What is Skinning?
Posted by Admin on June 05 2007 02:04:56
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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.
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.