2009
Making Gold With Cooking
Posted by Lawbringer in Efficiency Tips, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK
Fishing and Cooking Your Way To HUGE Profits
We’ve always said that your main toon needs to be a cook. Unfortunately not everyone listened to us. They probably wish they would have when the Winter’s Veil achievement became available and they hadn’t ever cooked anything but a little bread. Now they had just a few days to try to catch hundreds of fish, or grind hundreds of mobs for cooking mats.
Well stop that. Don’t NOT listen to us again. There are some great new high end buff foods in the game, but unless you are a cook, you probably will never be able to afford them. But for the cook, it means the same thing in the other direction - you can make really big gold from cooking if you put in the effort.
The other thing you have to know is that you simply MUST add fishing in order to do this. The high end fish are not any harder than the BC fish to get and that alone makes them easier than farming for worg haunches. Yes, we know leveling fishing is a pain. Yes, we know it is tedious to level cooking. But what if we also told you that you could maybe get 5 gold EACH for a cooked fish? Would that make it easier for you?
The big reason why these buff foods will be worth so much has to do with one thing: Northern Spices. Prices always boil down to supply and demand. In this case the way the game is currently structured means VERY limited supply for cooking mats. The stuff you make from it rivals alchemy potions so demand is also there. Low supply along with high demand equals very high prices.
The only way you can get Northern Spices is from doing the cooking dailies in Dalaran. Every time you complete the daily cooking quest you get a bag of spices and a Dalaran Cooking Award. One of the cooking quests gives 2 awards. The awards are used to purchase te new recipes OR you can spend 1 award for 10 Northern Spices.
The average person can easily complete the cooking quest every day. In order to get all of the available recipes you would have to do the dailies each day for about 50 days to buy every single new recipe available, although about 5 of them are pretty worthless so let’s just say 30 days.
You have a pretty good chance of getting 3-4 Northern Spices each day from the spice bags as well. So at the end of your first 30 days you have all the best recipes and 90 northern spices. That sounds good until you begin to look at how many Northern Spices you WANT to have.
Price check on Fenris shows Northern Spices going for around 7-10g EACH. If you can even find fish they are selling at about 2-4 gold a pop. Even things like worg haunches are commanding 1g each prices. And that’s on a server known for rabid undercutting. Ask anyone in the Dominate guild how fast prices can crash on us.
So if we are seeing prices like this on a server with a low price economy and a large market, it’s a pretty safe bet that prices are pretty much like this on most servers. So here is the deal. If the mats for Dragonfin Filet are selling for a minimum of 10g, it’s pretty easy to assume that you can sell the food for 15g each.
As a test, that’s exactly what we did. We bought 10 northern spices and a stack of Dragonfin for 195 gold. We made 10 Dragonfin Filets and went right back to the AH with a price of 25g each. We posted 5 singles and one stack of 5. Before we logged in again the next day, every single one had sold and there was 250 gold in the mailbox. Now just imagine if you had fished up the fish and gotten the spices on your own!
If you’ve been reading DYS for any length of time at all you know we’re not much into farming. But if there is a way to make it worth the TIME farming compared to working the AH then we consider it. In the case of cooking and fishing we may just have a winner. But here is what you need to do:
If you have level 70 alts, get their cooking leveled up and get them a port to Dalaran. Have each one of your alts do the cooking quest every day and buy Northern Spices with the rewards. Have your main get the best selling recipes from their rewards until you can make almost everything and then start buying Northern Spices.
In my case, I have 4 toons in the 70’s and an 80 main. So in the next 30 days, now that I have all the recipes I want, I can also collect about 1800 Northern Spices. Now you can see how this turns into BIG bucks. With 1800 Northern Spices and just 3 stacks of fish a day (about an hours work for the fish and maybe 30 minutes doing the dailies) I know for a fact I can make at least 10 gold each on every single one, and probably more like 20g each. That’s 600-1,200 gold a DAY for two hours worth of work. Since this is about what I expect to make every single day at the auction house for the same amount of time spent it’s definately something I’m going to do.
Of course, I spent a TON of time leveling alts, but you probably did too. Put them to good use and for heaven’s sake stop being a hardheaded numbskull and GO LEVEL COOKING AND FISHING! You never know when a trade skill will hop up and get really good really fast like this. Go get near a stove and Dominate!
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