The Death Knight cookbook

Death Knights may have good first aid skills when starting out, but just as trained professions start from scratch so does cooking. My initial plan for Gnomesblight was to complete quests as I mined ore for blacksmithing, allowing me to gain faction reputation as well hunt beasts to let me increase my cookery skills. As it turns out, mining can be increased pretty quickly when you are high above the level required for the zones in which the deposits can be found, which is mostly because there is no threat from the wandering mobs. The low-level mobs can be avoided with casual ease and even if they attack when I start to mine they are despatched quickly.

Because mining is so easy the notion of completing quests at the same time becomes more of a chore, an activity that gets in the way of the aim of levelling the gathering and thus crafting profession. Without completing quests, mobs are not defeated as a matter of course and the ingredients for cooking are not gathered incidentally. Just as levelling a Death Knight in the Outlands without being able to gather and use the ore found there can be frustrating, the same is true about the cooking profession. Animals provide meat for recipes that can be bought or are given as quest rewards and without being able to use them the ingredients and recipes either end up taking up room in the bank or are discarded only for them to have to be regathered at a later date when the skill is latterly increased to the appropriate level.

Luckily, it is possible to gather cooking ingredients quite efficiently and somewhat more reliably than mining. The cooking skill can be increased initially by the new trained recipe and ingredients bought from vendors. Running through the still-enjoyable quests in Westfall gathers me enough ingredients to level a little, but the real benefit is in the cluster of crawlers half-way up Longshore. The crawlers drop two types of meat that can be used to gain plenty of skill in cookery and the crawlers respawn at an amazing rate. No sooner have I wiped them all out than new ones appear, even when one-shotting them.

From there, I use the clam meat from the clams dropped from all the murlocs I take too much pleasure in attacking, also on Longshore. There may be some holes in my memory now, but I think I was able to jump from cooking in Westfall straight to the beaches of Southshore. Come to think of it, I nabbed a bunch of raptor eggs from the guild bank and bought a recipe that used them from the waitress in the inn in the Old City of Stormwind, which helps my cooking skills along. Back in Southshore I grab even more clams from murlocs, this time for zesty or tangy clam meat. The added benefit of collecting clam meat in Southshore is that the chef in the inn gives a quest for a turtle meat recipe. Cooking with turtle meat is enough to get me to skill level 225, after which I head to Gadgetzan to see the goblin chef there and complete his quest to gain the next skill mastery in cookery.

After completing the cookery quest I buy the recipe for tender wolf meat and head to Felwood. I start in the south and run north, collecting wolf meat as well as as many bear flanks that I can get my hands on, in preparation for the next stage. In his chronicles, Kinless points to the new recipes available to level cooking up close to 300 available in Felwood that make use of bear flanks, bought from the vendor in the north of Felwood for the Alliance. The tender wolf meat and bear flanks allow me to get cooking up to 290 easily enough. From there to Silithus.

The innkeeper at Silithus asks me to find a recipe for sandworm meat from a nearby hostile camp before getting me to use the recipe to make ten sandworm meals. The drop-rate for sandworm meat is terrible, but it is still probably more enjoyable to collect it than to try fishing for ingredients. Cooking the ten sandworm meals takes my skill level from 290 right up to 300. Job completed! I go back to the Outlands and pick up the skill book to let me learn the next level of cookery. A quick visit to Sporeggar and I have two recipes, one for skill level 300 and one for 310, using ingredients I have been picking up already. Before long my skill level is half-way to the next level.

If only blacksmithing were as easy as cooking.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: cooking, gnomesblight, mmorpg, professions, world of warcraft