Professional Opinion

Today, I want to talk about Professions. For most of Wulf's life, he's been a skinner/leatherworker. It's a great combination for a Hunter since the resources you need to skin to make your leather goods are the very beasts you're killing. In fact, if you're lucky, you can actually end up skinning beasts that other people have killed. It's free money!

The armor a leatherworker can make is usually decent, if slightly underpowered compared to dungeon drops, but often easier to get. Wulf used to spend many idle hours on the Burning Steppes killing Dragonkin by the Hundred in order to get scales to make armor for him and his fellow Hunters in CD.

In the Burning Crusade however, Leatherworking's changed. Leatherworking, like every other profession, is hard work now.

When you start, it's simple enough and the first 30-or-so points fly by in a frenzy of slaughtering and skinning mobs. After that, it get's very expensive in terms of leather and by the time you hit the mid-340's leather alone won't do it anymore. The patterns past that point require increasing amounts of Primals. Primals are made by collecting 10 motes of the required element (such as Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Shadow, Mana, Life, etc). If I go all out on the grind, and am exceptionally lucky, I can collect one primal's worth of motes ever 30-45 minutes. Since this guide suggests I'll need something in the region of 145 Primals to reach Leatherworking 375, then that equates to over three whole days of grinding to collect the necessary Primals, which is to say nothing of the other materials.

And once I get to 375? Well then I can grind even more Primals (another 72 by my count) to make this armor, which I'll admit is pretty awesome. But it's a lot of work to fit around the act of playing with my friends. Still, I'll get there eventually, I guess.