Working on Cooking

The Pilgrim's Bounty is something I have been waiting for.  The reason being is that since it last passed I started a bunch of new characters.  Two of them I leveled cooking the old fashion way, I worked to level it.  This required fishing, hunting, running all over for recipes that I needed, even the occasional visit to the auction house.

Is there any more satisfaction doing it that way then doing it easy?  Nope.  High cooking is high cooking no matter how you got it there really.  With that in mind I stopped training cooking on my characters looking forward to pilgrim's bounty time.  Not saying I never picked it up.  I did.  But usually somewhere between 60 and 160 it died out.  Either because I needed to go somewhere out of the way to get a recipe or over pay on the auction house.  Two things I had no desire in doing. 

That is where this holiday event comes in.  You can easily get to 305 minimum and 350 maximum doing the quests and cooking from the recipes that are supplied for the event.

Basically you will need around 80 of each unique item, there are three, one each in each of the vanilla cities.  If you do the quest line the best way to handle this is to not make anything until you got the quest for it that says "prepare 5" of the item.  Once you get that quest, cook 80 of them.

Keep the others on hand because you will get a quest to turn in 20 so might as well already have them done being you were doing them to level any way.

On the last step if you go over the 80 mark and really stress it you can get it up to 295.  I would suggest that, the materials are cheap so getting 1 skill up every 4 or 5 is no big deal.  It also means less turkey hunting should you want to max it later.

Once you go back to do the turkey one you will need to get 25 turkeys anyway for both quests for it so kill 25 and go back and cook them and you will be at 320 cooking.  If you really want to you can go and kill more turkeys and get it up to 350 or if you want you can stop at 280 on the previous cooking and only get up to 305 with cooking the turkeys.

Either way, for much cheaper, less time, less travel, and some achievements made along the way, you will get cooking up to 305 at least.  Usually you can power level it from there using the auction house.  So many people leveling through BC areas sell meat and fish dirt cheap.  Just a matter of grabbing the recipes which in BC, with flight, is a hell of a lot faster then hunting them down in vanilla.

Love this event for the ease of leveling cooking.  I am not working on the meta achievement on any of the other characters.  I did it on my main last year and in truth it was most of them are not fun in the slightest.  It is not something I would ever want to do again on any of my other characters unless there is a pet or mount or title I might want.  With the exception of the polymorph rabbit from noblegarden I do not think there is anything in any event I would go after now.

I am proud of the achievement for a long strange trip on my main but it is not something I will ever do again even if you paid me to do it.  Not sure what type of person would consider doing some of the crap they have us do as fun.  90% of the things you do for these events are purely time wasters and nothing more. 

In the end, all you get out of it is a mount and master flight now.  That is 4,000g (with faction rep discount). It will take you at least 100 hours to complete all the crap for the meta.  Most of it is either boring or frustrating.  Now, in that same 100 hour you can make 40,000g with ease even if you are not an auction house master mind.  So lets see. 100 hours get the mount and flight for one character or 100 hours gets no mount but flying for all 10 characters on a server.  I'll take 310% for everyone and only worry about the meta on my main if that is really what you are into.  Most of these events are useless.

Except for this one.  It is something that everyone should do even if you do not care about cooking.  Why not level it up if it is cheap and easy?

Pro Tip:
If you have a Mage, hang around one of the tables, people will whisper you for ports.  I made almost 500 gold and I was not even trying.  I was just getting my cooking up and at that it was really early in the morning and not many where on yet.  Once I was done I logged off.  Imagine if I stayed around?  I could have easily made 10K gold yesterday.