Hello all! I recently went through the pain of trying skinning and having serious difficulty understanding how to obtain knowledge points in order to make my skinning more efficient and unlock spells.
The main underlying problem: Blizzard is a master of hidden and undocumented code that only becomes understood with live gameplay experience. That applies to skills, builds, guides, data mining, etc. Buyer beware on the sites you know. From my experience, this is what I understand and how I am maxxing my skinning knowledge points. Parts may be not 100% correct or may be wrong with later patching. I do not 100% know if any rules mentioned here apply to other gathering professions.
Getting this out of the way, static knowledge point sources.
https://www.wowhead.com/guide/the-war-within/professions/skinning-overview
Mainly the knowledge we are missing:
"Several Knowledge Treasures are harvested as rare gathers from Skinning.
Toughened Tempest Pelt Toughened Tempest Pelt, Razor Talon Razor Talon, Stone-Leather Swatch Stone-Leather Swatch, Sturdy Nerubian Carapace Sturdy Nerubian Carapace all increase Khaz Algar Skinning Knowledge by 1.
Abyssal Fur Abyssal Fur increases Khaz Algar Skinning Knowledge by 2."
But how do we actually obtain those drops? The guide suggests speccing into perception as quickly as possible. I agree with that but I havent negative tested because the drops I want align with using that Perception chance to drop.
So your skinning is maxed, maybe you have tools or not, and your trying to focus Perception. Maybe you got the staitc, one-time points or not; I believe the next part is independent of that fact. Time to try to get those knowledge points.
I think there are two categories: Weekly and Season. Similar to Crests, there is a weekly cap and a growing Season cap.
Weekly cap is 5 Toughened Tempest pelts and 1 Abyssal Fur. They drop in order respectively and the drop rates suck more than Razor Talon and perhaps the remaining two sources.
Weekly cap also includes the weekly quest to turn in materials for a book that gives +3 knowledge points.
10 weekly points total.
Okay here are the weird hidden rules:
Razor Talons will not drop unless:
- youve gained all 10 weekly points
- youve logged in without Razor Talons in your inventory or have since used them
- you are not at the max amount of Razor Talons
- you have killed enough mobs so the game understands your attempting to catch up
Let me expand on these, because yes it sounds dumb.
I noticed that I wouldnt receive ANY Razor Talons unless per week I got the 5 Toughened Tempest Pelts + 1 Abyssal Fur + Weekly quest. They seemed locked. Would not drop.
I noticed that if I logged into with Razor Talons in my inventory, they would not drop. I spent the Razor Talons and now they would drop again.
I noticed that if I had a stack of 40 Razor Talons, I could not get anymore to drop. I spent Razor Talons and that started dropping again.
I noticed that Razor Talons may not drop immediately when beginning a farming run. Is there a threshold during that session that the game realizes you mean to catch up to the Season limit and now enables the drops?
And of course, you cant go past the Season limit. If you stayed within these rules and no more drops, welp youve hit the limit. It will increase by 10 next week but then again you must complete weekly to enable Razor talons so if your diligent, youll never see a Razor Talon again.
I am using Razor Talons as an example here and my personal experience. I would hope the other two “catch-up” drops behave the same and the only difference is in the type of mob that you skinned.
I hope this helps. My goal was to provide something more than I started with when people Google search how the heck to get those knowledge points.
Unconfirmed if these weird rules apply to other gathering professions. I feel confident that Herbalism does but I havent tested it nearly as much.
Skinning itself is pretty nice this expansion. I have routes based on what I want. Some includes quick pulls of 3, others includes pulls of 15+. Of course if you have a tank character, if they have a ranged cast (like a bear) then it makes life a lot easier. I have destroyed all the delves, personally I do this on my Holy Priest with no issues, haha.