The Ultimate WoW: Shadowlands Leatherworking Leveling Guide

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There’s something satisfying about wearing the skin of your enemies. Bonus points if you do it the same enemy while they were alive and again in the afterlife! 

Today we’ll be going over the fastest and most efficient ways to level your Leatherworking profession in WoW: Shadowlands. Additionally, we’ll examine which recipes you should be aiming for and which recipes come from sources other than the trainer.

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Shadowlands Leatherworking Leveling Guide: Getting Started

First things first, you’ll need to be at least Level 50 to learn any Shadowlands profession. 

Head to the Hall of Shapes in the northwest section of Oribos and speak to Tanner Au’qil to learn Shadowlands Leatherworking. 

If you don’t have Skinning as your second profession or at least on another toon, we strongly recommend picking it up from the trainer right next to him (Flayer Au’khem).

Take note of the nearby Leatherworking supplies vendor as well (Distributor Au’tem). You’ll be visiting them often to buy thread.

Leatherworking Reagents

Compared to Classic WoW, leveling Leatherworking in retail is an incredibly simple task, assuming you have a way to get the leather needed. What’s more, there are only a handful of reagents you have to worry about in this expansion!

In this section, let’s go over the reagents one by one. We’ll discuss what they are, their purpose, and how to obtain them:

• Desolate Leather. The standard leather you’ll be working with this expansion. You’ll obtain this from pretty much every mob you skin. Nearly every recipe uses it or its heavy variant. Save every bit you obtain, as you can convert them into Heavy Desolate Leather.
• Pallid Bone. The other common reagent you’ll obtain from skinning. They’re mostly used only in crafting Mail armor and a handful of other recipes. You’ll probably end up with far more than you can feasibly use, so feel free to sell most of them on the auction house.
• Heavy Desolate Leather. The higher tier version of leather this expansion. You’ll occasionally obtain these from skinning mobs. Its used in nearly every high end recipe. Thankfully, you can convert your normal Desolate Leather into the heavy variant at a 10:1 ratio once you hit skill level 70. Just be prepared to AFK for a while, since there’s no way to speed up the process this expansion.
• Callous Hide. The uncommon hide of this expansion. You occasionally obtain them from skinning mobs. Most mid-high tier recipes will require varying amounts of this and its heavy variant. Save every bit you obtain, as you can convert them into Heavy Callous Hides.
• Heavy Callous Hide. The heavy variant of Callous Hide. You rarely obtain these from skinning and are more likely to convert ten normal Callous Hides into one once you obtain the recipe from the Revendreth faction. You can also buy ten Heavy Callous Hides from Tu’kol right next to the Great Vault in Oribos for 7500 anima. 
• Enchanted Heavy Callous Hide. Used exclusively to craft legendary pieces of armor. You obtain these by asking a max leveled Enchanter to convert two pieces of Heavy Callous Hide and one Soul Dust (super common Enchanting material) into a single one. As max level Enchanters are common at this point, you shouldn’t have any trouble. It’s also usually cheaper to ask one for help than to buy them off the auction house.
• Penumbra Thread. Used in a majority of recipes. You buy these from Leatherworking Supplies vendors.
• Curing Salt. Used to make Crafter Marks that can set your crafted gear to certain iLvls. You buy these from Leatherworking Supplies vendors.
• Orboreal Shard. Used exclusively in crafting Legendary armor pieces. They’re rather expensive. You buy these from Leatherworking Supplies vendors.

We recommend simply buying most of the materials unless you plan on going skin farming for a while. If so, we strongly recommend the Shardhide den of Mauler’s Outlook just west of the base in Korthia. Players are often killing them in mass (more players = faster respawn), and skinners can go wild on the corpses. Even more so if there’s a quest for that region on the day you go skinning.

Level 1 to 100: Complete Shadowlands Leatherworking Leveling Guide

The section below is designed to get you to 100 with guaranteed skill level ups. It uses only recipes learned from the Leatherworking trainer and does not require any reputation-locked recipes.

In total, you will need the following:

• 933 x Desolate Leather
• 140 x Pallid Bone
• 100 x Heavy Desolate Leather
• 70 x Callous Hide
• 10 x Heavy Callous Hide
• 169 x Penumbra Thread
• 30 x Curing Salt

What do you do with all of these materials? Here’s the complete Shadowlands Leatherworking leveling guide from 1 to 100!

Crafting Legendary Armor

We’ll be frank. If you’re just learning how to level up Leatherworking in WoW, don’t bother with crafting legendary armor yourself. 

The costs in materials to reach the max crafting level (Rank 4) for a legendary armor piece is staggering. It will easily cost you a million gold to hit that point. You’re better off just saving up the gold to buy the appropriate rank legendary piece off the auction house.

If you’re still hellbent on blasting through this Leatherworking guide for WoW and trying it for yourself, then you’ll have to start with freeing the Runecarver from Torghast. Once you do so, he’ll give you a quest item to turn into the Leatherworking trainer in Oribos. Doing so will grant you the recipe for all legendary armor pieces, starting at Rank 1.

Shadowlands Leatherworking Leveling Guide: Advancing Ranks

In order to advance a rank, you’ll have to craft the legendary armor piece at its current highest rank fifteen times (total of 45 pieces). That might not sound too bad until you realize that each rank you go up, the more materials you need. Even worse is that there’s nearly no market for the lower rank legendaries, so enjoy spending all that gold.

If you do manage to hit Rank 4 of a legendary piece, you’re going to need the Vestige of Origination recipe to hit Rank 6 (we’re skipping Rank 5 as it’s a complete waste of resources). Said recipe requires you to be Honored with the Death’s Advance faction in Korthia. 

It doesn’t take too long to hit the reputation requirement, but crafting the Vestige itself requires a staggering forty Korthite Crystals, which are randomly obtained from activities in Korthia. On most servers, a single Korthite Crystal is going for anywhere between one to four thousand gold!

The costs add up very quickly, and the market for demand is dropping even quicker. Unless you’re trying to prepare for patch 9.2 (which is questionable as we have no idea what Blizzard plans on doing for professions), you’re not going to walk away with any profit.

Important Recipes

Now that you’ve maxed out your Leatherworking using this Shadowlands Leatherworking leveling guide, what should you be crafting?

Well there’s really only two consistent money makers: Heavy Desolate Armor Kits and Drums of Deathly Ferocity.

The first one provides a two-hour 32-stamina bonus when slapped on your character’s chest piece. It does not override any enchantments on the chest piece, so most players use it to gain extra survivability in endgame content (raids, high mythic keys, etc.). You can obtain the recipe from The Wild Hunt (Ardenweald) quartermaster once you hit Honored with them.

The second one provides a weaker version of Heroism/Bloodlust to your party. Unfortunately, it’s only a 15% haste buff as opposed to the usual 30% one that you would get from the classes that can cast it, but it’s better than nothing if your group doesn’t have someone to cast Heroism. This recipe is learned from your trainer at max level, so don’t worry about missing out on it.

In terms of other important recipes to mention in this Leatherworking guide for WoW, you’ll also want to grab the one to craft Heavy Callous Hides from the Court of Harvesters (Revendreth) quartermaster when you hit Revered. It’ll allow you to convert ten normal Callous Hides into one Heavy Callous Hide.

It also may be worth getting the Crafter’s Mark of the Chained Isle recipe from Archivist Roh-Suir once yout hit Tier 4 with the Archivists’ Codex reputation. If you make one of these, you can include it in the crafting process of another piece of gear to bump it up to 230 iLvL. However, you can only equip a single piece of gear that was made with said Crafter’s Mark. This means no cheesing the system and making yourself an entire set of 230 gear.

Transmogs

As is expected of any armor crafting profession, there are four unique sets that you can obtain by using this Leatherworking WoW guide. All the necessary recipes are learned from your trainer, and you’ll have crafted some of the pieces already if you followed our Shadowlands Leatherworking leveling guide!

Leather wearers have access to the Desolate Leather and Shadebound armor sets, while mail wearers have access to the Desolate Scale and Shadowscale armor sets (see image above).

Make sure to craft and equip these at some point if you want to add them to your collection!

Become a High Grounder

And that’s it for our Shadowlands Leatherworking leveling guide! We hope it made your leveling process a lot easier and to plan out what you want from the profession. Stay tuned for our future profession guides by subscribing.

Happy gaming!

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