Peter's Blog

Skinning

Running Maezyn around Westfall I got really hooked on skinning, killing things just for the light leather. It's a great gathering profession because you can run with the minimap on tracking and it only adds two seconds to your looting if you shift-skin and keep plenty of free bag space. I was killing things just to skin them. With the aid of the TBags addon sorting my inventory I am becoming skilled at destroying vendor trash while running to the next kill. Tbags always puts this trash in the top right corner:

It takes time to get used to it but things are grouped consistantly: top left is ammo, top right is free space and vendor trash, the row below is quest items and the rows below that are profession materials, food ingredients and buffs and pots at the bottom. I've been using it so long now that I just know where to look for things. Green drops? Centre right. Bandages? Bottom left. Wonderful. If I could have just one addon it would have to be TBags.

Since my mining was lacklustre (skill 6) compared to skinning (75) I decided to bin mining and take up Leatherworking. It made sense since, for example, I could convert all the leather scraps I had been vendoring into even more leather. I did this and had enough leather on me to powerlevel into the fifties mainly on armour kits.

On to Lakeshire and more questing and skinning. I went wild on the boars and dragon whelps, as my skill increased I got more leather (maybe two pieces per kill) and I started getting medium leather drops. From the whelps I was getting dragon scales which I presumed could make something good.

As a side note, I'm not sure why the whelps dropped money (like a humanoid) but could be skinned (like a beast). What do dragon whelps spend their money on? And why would one be carrying a recipe for roast pork? Maybe the fire breath and the neighbouring boars explain this one.

At the end of the session my Skinning was at the 150 cap and I had to train to expert to raise the cap to 225. I had enough leather to get the leatherworking to 87, making things like gloves and ammo pouches that didn't use a lot of leather and vendored for copper.

When I researched what the whelp scales were used for there was this and this okish items for a level 15 character. Maezyn is now level 18. The whelps were levels 17-18. So lets think about this, to get the mats you fight equal level mobs and the reward is something that you can use youself if you want suboptimal gear or sell to players a couple of levels below you.

Or just vendor stacks of light leather easily for 1g50 apiece.

/disillusioned

Then again:

• It's not like hunters struggle to level with sub-optimal armour
• I'm aware that it's Blizzard's way of motivating people to use the Auction House and drive the economy

Can't wait to start skinning in Nagrand though

Not One but Two Screenshots

Here's Maezyn and Beefy her boar