Skinning is one of the most reliable gold-per-hour gathering professions in The War Within because the raw materials feed Leatherworking, Tailoring's Spider's Silk recipes, and a steady consumable demand on the Auction House. The two materials you actually care about are Mereldar Derma (the common leather) and Silk Cluster / Gloom Chitin from arachnid and insect mobs. Below are the specific zones, mob packs, and loops that produce the most hides per hour at level 80, plus an honest note on when farming it yourself stops making sense.

What you're farming and why it sells

Mereldar Derma is the bread-and-butter skin and the bottleneck for almost every Leatherworking craft, from Spiritbird armor pieces to the profession's gear upgrades. Gloom Chitin comes off spiders, beetles, and the Nerubian fauna in the Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet zones and tends to spike in price whenever a new raid tier pushes crafted gear. Because both drop from fast-respawning beast and arachnid packs rather than rare nodes, skinning rewards routes that keep you in constant motion across dense spawn clusters.

One efficiency note before routes: train Skinning specialization into the speed/yield nodes as soon as you can. The "Outsized Knife" and finesse points that add bonus skins and reduce skinning cast time are worth more raw throughput than any route optimization. A maxed knife with the right finesse tree can roughly double effective leather per kill.

Best beast-skinning loops (Mereldar Derma)

The Ringing Deeps – Cattle and Kaja'mite beasts

The Ringing Deeps is the strongest single-zone leather farm in the game. Focus the area around The Wandering Bog and the cattle/talbuk herds near the Earthenworks. These beast packs cluster tightly, respawn in under a minute, and reward AoE pulls. A geared character on a fast mount can pull 8-12 mobs, AoE them down, and skin the whole pile in one stop. Expect 300-500 Mereldar Derma per hour when the layer isn't contested, more with a maxed skinning knife proccing bonus hides.

Isle of Dorn – Coastal and crater beasts

Dorn is the gentlest route and ideal while you're still gearing or leveling skinning. Run the loop from Dornogal's south gate down toward the basilisk and ram packs along the western coast and the Stonevault crater rim. It's lower density than the Ringing Deeps but far less contested, so on busy realms your effective yield can actually be higher because you aren't fighting other farmers for spawns.

Hallowfall – Arathi beasts and the wildlife belt

Hallowfall's central valley has a continuous belt of skinnable wildlife between Mereldar and the Beledar's Spawn area. The advantage here is variety: you pick up Mereldar Derma from beasts and Gloom Chitin from the insectoid spawns near the Velhari ruins in the same loop, so you're double-dipping two materials on one circuit.

Best chitin and silk loops (Gloom Chitin)

Azj-Kahet – Nerubian spider farms

For Gloom Chitin, nothing beats the spider and silkspinner packs in Azj-Kahet, especially the dense clusters in the City of Threads outskirts and the web-tunnels around the Weaver's Lair. These mobs come in huge AoE-friendly groups. Because chitin feeds higher-end crafted gear and is needed in bulk for some Tailoring and Alchemy recipes, it generally sells faster than raw leather even at a lower per-unit price. If you have a tank or a strong AoE spec, this is the highest gold-per-hour skinning loop in the expansion during an active raid tier.

Route tips that actually move the needle

  • Always loot before you skin. Skinning is a separate cast from looting; mass-loot the pile first, then skin in one pass to avoid wasted GCDs.
  • Layer/shard hop when contested. If two other farmers are running your loop, hop to a fresh shard via group invite. Contested spawns can halve your yield.
  • Use a Skinning macro that auto-targets the nearest skinnable corpse so you're not manually clicking each body.
  • Bring a herb alt or dual-gather. The Ringing Deeps and Hallowfall both have Mycobloom and Crystallized Augment Runes nearby; a Skinning + Herbalism character nearly doubles passive income on the same path.
  • Sell in stacks during raid reset. Tuesday/Wednesday post-reset is peak Leatherworking demand. Posting your week's leather then, rather than mid-week, routinely earns 15-25% more.

When to farm it yourself vs. when to buy

Skinning farming is genuinely good gold, but it's time-intensive: even an optimized Ringing Deeps loop is an hour of clicking for a few hundred hides. That trade is worth it if you enjoy the loop or you're capping out a Leatherworking project and want the materials at zero gold cost. It stops being worth it the moment you're farming purely to fund something else — like a raid-ready crafted set or a Mythic+ vault push — and your real bottleneck is time, not gold.

If you're in that spot, buying a stack of leather or a WoW gold top-up to grab the crafted pieces outright is the honest time-for-money trade: you skip 6-8 hours of farming and get straight to the content you actually logged in for. Likewise, if leather prices on your realm have crashed from oversupply (common a month into a tier), your farmed hides are worth less per hour than your raw playtime — that's the signal to stop farming and either pivot materials or just buy what you need. For everything in between, the Ringing Deeps loop with a maxed knife is the most reliable gold-per-hour skinning route The War Within offers right now.