With Mists of Pandaria news hitting pretty soon and the in-house alpha now going, a beta is coming. Once that is out people will more than likely start to put out lists of what you should stockpile to sell at a higher price. I want to be ahead of the game and put out my lists now, simply because I think they are a good list of items to stock pile up. With that being said, today I’m going to talk about leather, in Mist we are surely going to get a new set of leather and everyone under the sun is going to be farming it to sell, to level up Leatherworking mostly. If you missed my cloth stockpiles list for 5.0 be sure to check it out.

Right now there is no way of knowing how the effect of the changes in-game will affect the leather market or Leatherworking as a whole. We don’t know if there will be any major overhauls to the professions yet. So base on what we know from Wrath of the Lich King I think it’s a safe bet to say that my leather stockpile list is safe to go with.

Stockpiling Leather Master List

• Borean Leather and/or Heavy Borean Leather
• Savage Leather and/or Heavy Savage Leather
• Pristine Hide
• Arctic Fur
• Cured Rugged Hide

You may ask, why not stockpile older leather? Well as I’ve seen in Cataclysm most of the older level 1-60 leather prices didn’t change. People level alts and twinks up still and most of the leather is still pretty high on the Auction House. This could change, one of the ideas I had been to make items require less mats but more of different kinds. For example, the new leg armors in Mist might need 1 Heavy set of each type other than say 10 of the new one only plus whatever the new volatile will end up being.

Lets break it down as to why these leathers are important to stockpile and how you can make money in Mist with them.

Borean Leather and/or Heavy Borean Leather – You have a a number of choices here; First you can stock just the Heavy version and store way more of it. In the end, if you go down the crafting count to make leg armors and Drums of Forgotten Kings, etc you’ll be using Heavy Leather here. However. Buy keeping it in the non heavy version, you can sell it to people who are leveling up Leatherworking.

Savage Leather and/or Heavy Savage Leather – Same reasons here, I would keep it in the non-heavy version simply to be able to sell it to levelers. You want to make leg armors here. Also keep in mind that most of the level 85 epics that use leather will be vendor trash, unless an item was BiS it might be worth something to twinks (yes people will make twink level 85s just as they did with level 80s). Either way no matter how you choose stock it, you wont lose out too much if you craft it all into heavy.

Pristine Hide – This one is the one I would toss-up to not stockpile too many of. The use of it will be really limited in Mist. First off the only item I can see using it for will be the mining bag or the inscription bag. If you did the Firelands Daily quest to unlock the pattern. The other option will be the leg armor for tanks. All the crafted gear needed it will be vendor trash, even most twinks will want the new level 83-85 Mist Greens which will be better. I would maybe only stock up 2-4 stacks of it. If nothing else, this might be one you’ll have to sit on for a bit.

Arctic Fur – This will be a big money-maker, back in Wrath these went for 100g+ even after the trading vendor was added for them. Right now I’ve been picking them up for about 50g and under, I’ve seen them drop to near 20g. I’m guessing that those are likely form someone leveling. Oddly I didn’t see one drop for me when I leveled my Skinner up. Either way these will have one use in Mist, Mekgineer’s Chopper or Mechano-Hog (depending on Alliance or Horde your on). You need 2 to craft them. You can also use them to make wrath leg armors, which sell but you can generally get more for selling them raw. Remember it can be different on your server.

Cured Rugged Hide – Out of all the level 1-60 leather this is the only one you truly want to stockpile. There are two reasons why, first reason is they are not easy to craft. They require a little bit of farming. I order to make you need 1 Refined Deeprock Salt which you get by using Deeprock Salt and a Salt Shaker and 1 Rugged Hide. So the other reason? We want to make Tranquil Mechanical Yeti which only need 1 Cured Rugged Hide. With the Pet Battle System coming in Mist, you want to be able to craft these bad boys for people looking to level up pets. I’ll talk more about pets in future stockpiling post.

NOTE: You want to have a skinning character, you want to have one not only so that you can go out and skin the leather cheaper, but so when MoP does hit you can make money with the new leather as well. I recommend leveling a druid to 85 for this as the new leveling profession cap will likely be 85 anyways.

Outland and Vanilla

To be frank with you, I hardly ever use leather hides from Outland content. There simply isn’t anything there, yes there are Leg Armors which I mess around in. It’s not a serious market that I play in. I found that while yes you can craft low tier leatherworking and mining bags if you don’t have the new ones, will sell. However I found that when I needed the leather, I could get it really easy.

For Vanilla leather, I’ve never gone to the Auction House and been shocked to find there was no leather here and if there was a hole say you needed Thick Leather, you can always buy the lower forms and craft them up to Think. Rugged might be one I would think about stocking if you wanted to but really unless you have two accounts and able to have 10 guild banks for stockpiling I would just skip it and if you needed it’ll be there. Remember people will be leveling new Pandarian’s and those new toons will still have to level in the current 15-60 content.

Finally I want to add that these are a good safe bet and you can’t go wrong having say 1 full guild tab full of leather, I’m thinking of going one tab for each leather, it depends on how much leather I can gather at low prices either off the Auction House or by skinning. Basically your options are going out and farming it yourself, this is and always will be the cheapest, depending that is on how you value your time, if you can gather say 10 stacks in an hour for example. How much would you price your Leather at? Would you price each one at 5-9g each? Something to think about.

If leather on your server is dropping, as it might be as more people are going back now and leveling alts or simply farming because there either isn’t any supply or it’s too high, in the case of Borean Leather which on my server normally floats at 2g. You have options here on what you can do, you can sell them raw to people leveling Leatherworking or craft bags, leg armors and pets. Let me know what you think in the comments below, are there any cloth items you think that might be good to stockpile?