Leatherworking: Leg Armor Kits

By far, this is my most consistent market I participate in. Demand remains constant, prices are going to keep going up, and materials for the kits always costs less than the finished product. Back in Burning Crusade, leg armor kits were my main source of income, which we wrote an article on. This method had an estimated 6000g per hour!  Towards the end of that expansion, profit margins were as high as 200g per kit due to falling prices of primals. Now the Leatherworking epic leg armor kits are no longer reputation based, but a trained recipe. Many Leatherworkers will craft lots of these just to level up. This is one reason why you see low priced leg armor for very close to the price of the materials. There is still profit to be had on these items and possibly more if you wait till 3.1 when lots of players will need them for their new PvE, offspec, and PvP leggings. The great thing is that it takes very little time to buy materials and craft these kits. Take for example how fast it takes to make just one kit, probably about 1 minute. Running to the auction house, buying out materials, opening mail, and crafting it. So in 60 min you have produced about 60 kits, with profit being around 50-100g each. This turns out to be up to 6000g per hour. As I mentioned before in the TBC version of this article, these kits only sell so fast, so you may have to re-listing them constantly. That gold figure does not mean that spending an hour doing this will give you a instant 6000g at the end of the hour. Even farming methods are not like this because you have to go through the auction house before your gold comes in the mail. However this will give you the inventory worth 6000g in profit when they all sell. I am sure most of our readers know this already.

I have always enjoyed the Leatherworking market due to the low competition. Most people don’t have this professions for various reasons. Many have simply taken up Jewelcrafting and Enchanting for min/max purposes or Engineering for Arena’s recently. However the ring enchants give the same amount of AP bonus as the Leatherworking bracer enchant, just something to keep in mind when comparing profession bonuses. I myself have taken up JC and found the market to be flooded with cheap gems and low profit margins, while I have to micro manage the items and auctions a lot more compared to LW. Although if prospecting keeps working out, then there is lots of potential profit on cut rare gems and enchanting materials in patch 3.1. Leatherworking is great because you can just craft a few things, sell them, and craft some more with out having to micro manage much or deal with a huge inventory. The leg armor kits stack to 20, so at an average price of 200g per kit, your looking at a stack worth 4000g. Very few items that fit in one bank slot are worth that much, for now probably just the [Nobles Deck], motorcycle mount, and certain BOE epics. I don’t like to carry more than a stack because there needs to be room to adapt to falling prices of materials as well as the kits. If the stack of kits cost 3000g (150g/kit) to craft and market price for them at the time was 4000g (200g/kit), you do not want to be caught in the situation where the stack is now worth 3000g due to falling prices of the materials. This is where you just break even, so keeping a low inventory allows you to compensate for when prices fall. The two prices seems to be loosely related to each other in the sense where if material prices increase, so will the cost of the kit. However toward the end of TBC, prices of materials dropped significantly, while kits increased in price.

By no means do you have to craft so many kits at once. My personal method is to constantly buy low priced materials or at least at a price I am comfortable with in relation to how much the kits sell for. Some days prices will be high for [Arctic Fur], around 75g, and on other days I may find them for 40g. Obviously I will buy them when they are low, which increases my profits on the kits. Buying materials when you run out of kits is not usually a good idea, more often than not, you will see high prices when searching. So buying them when they are cheap keeps that profit margin where you want it to be. Some times if you are aggressive enough, you may start lowering the supply of the materials. This may lead to players buying out the kit instead of trying to buy the mats because there is not a huge price difference between them. The convenience factor of not having to find a crafter is also nice. If you are buying out all the materials at a low cost, that only leaves the high cost materials up, making the kits seem much more attractive. This also lowers the profit margins of your competitors, making them less likely to buy the high priced materials and possibly reduce their inventory of kits. [Arctic Fur] is a great example of this, the supply seems so limited. There are skinners around despite so people dropping their professions for something like JC, however the drop rates are not very good either. It seems like there is always a shortage of them on my economy, so since day one, I have been buying them out at 50g or less when I see them. This long term investment will most likely pay off in 3.1 when the demand comes back for leg armor kits as well as the [Arctic Fur] itself due to the new Ulduar patterns, which requires 8 per item.

Below is the breakdown of the leg armor kits, feel free to insert your own prices to figure if this is profitable in your economy. We included the green and blue quality kits as well, they are a good way profit from [Heavy Borean Leather], which you should be buying 6 of the lower version, [Borean Leather] if it happens to be cheaper. These kits are also a good way to diversify your auctions, but keep in mind they have lower profit margins, yet the materials don’t compete with the epic quality kits. As for [Earthen Leg Armor], this PvP orientated kit may yield it’s highest profit during the start of Season 6, which should be about the same time that patch 3.1 is released.

Materials Required:

[Frosthide Leg Armor] Buyout Price: 200-250g

• 2 [Arctic Fur] 100g
• 2 [Nerubian Chitin] 4g
• 1 [Frozen Orb] 50g

[Icescale Leg Armor] Buyout Price: 200-250g

• 2 [Arctic Fur] 100g
• 2 [Icy Dragonscale] 3g
• 1 [Frozen Orb] 50g

[Earthen Leg Armor] Buyout Price: 250-300g

• 2 [Arctic Fur] 100g
• 4 [Eternal Earth] 20g
• 1 [Frozen Orb] 50g

[Heavy Borean Armor Kit] Buyout Price: 25g

• 4 [Heavy Borean Leather] 8g

[Jormungar Leg Armor] Buyout Price: 25g

• 5 [Heavy Borean Leather] 10g
• 1 [Jormungar Scale] 1g

[Nerubian Leg Armor] Buyout Price: 25g

• 5 [Heavy Borean Leather] 10g
• 1 [Nerubian Chitin] 3g

Look for the Tailoring version of this article soon.