ones can always be bought at the auction house under the Profession Equipment section.
• Blue ones, such as the Sunforged Skinning Knife, can be crafted at a blacksmith's crafting order table. This requires artisan's mettle, which you earn by working your profession.

Enhancements and buffs

The game features special potions and items that increase your profession stats, allowing you to obtain rarer reagents when gathering.

To get the most out of Skinning, we recommend using them:

• Haranir Phial of Finesse — increases Deftness and Finesse.
• Haranir Phial of Perception — increases Perception and Finesse.

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

Demand and price

If you plan to make money from the profession, we recommend keeping a close eye on the price of every reagent you gather — for example, by adding them to your favorites at the auction house. The thing is, not all reagents are worth the same, and the tier of the loot doesn't always justify the price. For instance, you might skin plenty of low-tier hides, but they'll be worth the same as top-tier reagents, because players specifically have demand for that type of reagent. You can also process lower reagents into higher ones if their price is more favorable when selling.

Rare enemies

The game has many rare enemies that are animals and can be skinned. They can inhabit the open world as well as dungeons and raids. From rare enemies you can obtain very rare reagents whose quality directly depends on your profession's level.

You can also summon rare beasts using a lure in your talents, but note that the chance of obtaining a rare resource is very low and may not offset the use of rare lures.