WoW Leatherworking Gold Guide

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Leatherworking

As with any profession, you can make quite a bit of gold via Leatherworking. If you want to make a lot of gold as a Leatherworker, you will have to spread out your efforts a bit more and create a lot of different items. 

There are no items that you will sell dozens of in a day (aside from perhaps leg enchants) but rather a lot of different items which you can sell a few of each day. You will have to a lot of different items in order to earn a lot of gold with this profession. 

Downside to Leatherworking

The major downside of Leatherworking is that it is not as easy to get materials off the auction house. Since there is not as much demand for leather, there are not as many skinners around supply leather. 

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You should not have a problem finding the most of the current top tier materials, but it can be hard to find the leathers for low level recipes. Additionally, finding enough of the scales such as Blackened Dragonscales and Deepsea Scales on the auction house is tough. 

Because of this, I recommend that you do not take up Leatherworking on a low-population server, particularly if your faction makes up the minority of your low population server. Otherwise, there will just not be enough resources on the auction house for you to craft with.  

You could always take up skinning yourself, but the amount of time you would have to spend skinning would hardly be worth it. If you are on a low population server and still really want to do leatherworking, there are indeed a few profitable recipes that you can still craft in order to make some money, so do not fret too much. 

With that said, now we will look at the different things you can sell for gold: 

Leg Enchants

The most popular Leatherworking item will always be leg enchants. All of the following items are reliable sellers: 

·         Charscale Leg Armor 

·         Dragonbone Leg Armor (best seller) 

·         Twilight Leg Armor 

·         Scorched Leg Armor 

These are the current top tier of leg enchants. The process here is simple: 

·         Check the AH for cheap scales, leather, and volatiles (need fire for these) throughout the week (preferably mornings and weekends. Buy it as you see it. 

·         Turn them into leg enchants and keep them listed throughout the week. 

The biggest way to make these profitable is to make sure you can make at least 20 gold profit (over what you paid on the materials ) per sale on the epic enchants and 10 gold per sale on the rare enchants. Anything less than that and I would wait for the market to become less saturated.

Twink Leg Enchants

Also, you can occasionally make 50-100g profit on each of these enchants: 

·         Cobrahide Leg Armor 

·         Clefthide Leg Armor 

These two enchants can be placed on items level 50 and above. As a result, they are purchased by twinks in the 50-59 bracket (i.e. people who hold characters at level 59 with high-level gear in order to dominate players passing through and play games against other organized groups of twinks). 

Cobrahide Leg Armor is a real pain and requires you to get 2x Cobra Scales. These only drop from a few mobs in Outlands (such as the Twilight Serpent in the western plateau of Nagrand). As a result, these can sell for a few hundred gold (WoWHead median price at the time of this writing is still 300g). 

If you have skinning, you can farm all the materials yourself for the Cobrahide Leg Armor. You can easily farm the materials for 10 of these in a few hours, and then turn around sell the 10 over the next few weeks for 300g a piece. They do take awhile to sell, but the profit potential is there.  

Armor

The other major method of making gold as a Leatherworker is to create armor. In particular, I think that epic equipment as well as certain pieces of low-level equipment tends to have the highest sale value. 

High-Level Epics

The current top-tier of epic gear is always a great seller. While not all the recipes are yet available (and more will be added to Cataclysm as time goes on), two easy to make recipes that are sure to make a lot of gold are: 

·         Belt of Nefarious Whispers - requires just 3x Pristine Hide, 30 Volatile Air, and 2x Chaos Orb. 

·         Assassin's Chestplate 

These two pieces of equipment have very modest ingredient costs. You should be able to easily pick up all the ingredients off the Auction House and then list this item at a 100 gold mark-up (or more).

As a general rule of thumb, I would not sell BoE epics for less than a 100g what the materials cost because they can often take a week to sell. Stay consistent with the pricing and someone will buy it eventually. 

I try to avoid very expensive to make niche items, like the Chestguard of Nature's Fury. As a leather piece, it is meant for Moonkins, which make up an extremely small percentage of each server's population. I avoid specialty items like this whenever I can. 

Item Level Jump Armor 

With each new set of gear that follow each expansion, there is a huge "item level" (also known as "ilvl") increase in gear. In other words, when your level 58 character first gets Burning Crusade gear, it is a huge stat increase. The same goes with your level 68-70 character in Northrend and now your level 78-80 character in Cataclysm. 

By supplying the auction house with the entry-level gear for these ilvl jumps, you can make plenty of gold. Whenever players have access to these massive upgrades, they will buy them, even if they are green. 

You might think that they would not buy green-level equipment because they can easily get that from questing, but that is a major mistake. Many players now use the dungeon-finder feature to level exclusively through the old areas. After all, who wants to play through all the Outlands quests for the 5th time on one of their alt when they can level through a lot of the dungeons they might have missed the first time around? 

The point is, the dungeon finder places ilvl minimums on each dungeon so you do not wind up with someone in terrible gear in your group. The requirements spike rapidly with each expansion, since the ilvl of even green gear rises dramatically.  

As a result, when players first get to Outlands, they may be barred from queuing for an instance until they upgrade their gear. When players do not meet the requirements then run to the auction house to pick up gear. You can sell them that gear for a big profit! 

However, it always seems to run 1 expansion behind. In other words, when Cataclysm comes out, crafting level 80-81 greens will not make you much gold. However, level 70-71 greens will start to rise in price. 

Always check the auction house for the going rate before buying materials. You do not want to craft into a loss by not looking up the entire sets beforehand. 

Here are some of the relevant pieces: 

Northrend Intro Sets: 

·         Arctic Set (8 pcs - intro Rogue and Feral Druid set) 

·         Nerubian Set (8 pcs - intro Elemental and Resto Shaman set) 

·         Frostscale Set (8 pcs - intro Hunter set) 

·         Iceborne Set (8 pcs - intro Resto & Boomkin Druid Set) 

All 32 of these sets can turn you a profit a few months into Cataclysm (and beyond). At the time of this writing, these sets are not quite yet profitable, but it is only because there are a lot of players still getting BoE greens from fighting monsters in Northrend. 

Once Cataclysm comes out and players leave Northrend, these items will rapidly creep up in value. 

Outlands Intro Sets:

·         Thick Draenic Set (Rogues & Feral Druids) 

·         Felscale Set (Hunters) 

·         Wild Draenish (Casting Druids) 

·         Scaled Draenic Set (Casting Shamans) 

Be careful when crafting with the items from this set. The level 57-61 items are actually worth more than the level 63-65 items. Players want items that will get them into Outlands dungeons as soon as they can; by the time they are level 63-65 they will already have decent gear.  

BoE PvP Sets

The level 85 rare PvP sets can also make you some decent gold. I have found the market to be a bit competitive (as you can level up from 510-525 off these recipes).  

Since you will be competing against players who are just trying to level up their LW skill, I recommend staying away from these items. On smaller servers you can get away with this, but I prefer to go for the more lucrative items (BoE epics) or less competitive (twink leg enchants)  

Leatherworking Conclusion

By using these strategies, you can earn quite a bit of gold off of leatherworking. I recommend trying to keep one of the best types of BoE epics on the auction house at all times, as well as a few twink leg enchants to maximize your profits with minimal effort.

---> Next: WoW Blacksmithing Gold Guide 

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