Skinning Guide for Midnight

Skinning is responsible for processing the corpses of Midnight Beasts into skins and hides widely used by Leatherworking and to a lesser extent by other specializations.

Skinners also craft Lures such as Grand Beast Lure, which allow for more targeted material farming including special rare materials such as Majestic Claw which are frequently used in end game profession and combat gear crafting!

Earthen will be able to gather more skins with their Hyper Productive racial, making them a great option when looking to farm a lot of basic materials.

Dracthyr mobility abilities and +2% baseline Perception racial are a good alternative, which is more focused on hunting for rare reagents.

Last but not least, Worgen grant +5 skinning skill for better quality results and 25% increased skinning speed from their Flayer racial, making them the best skinning race overall.

Skinning can make great use of all three stats, but you might want to focus on specific stats for different playstyles. We go into detail with Skinning stats and the gear you can use to boost them in the specialized guide below:

You can gather four base skin types:

Void-Tempered Leather are skinned from leathery beasts, while scaly beasts give Void-Tempered Scales instead.

Rarely, you can find Void-Tempered Hide from leathery beasts and Void-Tempered Plating from scaly creatures.

You will also gather meat and other reagents for Cooking as you go, especially if you invest into the Careful Carving sub-node in the Gainful Gathering knowledge tree, which is focused on meat farming through Skinning.

Some enemy types can drop unique types of skins, such as Carving Canine, which comes from creatures possessing fangs. You can also find:

• Fantastic Fur from furred creatures;
• Peerless Plumage from winged / flying beasts.

Finally, there are three epic materials which come from beasts attracted through Lure items: Majestic Claw, Majestic Hide, and Majestic Fin. These are typically used in blue and epic profession gear and also for epic combat gear crafting.

Skinning is perhaps the easiest primary profession to level, as all you need to do is kill and skin mobs, without any real concern for your own skill level or enemy levels and modifiers.

As you skin enemies you will also occasionally loot items that can increase your knowledge, up to a weekly maximum tracked on your profession journal.

You will be able to track all weekly and one-time sources of profession knowledge with Myu's Knowledge Points Tracker, which has been converted to an addon in Midnight!

There are also eight treasures around the world that you can loot to gain up to 24 extra knowledge. You can find them all easily in-game with the aforementioned addon.

The new Find High-Value Beasts tracking ability is available as soon as you learn Skinning and allows you to see special beasts in your minimap that provide many more materials than regular beasts of the same type when skinned. These are randomly distributed around the world, and a nice bonus when you manage to find them while doing your regular skinning rounds through the zones.

Midnight has Crafting Specializations, which you are able to unlock once your profession skill hits 25. These serve as a profession talent tree system fuelled by Skinning Knowledge, obtained from weekly quests, one-time treasures in the new zones, Treatises, and first-time crafts.

While you will eventually be able to unlock all talents, doing so will require a long time as the sources of knowledge are very limited, especially once one-time treasures and first-crafts are exhausted.

Skinning Specializations dictate what enemies you are most proficient at Skinning, and you can even learn how to craft Lures with the Talented Tracker tree, which unlocks the Grand Beast Lure when fully unlocked. This item, or any of its zone-specific counterparts, can be used to summon unique beasts that grant more materials than normal when skinned, with some of them also being able to drop epic skins when first killed and skinned in a day. The sub-node Majestic Materials focuses on maximizing the chance for epic skins to drop, while Component Collector allows you to gain a lot of basic and species-specific materials when skinning the unique beasts summoned by Lures.

The Gainful Gathering tree is full of stat gains and each sub-node has a further specialty: Careful Carving gains you a lot of meat for Cooking, Trophy Taker increases the amount of species-specific reagents (such as Carving Canine) gained drastically, and Dedicated Diffuser provides a convenient way to target farm massive amounts of elemental motes!

Alternatively, you can guarantee a rare skin every hour before further tree investments with the Thorough Tanning tree and its Sharpen Your Knife core ability. Further investment into this tree unlocks up to three Knife charges and massive skill bonuses.

Skinning makes gold by farming skins in the world, with rarer skins being looted based on your Perception stat.

As skins are a common ingredient for Leatherworking, try to sell yours in raid days, when Leatherworkers are more likely to be looking to create and sell their wares. The Undermine Exchange can also help you understand the price fluctuation for skins in your server, and which skins are best to farm at any given moment.

We have a specialized guide for Midnight gold-making below, which contains a gold-making tier list and goes deeper into techniques and habits for successful gold making, as well as websites and addons that can help you on your journey!