Ok, so ah pulled a bit o’ a fast one last night but, hell, I’m a rogue, whit dae ye expect?

I was sitting last night, playing my druid, and looking at her underwhelming leatherworking level.  You see, I’ve decided to make her a tribal leatherworker.  Yes, tribal.  She is still going to be feral but, to be honest, the elemental crafted items really aren’t worth crafting for a druid or at all - there are easy to get upgrades from quests and instances which are better.  So, I figured I’d get her tribal leatherworking so that if I ever decide to spec doomkin for fun in pvp I’d have a decent starter set.  I know you don’t need to pick a specialisation to continue levelling leatherworking but I like to do things in the right ‘order’.

Anyways, as anyone who’s levelled tribal leatheworking knows it is the most painful leatherworking profession quest.  Or, rather, it has a set of pre-quests which are just painful to do.  They start here and end up costing the following, ingredients wise:

• 8 Wildvine
• 112 Turtle Scale
• 192 Thick Leather

Not so bad, you think?  Well, let me beg to differ. See those scales? Y’can’t buy them for love nor money! Noone grinds them unless they’re doing this quest, it seems, and noone wants to grind more once they’ve done it! You’ve gotta go out and skin the buggers.  Now, the turtles in the Hinterlands drop around 90% - some drop none but some drop two.  However, being turtles it takes rather a long time to kill them if you’re of a level with them (which I was last night).  I spent about 45-55 minutes last night and got around 20-30 scales.  Bah.

Now, I think half the problem here is that I’ve done these quests twice before - on Aurik for fun as I wanted the recipes and leatherworking was new and on Mharai because I went tribal leatherworking on her for the same reason as I am on Jhai.  Now, doing it a third time, I was utterly bored. Not only that but it’s incredibly expensive to level it this way in terms of mats cost (something I wish they’d address…).

However, an idea struck me - when I had been doing alchemy on Avarix and having trouble getting BM runs for my specialisation I was tempted to spec transmute mastery (which I could solo-quest) and then change specialisations as it meant you didn’t have to do the other quest.   I was sure you could do the same for leatherworking but was not sure tribal would be available this way because the quests needed to get the tribal specialisation are pre-requisites, not just a direct quest.   I could find no info on it except one post on thotbott which did not confirm either way but suggested what I had been thinking.

The easiest, by far, to do is elemental (for me, anyway as I had the stuff in the bank).  I figured, hell, at level 49 it’s only going to cost me 25 gold to try the ‘respec’ so why not?

Quick hop to Searing Gorge, picked up Elemental Leatherworking and dropped it again for 25g (this reportedly increases to a max of 100g at level 70), flew to Tanaris and, with some trepidation clicked on “Soothsaying for Dummies”.  BINGO!  One Tribal respec done without the arduous task of completing the wild leather quests.  Hopefully they won’t patch this - it’s a pain to level leatherworking multiple times and go through that whole, irritating quest line over and over.

Of course, if you’re sensible you won’t level leatherworking in the first place.  *ahem*