Cooking 1-375 is $32.59, or $24.33 for 300-375.
Food buffs are not optional in TBC raids. A well-fed buff is 20 to 30 points of a primary stat for the whole night, it stacks with everything, and it is the cheapest raid performance you can buy. Turning up unfed is the thing that gets a casual player quietly dropped from a group.
What you are cooking at the top:
- Spicy Crawdad — the best stamina food in the game, from Furious Crawdad;
- Golden Fish Sticks — top healing power, from Golden Darter;
- Zangarian Sporefish Stew for mana regeneration, plus the Barbed Gill Trout, Feltail and Mudfish dishes that cover every other stat.
It pairs with Fishing, and that is the catch. The best TBC food comes out of the Terokkar highland lakes, which needs fishing skill and flying to reach. Levelling cooking alone gets you the recipes; levelling both gets you the food without paying auction house prices for every raid night.
It is a secondary skill, like fishing and first aid — it does not use either of your two profession slots, so there is no trade-off in taking it.
The grind itself is meat volume. Outland cooking runs on Clefthoof, Warped Flesh, Talbuk and the Zangarmarsh fish, which means hours of farming mobs you have no other reason to kill. That is what you are handing off.
