Skining for gold!

Skinning is one of my go-to professions. There seems to always be a market for it, and there are animals EVERYWHERE in Azeroth/Outlands, just begging for you to rip their hide off and sell it. Ok so they aren't begging, but I'm a warlock, and I dabble in soul stealing and crap like that.. Don't expect rosey things here!

Light leather: Ok this one is easy. Pretty much everything you skin in starter zones will drop the ruined leather scraps or light leather. I play around with humans (even though, mostly I use dwarves/gnomes), so I go from stormwind to eastvale logging town. These mobs are lvl 10ish, so don't show up at lvl 6 and think you'll steam roll these guys. As a higher level lock... you should tag RUN. I use this a lot, the run+dot+hellfire farming method. It's gold baby, thats all there is to it. There is SOME downtime, but really not enough to sweat especially when killing 9 mobs at once. Hit NUM LOCK and run through hitting everyone with curse of elements, and siphon life(this reduces downtime) when you get about 6-8 on you sacrifice the VW, and pop hellfire. They should all be hurting anyway, and you should get some good health before you really feel the pain. This works great, and I use it on lvl 60's even now (at 65!) although I put a corruption on them for good measure. This will level you out of that in quick order.

Medium Leather:
I go to Duskwood for this. Duskwood was my first big BOOM for money in the game with Mcgoo anyway. I got lucky drops and the leather off the nightbane worgen folks is all gravy. Caution: These guys hit pretty dang hard. Casters in particular should watch out. if you are a lock/mage this is scary (unless you are a frost mage), but papa Mcgoo has your way out. I have 2 tried/true farming methods. First is the dot+run+hellfire method, second is the VW AOE taunt method. As you can tell I send the VW in to a series of mobs hit each one.. (while I dot them with the appropriate aforementioned dots), then I force the AoE taunt. and hit passive to pull them to me. Some locks use hellfire, others use rain of fire. Rain of fire sucks. They always come for me, it never works for me.. ever. If you are a serious farmer, getting the talents in destruction to have things "daze" from your spells can be suped up a bit by the talent to cause ROF (rain of fire) and HF(hellfire) to do the same thing, and also resist interrutpion (BOO YA!). So that really ups your chances to daze them. This, really, seems to have almost no utility in instances, so if you're going to go raiding remember to respec, cause most priests would rather let you die from HF than keep your sorry butt healed. Anyway this is the other method, and the one Papa Mcgoo says will work for you. TRUST in Papa.

Heavy Leather:
This is the easiest to level.. 2 words, Stranglethorn.. Vale. Its a gold mine. There tends to be more Heavy Leather on the AH than anything else for most servers I've been on.. I rarely had issue not selling though so I pushed this till I could go up to thick. Now on occasion in STV there are some guys that will drop thick leather. You can check your WoW database for the level ranges here because STV spans a good distance in levels. One of the great things about STV is you may not have to kill anything. THAT'S right kiddos, there is always 90 bigillion people in STV, and most don't do skinning so just run around and you'll find bodies to skin. Another reason to love this place, I know..

Thick leather:
If you are leveling up, you should just FIND this stuff from fighting mobs your level or higher. But the goldmine for this, Ungoro. Specifically the Monkey Caves. Not saying you can't do it from raptors, but my monkey friends.. if they are almost dead.. run to get help (ahem.. no need to search.. they'll go get help on their own. This is always awesome, many q's push you into these caves @ level so you may find some bodies to skin without killing, but the drops can be good so I wouldn't turn my nose up if I was you.

Rugged Leather:
Any schmuck will tell you the Yeti Caves in Winterspring are the place to go for this in mass numbers. I however will tell you that Fearing these guys as a lock, is where the REAL money comes from in the caves. They bring back friends, and you can dot them up for the dot+hellfire method. Sometimes I sac the VW to get that pain shield, but really in here dots almost always kill them at 60+ anyway.

Knothide Leather:
Pretty much everything in Outlands has this, or some scraps. Nagrand is where this becomes the awesome. Keep in mind I am just getting THERE myself! So this part I am hazy on. I prefer Clefthooves. Why? cause occasionally they drop clefthoof leather, which is worth a lot of money on its own.
There are talbuks and all manner of things here to kill/skin, so go nuts

This is where the skinning guide ends for now kiddos. Now go get some dead animal and skin it! hm.. well in game you can do this.. IRL, you might get some funny looks.

;)