Guest Post by Aeliel from Dreams of Iso'rath
The price of Savage Leather just won’t go down on my server – and I need to level leatherworking on my main. So I’ve been levelling my hunter, who has skinning as one profession. It’s something I’d been wanting to do anyway, considering all the pretty pets in Cataclysm (got myself a flaming turtle as soon as I hit 81; I might tell the story of the adventurous tame later), and if it saves me some gold all the better.
Doing 80-81 in Vashj’ir got me some leather, but just barely enough for 5 skillpoints. Argh. I switched to Hyjal at 81, mostly to get the aforementioned flaming turtle, and then did 81-82 there simply because I couldn’t be bothered switching back. At 82, I went to Deepholm.
Not much skinning in Deepholm, what with all the stone creatures, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought as well. I quested my way through almost the entirety of the zone, skinning the occasional dragonkin and getting more and more anxious to hit 83 so I could go skin my way through Uldum.
Then the Therazane quest chain led me to the upper left corner of Deepholm. Unskinnable flayers, rock, rock, more rock, and… what’s that? Bats? Let’s try and shoot them and see.
In red, we have the bat path. Here, Stone Bats fly all around the marked area in packs of 8-10. You shoot one, you pull the entire pack; they have 5368 health each, and I could 3-shot them even as a level 82-83 hunter. Each of them skins into one Savage Leather (no scraps at all that I could see in my brief, unscientific farming of 8 stacks of leather off them) and will also occasionally skin a Strange Bloated Stomach; they also have a chance of skinning into a Pristine Hide (I got one last night), although the droprate is so low since the nerf-hotfix that your best bet if you want Pristine Hides is to just skin lots and lots of leather and trade up using the vendors in Twilight Highlands.
The bats also drop Toughened Flesh. It doesn’t sell terribly well (just 2g each on my server) but it’s used to make the Goblin Barbecue, the Engineering-crafted basic feast of Cataclysm. (There’s a better version, providing 90 stamina / 90 something else, but it’s a reward from a guild achievement your guild is unlikely to obtain anytime soon unless you’re in <Fishing Addicts>.) I got 3 stacks of the stuff from just a brief period of farming and let’s just say that Alieth loves me very much right now considering how fast his guild chews through the barbecues.
