Multiworld

Leveling cooking is a very good idea, and when you get to 300 its really not that hard. And you really don't need fishing.

In shat there is a npc that gives you your daily cooking quest. Some gold is always welcome, and you can choose between a barrel of fish and a crate of meat. No fishing needed, just get your barrel and enjoy.

I don't hunt for meat anymore, and I use a lot of food on raids four times a week.

My advice: If you can, max all your trade skills. If not in TBC, you will need it when WotLK will release. And those skills really help.

Personally, I maxed all my trades (need 2 more points in enchanting only), but I never been able to level fishing. And believe me, I tried several times. Its too boring for me. But if it's not boring for you, max it too. The time wont be wasted.

(Fishing is needed to summon The Lurker Below, first SSC boss).

Aaah, consumables in raiding... Your first and greatest gold sink. Yup. That's why I still don't have my epic flying mount.

Cooking is a must-have for raiders - mats are much cheaper then food itself on AH, and you can easily farm most of them yourself even without fishing - well, unless you're a healer, fish sticks (+44 healing, some spirit) and sporefish (20 sta, some mp5) both require fishing, unfortunately. I maxed cooking on both of my 70 charas without leveling fishing (tried on my shammy, but it's too boring), although I admit, on mage I got lazy and instead of hunting for meat in Silithius, I bought some fish off AH.

Once you get max cooking, it's pretty much no bother - you do the cooking daily, select the crate you need most (fishes/meat) and - at least for me - most of time you get what you need. I have to buy fishes for my shammy only if there's a learning run scheduled, when I know we'll wipe many times.

As for flasks/elixirs - those are annoying when you're still learning, given all the wipes, but really help a lot. Honestly, it depends on one's gear. Hari, whos gear would pretty much allow him to perform well in T6 content, can stick to just food and wizard oil, only poping an elixir on harder bosses, and he's still up on the dps meter. Me, still a bit undergeared, must be fully buffed up: two elixirs, food, mana oil and whatever consumables I can get atm (like the chocolates on valentines. Those were awesome, too bad they had 10days limit).

Another thing, potions. I know nothing about health potions, not using them, but mana pots tend to disappear from my bags way too fast. You're gonna need a lot of them, especially at the beginning, when your mana regen's not that great yet - you'll see on Curator. It was a first fight that long for me and at the beginning I tended to run out of mana (and out of cooldowns) way before the 10 minutes passed. You'll want to manage the potion cooldown wisely, so use the first one when it'll get you back to full mana - when you used about 2,5k mana. That way there's a chance it'll cooldown before you're completely oom. I don't need that much potions now, with water shield improved, set bonus to the mana totem and mana tide, but priests can use 6 potions on Al'ar fight.

Also, if you're a leatherworker, get yourself some drums. I always have two on me: drums of restoration, that give the party mana/hp regeneration for some time, and drums of battle, that work like Heroism - give the party haste on everything.

(edit - typo)

Hehe, thanks for making this topic, I was actually going to today (would have done it yesterday, but it was like 3am and I needed to go to bed. xP

Well, I guess I should go lvl my cooking.. I didn't lvl any of my secondary professions (always used all my cloth for tailoring, so didn't have any for 1st aid, and fishing... I keep falling asleep trying to lvl it T.T) till recently when I got high enough to make good bandages, I just hope powerlvling tailoring isn't god awful expensive now that I don't have the recopies I could have gotten while I was naturally questing (though I kept the last 2 I got, cause I saw that they were high stamina, and high spell dmg, and figured if I lvled cooking it would be good to have those. =P)

Okay, cooking out of the way, how is the best way to make buff pots? AHing them, buying mats and begging a guildie to make them, etc? Same if there's a way to get scrolls other then AH.

Well, from what I counted, cost of mats is roughly about the same as cost of flask/elixir, at least on our server (and unless someone overprices the flask, that happens, too). It honestly depends on whether you have a high level alchemist in guild, and if you can be bothered with buying all the mats and chasing around the guy who can make whatever you want. Mana oils are much more expensive then their mats on our server, so I usually just buy the herb and dust and make Rav create the oil for me.

About leveling cooking - well, you can buy most of recepies (check wowhead on that), but it might get ugly on outlands if you sold the Buzzard Bites recepie - it's the easiest way to level from 305.

I'm also using foods, elixirs and oils all time. When we wipe every 10 minutes it might be depressing. but at least it's not so expensive as spamming 1k mastelas to pass precast. Most of stuff I got from gv, Anelai, some mats from AH and fishing/cooking.

I've been leveling my fishing to get primal waters for shadoweave set, but it's actually not helping much. Pure waters spawn quite rarely, I think it's around 1-1,5 primals per hour (if no other horde players around). Still fishing really makes leveling cooking easy and after I started leveling it in outland, I'm always full of useful +stamina/+spell dmg foods and provide other types for guild. It's boring at some parts of leveling it for cooking, but usually I just leveled it while waiting in queue for bg or browsing gear. With patch 2.4 there will be fishing daily, I dunno rewards yet.

I have almost all high lvl elixirs recipes, the best potions and some flasks. Just pm me on irc for full list or if You will want something. Elixir Mastery ftw!