Leatherworking: Leg Armor Kits

Posted by Warcraftecon | April 5, 2009 .

Icescale Leg Armor

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

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

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

[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.

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7 Comments so far

Raaj April 5, 2009 6:10 PM

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Yeah, I don’t think you can count it as 6000g an hour unless you’re actually selling 6000g worth of stuff per hour. I’ve finished 3 Nobles Decks in an hour before and I don’t go around saying I’ve made 24-30k an hour because it’s not true.
Warcraftecon April 5, 2009 9:39 PM

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@ Raaj – By those standards, gold per hour from farming items are wrong too. Items from crafting or farming still need to be sold. The figure we came up with goes by the the similar gold per hour standards as farming methods use. Like farming methods, it does not take into account how long or fast it takes to sell your items. However the gold per hour is an indication of time spent to make a certain amount of inventory. Most players are interested in a high number, which means less work for more gold. Your 3 Nobles Deck equals 24k an hour, this is just a number to simple state how much time you spent producing your inventory. Just like farming Eternal Fire, you spend an hour collecting say 300g worth of inventory, so most people would say it is 300g per hour. Obviously you are going to have to go to your local auction house, sell the eternals, maybe even have to re-list them if they don’t sell. We don’t usually take that time into account. I do somewhat agree with you, there are differences between making 6000g per hour for just that first hour and 300g per hour consistantly, like farming for an item.

We would like to hear thoughts about this from our readers as well.
Jon April 6, 2009 4:51 PM

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There is definitely a difference between “X Gold Per Hour” and “X Gold In An Hour”. The former assumes you can continue to farm hour after hour. The latter implies a one time effort. You can’t repeat your effort and sell, say, 10 stacks of these in one sitting. The demand simply wouldn’t be there.

If you had a car that could do 200 miles per hour, but then ceased to function – and another car that could do 50 miles per hour but worked for any number of hours – you’d certainly have two different vehicles on your hands.

Yes, it’s semantics, but important semamtics nonetheless.
Seafog April 6, 2009 8:10 PM

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Wow, you have a VERY different economy then my home Aggramar has. Arctic Fur is 20-25g and Frozen Orbs are almost never below 90g, usually right at 100g. And the leg armors? People must still be leveling because I’ve been seeing them at 150g or less for a long time now. I can’t explain it, but there it is.
Warcraftecon April 7, 2009 12:10 AM

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The kits are starting to rise in price on my economy. I probably still have some left from when I leveled it, the price was just too low to sell. You should see an increase in price and demand for the kits real soon.
Inscrutibob April 7, 2009 6:23 AM

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What you really mean, I think, is more along the lines of “With an hour’s work, you can make 600g profit per week.” Or whatever time period it takes to sell all those kits.
Ta-da.
JSG April 7, 2009 8:27 AM

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That gold per hour is definitely wrong. If you sold them all in an hour, you would be correct. But instead, you spent an hour making stuff to sell, so you are ONLY making 60 kits per hour (rather than 6000gph).

Whoever said that it applies to farming is correct. If you spend an hour getting borean leather and arctic fur, then what you get is what you get, not the gold.

If you want to say you made stuff WORTH 6000g in an hour, you could be accurate (depending on your AH).