Group Skinning Changes What Leather Costs
One beast, one set of hides for every skinner standing over it. Mining and Herbalism were left alone, so Skinning is the only gathering trade in Forever whose output grows with the size of your group rather than shrinking against it. That is a mechanic with a price attached.
One corpse, one hide for each skinner
A skinnable body in Forever is not one player's prize. Everyone in the party who carries the profession can take hides from the same corpse, and each of them receives their own materials rather than dividing a single loot between them. The body is worked once per skinner instead of once in total.
The other 2 gathering trades were not touched. A vein or a herb still goes to whoever reaches it and clicks first, and the rest of the group walks past an empty spot. Put the 2 rules side by side and the difference is easy to state as a ratio: a party where every member skins produces a full share of leather per member off the same kills, while that party produces exactly 1 player's worth of ore or herbs from the nodes along the way.
That is the whole mechanic, and it is worth separating from the ordinary loot rules it sits next to. Coin on the body is divided, drops are rolled for, quest items are handed out in turn. Hides are none of those things. They are generated per skinner, which means the party is not sharing a resource at all — it is multiplying one.
What that does to the price of leather
Our reading: leather is the raw material whose supply scales with how social the server is. Every other gathering line in Forever is capped by contention — 2 miners on the same route halve each other, and how many players share your copy decides what is left standing when you arrive. Skinning inverts it. The more people are out killing beasts together, the more hides come off the same number of corpses.
Stack the other supply-side changes on top and the direction is clear. A gathering profession is handed out free by a quest in the first few levels, so the number of characters who can skin is close to the number of characters playing. Beast kills happen anyway while questing, so the material costs no detour. And the Legacy perk that raises scarce material yield covers Skinning alongside Mining and Herbalism, which means a prepared gatherer gets the group multiplier and the perk at the same time. The result we expect is leather as the cheapest raw material of the opening weeks, and soft for a long time after, because its supply curve grows with population instead of fighting it.
The demand side does not grow the same way. Leatherworking buys hides, and so does anyone levelling the trade for Legacy points, but neither of those scales with party size. A market where supply responds to grouping and demand responds to the number of crafters is a market that clears at volume rather than at margin, which is the same conclusion the gathering professions and supply arrive at from the other direction.
There is one more faucet on this side and it is the one nobody can size. Automated farming is already reported on the beta, and a skinning operation is not slowed by node contention the way an ore route is, because the input is a corpse rather than a fixed spawn point. Whether grouped bots actually exploit the shared rule, and at what scale, is not something anyone has measured — the first bot reports from the beta describe mobs and routes rather than hides. Treat it as a reason to watch the leather listings rather than as a figure.
How to farm against that, rather than into it
The practical reading for a character still saving toward the cost of riding training is not to drop Skinning. It is to stop pricing it like a scarce material. Hides sell on turnover: list in stacks, take the market price, and go back out. The hour you would spend watching undercuts on a cheap commodity is worth more spent killing.
Where the mechanic genuinely pays is in a group you were already in. A dungeon run, a questing duo, a camp 2 people are holding together — in all 3 the hides arrive at full rate for each skinner, so the trade adds income to time you were spending anyway. That is a different argument from the one made for the other gathering skills, where what dungeon runs actually pay has to be weighed against a solo route you gave up.
The reverse also holds. A solo farmer choosing between gathering trades gets none of the multiplier, and is selling into a market that other people's groups are filling. On a character that levels alone, the scarcity of ore and herbs is the point, and Skinning becomes the third slot it has always been rather than the headline. Which way that falls for your own account is the sort of question choosing a gathering trade to fund is built around, and the answer depends on how you play more than on the rates.
One habit worth keeping either way: track what the hides actually sell for against what the same evening produced in ore, cloth and vendor trash, instead of assuming. The ledger in the client counts auction proceeds separately from loot and vendor sales, so the comparison is available without any addon, and it will tell you sooner than any guide whether selling raw materials in stacks is paying for your route.
What has not been published
The shared rule itself is described, but almost everything around its edges is not, and we are not going to fill those gaps with numbers.
- Whether the shared loot applies beyond a party — nothing has been said about raid groups, or about players who are nearby but not grouped.
- Whether each skinner needs the skill level the beast would normally demand, or whether one qualified skinner opens the body for the rest.
- Whether the hides each member receives are rolled separately, so 2 skinners on one corpse can come away with different quantities or different grades.
- What vendors pay for the common hides, which is the floor under the whole market and the one figure that would settle how far the price can fall.
- Whether the Tanning Rack, the camp object that creates reagents outright, interacts with any of this.
The Legacy perk raising scarce material yield is published and it names Skinning, but nobody has published what share of a skinning route is scarce material in the first place, so the perk cannot be converted into an income figure either. Check the tooltips on a live character before planning a slot around any of it; the beta answers these faster than a guide can.
Questions
Does every player in the group need the Skinning profession?
Yes. The rule shares the corpse, not the skill: each member who wants hides has to carry Skinning themselves and work the body. Whether each of them also needs the skill level that beast would normally require, or whether one qualified skinner is enough for the group, has not been published.
Does the same rule apply to Mining and Herbalism?
No. Those 2 were left as they have always been. A vein or a herb goes to whoever reaches it and clicks first, and nobody else in the group gets anything from that node, which is why the 2 trades keep their scarcity while leather does not.
Is Skinning still worth a profession slot if leather is cheap?
It depends on how you play. In a group the hides arrive at full rate for every skinner off kills you were making anyway, which makes it close to free income on time already spent. On a character levelling alone the multiplier never applies, and the scarcer materials from Mining or Herbalism are the better argument for the slot.
Will leather prices recover later in the season?
We are not going to forecast a number. The structural point is that the supply of hides grows with how many people group up, while demand comes from the smaller pool of players levelling Leatherworking, so the pressure sits on the supply side for as long as grouping is common.
Sources
- Shared skinning, the free gathering quest, camping objects and the Legacy points at each tradeskill rank — Wowhead's professions breakdown.
- Bountiful Harvest and the Legacy trees, including which gathering skills the perk covers — Icy Veins on the Legacy system.
What changed on this page
- 2026-10-01Страница о правиле группового снятия шкур в Forever: один труп даёт шкуры каждому скорняку в группе, как это давит на цену кожи, что делать фармеру и что по теме не опубликовано.