The pre-patch is now upon us, so it’s high time to keep pushing out profession previews. Today we will be looking at leatherworking.
Armor is king
The main thing you can craft with leatherworking that will be economically meaningful is BoE armor. You get to craft both mail and leather, which covers a large number of classes. Outside of the armor you can craft ammo bags, and armor kits that you can apply to legs. You can also craft drums that can give various raid buffs.
Pre-raid gearing
There’s a good number of recipes that are relevant for pre-bis gearing. Revenant’s Threads are pre-bis for Elemental shaman. Outside of that there isn’t much that is clear pre-raid bis, but there are a lot of useful items for initial gearing, including the Ice striker’s Cloak, Eaglebane bracers and the Trollwoven and Giantmain items.
In addition the entry level PvP gear you can craft can be quite useful for players for initial gearing.
Bags
Leatherworkers can craft various profession bags as well as ammo pouches. I don’t really see any of these maintaining particularly high demand, as outside of dedicated profession alts I don’t really think profession bags are worth it. Ammo pouches and quivers may see some sales, I think hunters will prefer to keep as much ammo on them as possible, but whether or not that justifies the lack of flexibility is uncertain to me.
Recipe acquition
There are two main ways of obtaining leatherworking recipe. As usual a very large number of the recipes come from the trainer. Outside of that there’s a vendor in Dalaran that will sell you most of the other recipes. You need to trade in either Heavy Borean Leather for the rare recipes or Arctic fur for the epic ones. There’s no significant barrier to entry on any of them, so I would suggest getting them early, and crafting away. Focus on the most in-demand ones as listed above.
The most promising strategy
Leatherworking is fairly straightforward. You will want to power level to max skill, get the most in demand PvE recipes. Focus on the epic recipes if you can get Frozen Orbs if not it’s the PvP gear and Eaglebane Bracers. I would also suggest grabbing the entry level PvP set recipes. Once you have all of those, it’s as simple as restocking consistently to keep them available on the AH. This can easily be done on a level 68 alt, so go to town.