Skinners harvest the skins (leathers, hides & scales) from beasts primarily of use with the Leatherworking profession but other professions have a few crafted items that require leather too. It can also be taken alone, without Leatherworking, to sell on to other players for a good profit. As it can be learnt at a character level of 1, it’s useful for bringing in revenue from the very start of a character’s life.

Skinning is a Primary Gathering Profession and therefore counts towards your 2 primary profession limit.

How do I become a Skinner?

You need to seek out a Skinning Trainer. There is usually an Leatherworking trainer closeby too which you’ll need for your knife. All Skinning Trainers can train you to all ranks from character level 1.

You can train to four ranks of proficiency and each has certain prerequisites that you need to meet before you are able to progress to the next rank of proficiency.

1. Training costs are reduced by 10% in cities you have an ‘Honored’ Reputation.

How do I get skins?

The only thing you need is a skinning knife which you can pick up any trade goods vendor for a few copper pieces. You need to have the knife in one of your bags, not your bank but you will never need to equip it to skin something. It works like the mining pick in mining in that you automatically access it when you click on the corpse of a skinnable beast, there’s no action of actually skinning with the knife, the skin just comes off while you rub your hands together. ’tis magic.

After you’ve killed a beast you will need to loot it first. If it’s not looted it can not be skinned. Any player in your group can loot it. Then hover your cursor over its corpse and you will see a message (as on the left) telling you if something is skinnable. If it is merely right click and you will begin to skin it. If you hold down the Shift key at the same time any skin you take will automatically be looted and sent to one of your bags. Otherwise you’ll just get the normal loot box as seen here. You do not have to loot the corpse to get the skill raise in skinning, so if you have no room (skinning is a space hog) you can leave the skin.

Depending on the level of the kill you may or may not receive a point in skinning when you skin. The codes are as follows:

Grey = No skill increase.
Green = Rare chance of your skill increases
Yellow = Sometimes your skill in increase
Orange = Will always gain a skill point
Red = Can not skin

As you can see from that list the Persterhide Snarler has only a rare chance of adding a skill point to skinning when skinned (because the text is green). So to level up your skinning skill find beasts that produce yellow or orange ’skinnable’ text.

As is the case with fishing if you divide your skinning skill by 5 you should be skinning in an area where beasts are round about that level. So if you have a skinning skill of 100, that would mean you would be best suited to skinning in an area populated by level 20ish beasts.

As your skinning skill level increases you will be able to skin and level in higher level areas from beasts that produce better quality skins. Before you reach your maximum skinning level remember to train to the next rank (as detailed above) because once you hit the cap for that rank you can’t level the skill no matter what you skin.

What do I do with the skins?

Skinning is a great money spinner. You are able to sell to Blacksmiths, Tailoring and Engineers who use a fair amount of leather but the Leatherworker will require the most and therefore you are able to sell to Leatherworkers who have not taken the skinning skill or can no longer be bothered to collect and store skins. Each server has a different economy so observe the auction house and although you can’t see how much a commodity eventually sells for you can see what the highest bids are and the (often ridiculously inflated) ‘Buy Out’ price and get some idea of the market value of your skins.

The natural pairing with skinning however it to learn Leatherworking yourself so you are able to follow patterns (learnt at a Trainer) and fashion your own items to wear (if you’re unable to wear mail items) and to sell on. You can also make armor kits which can be applied to any chest, legs, hands or feet armor to increase armor value (up to +32) and as most characters will go through many outfit changes through their lifespan there’s a good market for those also.

Below is a list of all the skins that a skinner can gather and if you follow the links it will show you where the beasts that drop them are located. Marked below some of the skins is deatils of when the skin can be processed into something else through the use of Leatherworking.

Skin	Ilvl	Icon	Skin	Ilvl	Icon
Shiny Fish Scales	1		Thick Hide 1 + 1 deeprock salt = 1 Cured Thick Hide	40
Ruined Leather Scraps 3 x = 1 Light Leather	5		Thick Leather 6 x = 1 Rugged Leather	40
Light Hide 1 + 1 salt = 1 Cured Light Hide	10		Chimera Leather	50
Light Leather 4 x = 1 Medium Leather	10		Devilsaur Leather	50
Medium Hide 1 + 1 salt = 1 Cured Light Hide	20		Frostsaber Leather	50
Medium Leather 5 x = 1 Heavy Leather	20		Rugged Hide	50
Heavy Hide 1 + 3 salt = 1 Cured Heavy Hide	30		Rugged Leather	50
Heavy Leather 6 x = 1 Thick Leather	30		Warbear	50
			Core Leather	60

Some of these skins can be further processed by leatherworkers to produce cured hides, again for use in Leatherworking. Below is a tiny selection of some of the items skins can go on to make with Leatherworking.

Toughened Leather Armor	Medium Armor Kit	Dark Leather Shoulders	Heavy Leather Ammo Pouch	Wolfshead Helm

Is there anything else I should know about Skinning?

Etiquette - As skinnable corpses can be skinned by anyone with the skill you can skin beasts that other people have killed and cruicially may wish to skin for themselves. Skinning a corpse that you know another Skinner is about to skin will make you a pleb of the tallest order. If you are fighting a number of beasts in a small area, do not loot the corpse until you’ve cleared the area. This will prevent some nob jocky from leaping in and stealing your skin.

Bonus Equipment - There are only two bonuses that Skinners can gain. One is through an Enchant and the other is the aptly named ‘Finkle’s Skinner‘ dropped by him know only as ‘The Beast’. Unlike the normal skinners knife this one will need to be equipped to gain the +10 bonus to skinning that it carries. True to his name The Beast is a beast class MoB and therefore can be skinned. You need to be a skinning level of 310 to skin him so your skinning skill needs to be maxed (300) so with this equipped you can skin him to get the Pristine Hide of the Beast which is required for a number of quests.

You will also still need to carry your skinning knife in your bag. As a ‘dagger’ class weapons unfortunately Paladins will not be able to equip it as they can’t learn to use daggers.

The second bonus comes through an Enchantment to gloves as detailed here.

Can I unlearn Skinning?

You can unlearn professions for free any number of times. Go to your skills panel (press K). Click on the Profession you wish to unlearn and a small icon will appear next to it and clicking on this will unlearn the skill. Be aware you will lose all associated recipes and support skills too and if you wish you hadn’t unlearnt it (eek!) you will have to start your training again at Apprentice level and work you way up again. Click the image on the right for a fully captioned shot. Use this feature with caution, Blizzard will not undo a mistake of this nature.

To recap on Skinning Basics

• Learning skinning costs money
• You can train Skinning at character level 1
• You need only a basic skinning knife throughout your entire career as a skinner.
• Skinning is the perfect partner to Leatherworking
• Leathers stack to 10, hides to 5, cured hides (made with Leatherworking) to 10
• Skinning breaks stealth
• No skins are soubound
• Do not need to have killed the beast in order to skin it
• Corpses must be looted before they can be skinned
• Only beast class MoBs can be skinned and even then not all of those are skinnable

Further Skinning Reading & Resources

List of Skinning Trainers

		Professions Forum
		Profession UIs/Mods
		WWN Data

Patch changes to Skinning

Patch 1.7.0 (13 September 2005)

• Ferra can now be skinned.

Patch 1.3.0 - 22 March 2005

• Finkle’s Skinner is now Main hand only.

Patch 1.2.0 - 17 December 2004

• Decrepit Darkhounds are now skinnable. 

Patch 1.2.0 - 21 December 2004

• Autoloot has been fixed to work with skinning.