Today we continue our previews for SL professions. I have now finally gotten access to the SL beta so I can test things first hand!
Testing limitations
At the moment there aren’t any materials available easily in the beta, and I don’t really have the time to farm everything, so I can’t know everything. I haven’t had time to look up everything either, so we will be trusting the in-game unlearned tab to get an idea of what’s going on.
Recipe types
The picture above shows the recipe categories for Leatherworking in Shadowlands. it’s a lot of categories, and quite a few different items.
Leveling Leatherworking
The basic armor recipes you craft are the same ones you will want to make money with at max, but you can’t apply or even learn the crafter’s mark recipe at the beginning, and Crafter’s marks are BoP. This means you will most likely end up spending a significant amount of gold leveling your profession and it will be a while until you can start making it back.
Crafted armor and weapons
Leatherworkers can craft two different sets of both mail and leathe armor. The higher level armor can take three optional reagents, whereas the uncommon one will only take crafter’s marks. I did not have time to farm materials to level my professions to compare the possibilities yet as there is no testing vendor for materials yet.
The weapons are only available as uncommons and you can’t choose secondaries for those at all. Leatherworkers get access to fist weapons a bow and a crossbow, so the coverage is fairly low.
Either way I expect these recipes to rely on crafter’s mark 2 to get any real profit, even if the higher level stuff is level 60 with item level 151 so it may see some use.
Intermediate materials
Leatherworkers can turn scraps into Desolate leather and callous hide, as well as turning the hides and leather into heavy versions. These are also used by enchanters to make the enchanted leather intermediate materials.
Optional reagents
The only optional reagents for leatherworkers are the crafter’s marks for increasing the item level. This will be necessary to effectively sell crafted gear, but you don’t have anything to trade to other players.
Legendaries
Leatherworkers get to craft the base items for mail and leather armor. The recipes require a lot of enchanted leather, as well as all of the base and intermediate materials. These recipes also require an Orboreal Shard that is currently just sold by vendors for 1k. This looks like a potential BoP material to me, so let’s hope it at least can be generated consistently in a less annoying manner than expulsom.
Armor kits
Armor kits can be applied to legs, chest, hands and feet and give you a hefty stamina bonus. This will potentially be good for tanks and PvP, but it depends on tuning. I like that more professions are getting item enhancements, but as you only have stamina these don’t seem amazing.
Utility items
Lastly leatherworkers can craft a new version of the Comfortable Rider’s barding as a mount equipment, and drums to give a slightly weaker version of heroism to groups that do not have a mage or shaman.
Both of these should be selling at a decent clip, but nothing crazy. The material costs don’t look to high, but I have no idea how fast skinners can generate materials so it is impossible to tell.
Overall outlook
Leatherworking has a lot of things going for it. Armor and legendary items should be really strong. The legendary armor recipe seems to be obtained from your profession trainer at max skill, so the barrier to entry is not particularly high. For armor and weapons you will need crafter’s mark rank 2 which requires revered with the Avowed, so be prepared to grind on all of your armor crafting characters.