WoW Skinning Guide

• Notice: This is a wow skinning guide. Looking for a 1-80 leveling guide? Visit these guides: Team Idemise Guide and Zygor Guides
• If you need a goldmaking guide, these two are the best: Warcraft Gold Secrets Guide and Warcraft Millionaire
• Learn how to best play your character class here: WoW Character Classes Guides

Skinning is one of the primary professions in the World of Warcraft that is incredibly easy to level. In fact, if you look for a WoW skinning guide, you may find that most of them are pretty short. However, there are some things you do need to know about skinning, especially if you want to make the most out of this profession.

Skinning basically involves defeating specific monsters and then using a skinning knife to remove their hides. These monsters include beasts, dragons, some Nerubians, Silithid, and a very few humanoids. Some monsters can’t be skinned. Birds, for example, are technically beasts but are unskinnable. The leather, scales, and hides you gain from skinning can be used in other professions, most often leatherworking. Tailoring, engineering, and blacksmithing also use leather to a lesser degree.

Companion Professions
As mentioned above, skinning works very well when you choose it along with leatherworking. Almost every leatherworking recipe calls for some leather or hides, and with skinning, you will almost always have an abundance of both. If you’re starting a character with the goal of making money, you may want to take skinning along with one of the other two gathering professions, herbalism or mining. Skinning does not require you to track anything on the mini-map, while both herbalism and mining do. Since you can’t track herbs and mining nodes at the same time, it makes more sense to do skinning as one of your two primary professions if you’re aiming to do nothing but gather materials to sell.

Tailoring is probably the other primary profession to take along with skinning. Tailoring doesn’t require materials gathered from a profession, so you don’t have to worry about buying herbs or metal to support it. You’ll be able to sell off most of your leather since tailoring doesn’t use a large amount of it. The gold you make from these sells could then be used to buy the various cloth that tailoring does make use of.

Skinning Tools
In order to skin any corpse, you have to have a skinning knife in your inventory. Skinning knives can be purchased in just about any town from the general good trader. You can also purchase a gnomish army knife, an item that counts as a skinning knife, blacksmithing hammer, mining pick, and several engineering devices.

Learning to be a Skinner – WoW Skinning Guide
You’ll find skinning trainers in all of the major cities and a few of the smaller towns. They will teach you apprentice skinning for a small fee. Once you’ve learned that, all you have to do is right click on the corpse of a monster than can be skinned and you’ll loot whatever leather, leather scrapes, hides, or scales that beast has. Monsters that can be skinned will have “skinnable” under their name in the little box that pops up when you move your mouse pointer over their corpse. As you skin monsters, you’ll see your skill points increase.

Eventually, you’ll notice that the “skinnable” tag in the box has gone from orange to yellow. This means you may no longer get a skill point when you skin them. Yellow monsters will give you a good chance of increasing your skinning. When they turn to green, you will have a small chance of increasing your skill. Finally, corpses that are gray will not increase your skill at all.

When your skinning skill reaches 75, you’ll need to return to a trainer and learn journeyman skinning. This will let you skin higher level beasts. When you hit 125 and your character is level 10, you can train to be an expert. At level 25 and with 200 skill points, you can become an artisan skinner. Master skinners need to be level 40 and have 275 skill points, while grand master skinners must be level 55 and have 350 skill points.

Increasing Your Skinning Level in Other Ways
There are a few different enchantments and items that can increase your skinning level as well. The Enchant Gloves – Skinning enchantment adds +5 skinning to your gloves, while equipping the Zulian Slicer or Finkle’s Skinner will give you +10 to skinning.

Looting
Note that you cannot skin any corpse until everything has been looted off of it. This means you may have to loot some worthless items and then trash them before you can skin.

Skinning Other People’s Kills
If you see someone killing beasts or come across a number of corpses that have not be skinned, you can skin them, even if you didn’t kill them yourself. However, it is polite to ask the other player (if you see one around) if they plan to skin the corpses. Otherwise, you may be accused of stealing someone’s leather. If the person says they don’t mind, follow them around and collect the free leather (which can translate into free gold).

Master of Anatomy
When your skinning reaches skill level 75, you’ll learn Master of Anatomy. This passive ability provides you with +3 to your critical strike rating. As you gain more and more skill in skinning, your Master of Anatomy will level up, eventually maximizing at +40 to your critical strike rating.

Some Issues with Skinning
There are a few different issues with skinning that any potential skinner should remember.

• If a pet (hunter’s pet, warlock’s demon, etc.) kills a monster and no player actually damages it, no player will be able to loot or skin it.
• Monsters killed by guards will also not be skinnable. This is sometimes true even if the player has damaged the monster before the guards attack it.
• Remember to empty your bags frequently or have large bags. You should skin every monster you can, and that will lead to having a lot of leather, hides, and scales in your inventory.

This WoW skinning guide will help you to become a better skinner. I hope you will find tips mentioned in the guide useful.