Help! My skill counters are stuck!Follow

Hunter, L34, professions skinning and leather working.

I progressed rapidly through apprentice leather worker and journeyman skinner, but now I'm stuck. Skinning is stuck at 231/300 and learher working at 57/75 and neither will move upwards no matter how many beasts I kill and skin or how many recipes I make.

Any idea what might be wrong?????

Like a lot of people, I have the opposite problem. I'm leveling up a scribe to add to my stable (the worgen I used to do all the new quests in that area). Even with no heirlooms and not doing any dungeons/BGs, I have to be very careful to skin everything skinnable when I encounter them, and go a bit out of my way to hit herb nodes (she'll be a scribe eventually, that might be the worst profession to level with, so I have two gathering for now). If I don't, I hit a point where I have quests that are only green to me but I the skins/herbs require more skill than I've been able to accumulate.

The upshot: don't hang around a zone too long, and don't rush through, otherwise your gathering will get out of sync with your questing/gear.

Actually skinning is bugged right now. Even while skinning gray beasts, you will get skill ups at the rate that you do with green beasts. It's supposed to be fixed in 4.2, so take advantage of it now while you can. I learned this recently when I leveled my DK's skinning with my druid's leatherworking.

I honestly have no idea why your tradeskills would stop skilling up at such a random level though. I'd submit a ticket and see if a GM can help you figure it out.

Edited, Jun 14th 2011 10:02pm by PigtailsOfDoom

If the recipe is orange you will get a skill up. If the recipe is yellow there is a good chance to get a skill up. If it is green there is a slight chance and no chance if the recipe is grey.

The thing about skinning is as you level the mobs get harder and higher in level and drop different leather. So if your leatherworking is falling behind then you'll have to go back and skin lower level mobs to get the light leather. After you finish with the light leather recipes you'll start working on medium, then heavy, then what rugged I believe and so on.

(Sigh)

In order to keep my leather worker in light hides so he can level up, I have become something that I detest in "real" history - a hide hunter. Like the boyos who wiped out the buffalo, you pretty much have to kill every beast you come across just to keep yourself in hides.

You should still be working light leather gear at that skill level - maybe the stuff you're making is grey?

Recipes

You've got a lot of boring farming ahead of you though if you've been AHing instead of saving all that leather that got you to 231 - back to the starter zones with you to slaughter and skin grey critters.

A good rule of thumb is to only vendor grey items out of hand. These items either never had a use, or the game was changed so that while they still drop, (for one example) the recipe that used to require the item was simplified, so the item's purpose is now gone.

Most white items do have a use. Anytime that is true, you can find people who are willing to pay for the ability to make use of it without having to find one themselves. Mind you, if the item is common enough, they'll only pay basically the vendor price so it's not worth the hassle - but if it's uncommon enough, it can be worth orders of magnitude more.

Green items even more so. In the old days, before heirlooms, certain items would be worth many times the value of relatively similar items due to PvP "twinking". The same principle still holds for some low-level recipes which are green because they aren't high-level or even high-powered, but are immensely rare, and some of them are worth hundreds.

Keep in mind, especially if you find yourself leveling skinning - if it's hard to farm (for whatever reason), there's probably more demand than supply because the general population flows through the easy parts of the world.