Artisan Skinning > Worth it? (general skinning thoughts)Follow

Have any of you paid the 5g for Artisan Skinning training? The description is vague. Is it interesting? WHat's it like? What kind of items to you end up with?



In my opinion, skinning skills up way too quickly. My skill is maxed out until I decide to part with 5g. I'm no expert money maker ... it's never been a huge priority... I spend it as I make it... so 5g is a lot to me when I don't really know what it gets me.



I'm seriously thinking about switching to mining/engineering. I started out on the skinning/tailoring tract. I was well into expert tailoring when I switched to enchanting. I'm not happy enchanting. It's pretty... all the dusts and shards... but at least on stormreaver, the market is flooded with mats and frankly it's hard to find people to give enchants to for free at the lower levels.



Mining is not my favorite, but it goes well with engineering. I like gadgets. I think it'll be fine. Mining does not seem to skill up anywhere nearly as quickly as skinning does. Looks like I'll be running up and down the barrens a lot once more while I get that mining skill up.




But before I leave skinning behind... any advice?

Umm, at some point you're going to have to upgrade your skinning to artisan, or give it up. I know that there is some formula to determine what you are able to skin, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it is.... I'll tell you this, I'm lvl 60, I have 300 skinning, and I still fail at skinning mobs lvl 58+ sometimes. Though a second try will usually get it.
If I want to to skin something that is lvl 61+ (UpperBRS Dragonkin) I need to whip out finkles skinner. And ever then I can fail occasionally.
If you can skin everything you fight right now, then do not bother buying artisan, but save up for it, or be prepared to give up high level leatherworking. You need it eventually.

as high as your skill is, and it sounds like you don't use it for leatherworking bc then you would know why 300 skinning is useful, i'm surprised you don't have more gold such that 5g is insignificant. at lvl 43 and 250 skinning, i have 200g (after getting my mount). i can easily plop 5g on multiple trade skills and class abilities and not feel a punch. so something is not right about what you've been doing with your skins (unless you gave them away to friends and guildies, that is ok).

so question what you're doing with your skins first. it is true that getting heavy skins or lower is enough to get you some money here and there. i guess that was around level 30 character.

but the other thing to do is, map out in your mind if you want alt characters (most people will) and what trade skills those characters might do. does a dwarven hunter make it easier to enter mines and spot out treasures and ore veins? or maybe a rogue that can stealth into some ore spots without fighting everything on the way in. if you think this is a nice feature, then you dont have to change your current char to go into mining if he's not one of those classes or races.

on the other hand, as you said, skinning is easy to raise and you may like a certain craft so much that you want to do it on several chars. if that's the case, think of it as fun rather than a chore.

that's what will get you to enjoy any craft you do on any char.

what you get from a skin depends on two things(other than luck of course): the first is what lvl the mob is. that is pretty simple-higher lvl mob=better stuff. for example a lvl 10-15 mob can give you light leather but it is much more likely to drop from a 16+ mob. the second factor in determining what you get is how high your skinig lvl is. you get better stuff from mobs closer to your maximum skin lvl. so a yellow skinible mob will more often give better stuff than a green skin and likewise a green skin will give you something better than a grey one most of the time.

I'm fairly sure skinning level has nothing to do with the drops you get. I'd almost stake.. uhh.. my character's life on it ;)

An example: Mobs at L50 start to drop rugged leather. Not too often, but they do a decent amount. You'll still get thick leather fairly often. You won't have 300 skinning yet either, most likely. As you progress to killing L55+ monsters, your skinning will probably hit 300, and you'll get rugged leather more often as you are killing higher level monsters. If you go back to killing those L50 monsters again, you'll get rugged leather/thick leather at the exact same ratio you were when your skinning was not at 300.

Unless you've seen a post from Blizzard stating otherwise (I haven't), I'm fairly sure this is correct. Feel free to test it and prove me wrong, I like surprises ;) If you don't like my example, it'd work better if you compared the change-over from heavy leather to thick leather, since then you're almost guaranteed to not have 300 skinning yet. Some people may get 300 before they start killing L50's, skinning tends to go up very fast.

Well to be fair, you could read the last sentence of my post.

I havent skilled up skinning in a long time... that's also why I suggested comparing the difference between going from heavy to thick and the rates at which you get it, since you're a lot further from the cap at that point...

The thing with skinning is you could get it to 300 fairly easy at L35 just by following people around in the right zones... you'd probably annoy the hell out of them if they felt obligated to save you from plaguebats that agro you from a million miles away while you try to skin the carcasses they leave behind.