Sharpen Your Knife

For those of you, like me, who are reading all these comments wondering how do you even use this, WHERE IS THIS, it is in your spellbook under general.

Learned when the Tanning specialization of the Skinning skill is unlocked, this ability when used gives the player a buff which guarantees their next skinning action will contain a rare Hide or Carapace.

Which you get is dependant on the type of creature you are skinning - enemies that when skinned provide leather will provide you with a Thunderous Hide whereas enemies which provide chitin when skinned will instead result in a Sunless Carapace. There is no guarantee on the quality of the reagent however I would surmise it is still governed by your other improvements acquired via specialization points within the Skinning tree.

The rare reagent is additive loot and does not replace the standard leather or chitin you get and with a cooldown of 1 hour it would appear that it is not worth saving this for any particular type of enemy (such as rares or bosses) but instead to just use it whenever it is off CD and you are about to skin something.

Every 20 points put into the Tanning specialisation gains you an additional charge for this ability, leading you to a maximum of 3 charges when at 40/40 Tanning. Worth noting that when you first apply the skill point you don't gain a usable charge and it is instead put on immediate cooldown of 1 hour.

Beware that skinning a creature that gives only [item=218453] consumes the buff but yields no hide or carapace.

ETA: This has been fixed and the buff is no longer consumed when skinning mobs that don't drop leather/chitin. Skinning rares that you've already killed/skinned that day still consumes the buff without giving loot. (Thanks, GalisKelThuzad.)