How to Skin a Rabbit in World of Warcraft

Skinning is one of the three gathering professions in World of Warcraft, the one that many people pair up with Mining. When paired up with Mining, Skinning can be a beneficial money maker, and when paired up with Leatherworking, it can help you cut down the costs for Leatherworking by more than half. It is an interesting skill, especially because of the way it works.

With Skinning, you can skin the hides of any beast in the game, as long as your skill is high enough. You can also skin few select humanoids, such as a Wendigo (Yeti-like creatures) and Worgan (Werewolves).

You start out being able to skin Leather Scraps from low level monsters and critters, like rabbits and deer. You can uncommonly get light leather from these monsters. After a few levels, light leather becomes the normal skinning drop, and medium leather becomes the uncommon drop. Then medium becomes normal, and heavy becomes uncommon. Then the heavy leather will become normal, and you will start getting rugged leather from monsters. Then, in the highest level beast monsters, rugged leather becomes the normal drop from beasts.

The higher the level of the monster, the higher level of Skinning skill you will need to be able to skin them. You will only be able to skin a monster that has no more loot on it. You will be able to skin other monsters killed by other players, although for courtesy's sake, you should wait to see if the player who killed it skins them first.

You can also get hides from monsters, which are much rarer to find than normal leather. These come in Light, Medium, Heavy, and Rugged varieties, and are worth a fair amount of money. You can also get, if you have the right tools, special drops, like the Pristine Hide of the Beast, which can be skinned from the Beast in Upper Blackrock Spire, but only if you have over 300 skill points in Skinning, which can only be achieved by using special tools, unless you have the Burning Crusade expansion.

You can also get Onyxia's Scales, if you and your guild succeed in killing her. Both the Pristine Hide of the Beast and Onyxia's Scales are used in high level crafting recipes, and are a great boon to the guilds that are able to get them. There are also other special leathers, such as Dragon Scales, Raptor Hides, and Shadowcat Hides, which only drop from certain monsters, and are very valuable.

There are also special hides in Outland, such as fel scales, found on Outland basilisks and ravagers, cobra scales, from Outland snake, Netherdragon scales, from Netherdragons, fel hides, found by skinning demons, and another tier of normal leather called Knothide leather scraps, and normal Knothide leather, found on most skinnable Outland beasts and animals.

Leatherworkers can take the scraps from the first skinnable monsters, and combine them into light leather. They can also combine light leather into medium leather, medium leather into heavy leather, and heavy leather into rugged leather. A high level Leatherworker can also combine Knothide Leather Scraps into Knothide Leather, and they can combine Knothide Leather into Heavy Knothide Leather.

Skinning is a perfect skill to pair with Leatherworking, as you will eliminate three quarters of your supply problems, because you can then get your own leather. You can also pair it with Mining or Herbalism, to make a character that specializes in supplying other crafters. You can make a good amount of money by doing that. But whatever you choose to pair it with, it is useful, and fun. So grab your knife, and go skin a rabbit!