Let It Rain, Leather And Gold

   I have always been one to be vocal against farming, mostly due to my inability to stay and do the same thing, over and over again. This was not the case always though, i used to love farming back in the TBC days, and the reason for that was that back then we used to do killing for our farming, opposed to the flying around in a circle nowadays, which might be the idea taken from the modern day airport flying routes as you can see on the image below. It does seem like that plane has been farming some herbs.

  Well there's still one profession in the game that has pretty much stayed the same, no matter what expansion it is, and that is skinning. Skinning remains as it is due to the fact that you actually need to kill, whatever it is that you want to skin. Due to this technicality bots seem to not go for this profession, basically due to the fact that they can't simply teleport around and mine it, or herb it, but they will need to do some actual killing. What this means is that the actual price of leather is going to be high, because it is collected by players.

   But enough about that, lets get down to the profiting part of the deal. As i am writing this post, the days to the release of patch 4.3 are cutting short, and what that means is that there's going to be new gear that leather workers will be able to craft, and to do that they will need our leather. One of the best places to farm leather in this expansion of WoW is Deepholm, or the Stone Drakes that are to the left of the Therazane Throne.

   The main reason for this place being worth mentioning, hell even me making this post, is the sheer gold per hour you can make off of it, let me explain.

   As you can see on the image on the left, the mobs we will be killing there will be the Stone Drakes. Reason why these mobs are so good to kill is because they are elites, but they drop out of the sky and are stunned with about 50k hp left on them, so basically as a 83 mob, so killing these is pretty much a joke.

 Well killing them might be a joke but that's where the joke stops. What i mean by this is that these mobs drop as much gold as if you killed them when they were at full hp, so you will be getting about 1 - 1.5g per kill, on top of that you can skin them for Savage Leather and Blackened Dragonscale, and like with all animals that you skin you have a chance to get a Bloated Stomach which can have volatiles in it that usually sell good.

   One other thing that's a plus when you have to kill things for your profession, is the fact that you will get greens and maybe even epics that are world drops, but put that aside and take on a treasure finding potion and you have a chance to get those tiny treasure chests that will give you even more of a profit boost.

   So as we have the patch just around the corner, this could be a good way to make some good gold by using your skinning profession, but remember to take on the Potion Of Treasure Finding to max out on the profit.

   Just as a clarification, i did some math based on the economy of my server and came up with some numbers. As a herbalist, or a miner, you end up making about 1000-1200g/hour, while killing these guys at this place and skinning them you end up with about 2000-2300g/h, and that is without taking into account that you might end up getting a green item (which you aren't supposed to vendor or DE but rather put them on the AH).

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.