As a primary trade profession in World of Warcraft, leatherworking is one of those few combination professions that will likely cover both of your profession slots. You’ll likely choose to pair it with skinning as buying the necessary skins to work with will cost you substantially. Much like Alchemy and Herbalism or Mining and Engineering, Blacksmithing, or Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking goes hand in hand with Skinning. Make sure to plan ahead before randomly choosing your professions and possibly creating a situation in which you must unlearn and relearn a new one.

To maximize the potential gold making prospects of professions, many players choose to pair up dual gathering professions early in the game. This means putting together Herbalism, Skinning, and Mining to maximize income. If you decide to do so, you should hold as much of the skinning materials you gather as possible for when you finally start on a crafting profession. It will ensure you maximize the proficiency of your profession when you start.

Leatherworking is popular for a few reasons. It allows you to create all sorts of useful items that many classes and characters might be interested in. To start with, you can craft leather armor and mail for those characters that don’t wear metal armors. It also allows you to create pouches and quivers as well as bags for bullets and arrows. You can also increase your weapon speed with many of these items. Additionally, you can craft armor kits, useful for adding armor class to certain kinds of armor in the same way that enchanting affects other armor and weapons.

To best utilize the items and benefits that you acquire from leatherworking, you’ll want to be a Hunter or Shaman. Druids and Rogues can also utilize items from leatherworkers at lower levels, but cannot use the higher level leatherwork you’ll work on in later years. If you are anything but one of these classes, it might not make the most sense to get started in leatherworking.

For gold making and for saving yourself money in the long run, leatherworking is one of the best choices you can make for a profession, assuming you are interested in one of the above mentioned classes. If all of the stars align though, you’ll find that you can save vast amounts of gold on your leather armor, offer sales to friends and other players, and even open yourself up for some late game fun.

Always work with your professions carefully, building them slowly and never putting more than the necessary amount of money into them too early in the game. They will save you money and build up your gold reserves over time, but need to be approached carefully.