Hello,
I was farming mobs to skin next to another player. We were not in the same party. We were both getting credit for the kill and both were able to loot the mobs.
When a mob died, it read that it was skinnable and I was able to channel skinning but ended up with an error that read something like “This corpse is not skinnable.” However, the other player was able to loot AND skin every mob. If I had already looted it, it would despawn immediately. If I did not loot it, the corpse would read as already skinned, and would despawn after I looted it.
This happened for EVERY mob that we both tagged. The only ones I was able to skin were the ones I tagged and killed without him/her tagging at all. I tried searching for this same problem via google and on the forums but couldn’t find anything similar. Am I misunderstanding how skinning prio works?
Edit: This is on retail
The only requirement to skin something is:
- It’s dead and has been looted by everyone eligible to loot it
- No one else has skinned it.
NOTE: you don’t have to kill a mob or even damage it to be able to skin it.
This sounds like 2 skinners competing with each other and the other guy was faster on the draw than you.
There are enchants that allow you to skin faster:
https://www.wowhead.com/item=159467/enchant-gloves-zandalari-skinning
https://www.wowhead.com/item=153434/enchant-gloves-kul-tiran-skinning
The worgen racial allows the character to skin faster (doesn’t stack with enchant).
In Legion there was a toy that allowed you to skin at a distance https://www.wowhead.com/item=130102/mothers-skinning-knife
There was something similar in MoP as well.
He was able to skin them before I looted them. It would say “already skinned” if that happened. I was unable to do the same.
In lower level expansions (I do not know where the cut-off lies exactly), you have to wait for everyone to loot before skinning, however, in BFA you can skin as soon as you loot, and the mob will still show up for others who tagged it to loot. As soon as all eligible players have looted, it should disappear.
The only time I get the ‘creature is not skinnable’ error is when the other player skinning is faster than me by a bit. (I start skinning before he/she is done)
Necro, but this is a related thread, and I figured out what’s going on here. Basically, you can skin a corpse regardless of whether it has been looted or not and regardless of whether you tagged it or not, though if you did tag it, you have to loot it before skinning it.
However, if you did not tag it and someone that did tag it has the profession for skinning the corpse (I’ve confirmed this so far with skinning, mining, and engineering, probably the same for herbalism), the corpse will have “Skinnable” in the tooltip, but mousing over it won’t give the skinning mouse cursor, and trying to skin it will cast but then end with “Creature is not skinnable”.
The corpse stays that way for roughly a minute, after which skinning rights opens back up to anyone with the profession. I presume this is to ensure that skinners (and engineers and miners, etc) get “first dibs” on their kills. If you tag those mobs as well, you also gain “first dibs” rights on the corpses, and it’s simply who skins first. And kills that are not tagged by someone with that profession are immediately available for skinning for anyone, regardless of tagging.
In addition to helping protect your kills from theft, this has an additional convenience silver lining when farming for mats. If someone kills something near me, I don’t have to wait there to see if they’re a skinner, because the status of the corpse immediately tells me. If it’s immediately skinnable, I know I can skin it without “stealing” it from them.
2 Likes
This is good to know. I’ve been running around zones in SL skinning things, but I’ve always waited till the person initially killing has run off, or looks like they deff won’t skin. I always felt bad if I skinned someone else’s intended skin, and tried not to ninja other peoples skin. GNT this should not be possible (if I understood the above correctly).
My skinning ability did not work at all on all of my toons for about a week, now it seems to be working. Very strange, no idea.