Meet Ohnekase: Professions Series, Part One. Skinning.

Meet Ohnekase

Deathwing US

So, we have met him on a number of occasions.  He helped teach us the some of the basics of Gold Making:  Looting, maximizing gold, and using external sites and addons.  Today, he is going to help us learn a profession and use it to make money.  Today, we are talking about Skinning.

Professions

Before we get into making ourselves some money, lets talk about what a profession is briefly.  Professions are  extra skills that you can train to allow your character to gather materials as he/she is out doing things, or they can be used to get materials to make items.  They are two kinds of professions:  Primary professions, which are restricted to two of these professions; and Secondary professions, which every character can pick up.  The reason that these interest us for this article is that every single profession (with the possible exception of First aid) can be used to make us money.  So, lets talk about the Primary and Secondary professions, then we will get into Skinning.

Primary:  These professions are also split into two types:  Gathering professions and Crafting professions.  Gathering professions are the professions that help you get materials that can help you or others to craft their items.  Crafting professions take those items and make other items that usually have a more direct use in the game.  An example would be that a gathering professions would gather something like Ore, and a crafting professions would use that ore to make armor and weapons.  The Gathering professions are Skinning, Mining, Herbalism, Enchanting, and Tailoring.  The Crafting Professions are Blacksmithing, Engineering, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Inscription, Enchanting, and Tailoring (yes Enchanting and Tailoring are both gathering and crafting professions).

Secondary:  There are four secondary professions:  Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, and Archaeology.  These professions are extra things that you can do and can give you an edge while you are playing the game.  The food you cook can up your stats for a time, Fishing can find neat items and can be used in cooking, First Aid gives you a heal for a good chunk of your health, and Archeology can help you find items, pets, and mounts that are useful.  For gold making, you can definitely make some good money using Cooking and Fishing, and Archaeology does give you money for the things you find.  We will likely talk about Fishing and Cooking later.

To learn a profession, simply ask a guard where you can find a profession trainer (or, if you are at the first town, there is usually someone who can train you in any of the basic professions), then go to the trainer and pay them some gold to learn it.

So, lets talk Skinning

Skinning is a great professions.  Simply put, Skinning allows us to get extra materials from the corpses of animals.  I personally like this cause it allows us to make some good money while we are out and about.  In addition, as we go along, it will give us another benefit of a small bump to our critical strike chance.  If we wanted to, we can use the leather and hide we get for other professions, mainly leatherworking.  However,  because there are other people who also want leather and hide, we can sell it on the auction house for a good chunk of money.

Lets take a look at theunderminejournal.com to see how much the materials we can get will make us.

So, you may remember in the last article that I told you that the Undermine Journal had some information already set aside so we can look at it.  Well, once you get onto the site and look at your server, check out the "Consumables" Tab and notice the sub-tab "Skinning".  That should give us some information on pricing for what we are going for. 

I grabbed the classic Leather prices because these are what we will really find before level 60.  The first thing we will find is Light Leather, and lets look at that Price and Mean Price.  For one piece of leather (which will probably be gotten while we are our questing and such anyway), we can get probably somewhere between 50 silver and 75 silver from it.  That goes up to 10 gold for 20 of them (not hard to get).  So, for starting out, there is a nice little bit of money to be made on these, all for just taking one extra step after we kill monsters.

So, lets try this out in game.

Ohnekase is learnin good...

So, first, lets ask a guard where to go to learn this.

Excuse, Mr Guard.  I am looking to learn to skin dead animals, can you help?

OK, in Old Town.  Excellent.

Sweet, now I can skin things

Ok, so now we know Skinning, lets grab a Skinning Knife (bought from the leatherworking supply vendor), and head back to Goldshire to see what this can do for us.

Tip:  Don't forget to get your Skinning Knife.  I have done it, it is irritating.

Let's Get Skinning


So, to skin things, it is very easy.  Once you have your skinning knife, simply go kill an (in our case, we want the wolves, bears, and boars around Goldshire), then loot them.

Woot, Stuff.

You will see a new Icon over them and the tooltip will tell you you can skin them.

Click on them again (as though you are looting them again), it will give you a bar and you will get some loot for them.

Leather Scraps.....nice, I think.

So, that is the basics of Skinning.  I am going to take 15 minutes and run around a kill Boars and Bears and such.  That way, we can see what you can get in a short time (or offhand while you are questing and leveling and such).

Watch out, its coming right for us!

We can't use the line "Watch out, its coming right for us."
We can however, "thin out the numbers".

Join us later, where we will "Thin out the numbers" of some
endangered species.

NOTE: Ohnekase nor the writer do not condone killing endangered species.
Please take humor in these South Park references.

15 Minutes later...(ish)

Ok, so after 15 minutes, what did I get, all in all.

14 Light Leather, 20 Ruined Leather Scraps
10 Chunks of Boar Meat, and 1 Malachite

So, in terms of leather, we got Light Leather and Ruined Leather Scraps.  In terms of other stuff that I think I can sell, I got some more Chunks of Boar Meat and a got a green quality item, Malachite.  Lets check them on theunderminejournal

Alright, so looking these over it looks like I can get quite a bit of gold for them.  They all sell for a reasonable price.

So, lets fly to Stormwind and try and sell them.

Hi, I have a bunch of stuff I don't need.  Know anyone that wants them?

Lets See what the AH looks for each of them and how much I want to put them up for

Ok, so the Light Leather is first.  It looks like someone put several up for really cheap (10 silver for that stack), but I think I can get more from that (especially because the mean price we have seen is 50 silver).  So lets undercut the second one.

The Ruined Leather Scraps don't have any large variance, and I don't know how well these will sell, so i am just going to undercut the bottom one and see what happens.

Ok, so here is some more Chunks of Boar Meat.  It looks like my original one got undercut again, but I will try to put the stack up for just under the lowest bid (each).

Again, the Malachite I don't know a lot about, but I dont see a problem with putting it up for 50 silver.  In my experience, that seems reasonable.


We have put a bunch of stuff up, lets see how they sell later.  I am going to come back to them and I will post more then...

Later...

Looks like our Strange Dust we bought from last week sold.  That is pretty cool.

Nice, everything sold.

So it looks like almost everything sold.  Lets go ahead and take a look at what we ended up with.

Nice.  So we have enough for our first mount and other stuff.

Not a bad start.  And that is really with very little work.  I would think that even just keeping this up, and skinning where we can and selling, we could get enough to have all of our mounts just as we level (20, 40, etc)  Not too shabby.

Conclusion

I really like Skinning as a profession.  Not as many people do it, so you get to double dip on skinning your own mobs, and any other skinnable mobs that happen to be dead and looted.  And, as we have seen, even a few of those sell pretty well.  I would recommend it to use while you are leveling up.

Thank you for reading and....

See ya next time....