Flipping The Leather

   I have talked about how to make gold by flipping various items on the auction house, and today we are going to be looking at the leather market for our profit making. Before i go on into explaining i just want to note that farming leather is the most unique way of farming as it requires that you actually go and kill, loot and then skin the animal, and as such it can't be done by bots, not very effective that is.

   Well the two items we are going to focus on today are going to be the Thick Leather and the Rugged Leather. The reason why i chose these two is not a random one, but a rather strategical one and i will explain why.

   Like i said farming leather requires that you need to kill animals and skin them, but with all the perks that give you plus bonus on your XP you will find yourself with a too low skill to be able to skin animals due to low skill, and in demand for leather to be able to break the 300 skill mark. 

   Now the reason why i didn't choose any of the lower tier leathers was because leveling in the Heavy Leather bracket of leatherworking requires about 150 leathers to get above it, so the demand is smaller. At the same time leveling leatherworking in the Thick and Rugged leather level is about 400 leathers each. So the demand for these leathers is almost three times bigger then the demand for the Heavy Leather, and the lesser class leathers.

   So we have a market where the demand is rather large ( all the people who are leveling leatherworking ) but at the same time the supply is low. What this offers is a rather unique opportunity for playing a Dam Strategy. 

What the idea of this strategy is that you will act as a dam build on a river (Auction House), and the only things that can pass through it will be the things that you allow it to pass. In this example it would be the Thick and Rugged Leather, but to make it more clear, this is what i exactly did.

   Log in on your server and check the prices for these two leathers. If you find them at prices lower then you would like to be selling them buy them out ( in my case i found the market with about 70ish stacks all priced between 30-60g per stack ), then you go ahead and post them all up for a price that you want them to sell ( again in my case i relisted them back at 140g per stack ). Since you have posted your innital stacks, check the auction house from time to time to check for people undercutting you, and if you see someone undercutting you then simply buy him out. The reason why this can work for these leathers is because you won't have to deal with a lot of competition as it is a sort of a Niche market. As a more hands on information, i managed to sell around 60 stacks in about two hours while i was out leveling my character, and made about 4000 gold by simply making a monopoly on the market.

 Now this works better on a high population server, and usually in the peak hours as that is when the most players are playing and leveling their professions, and if you would like to give this a try that would be the time to do it at.

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

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.