Agreed, but fishing is something that’s not real easily done while leveling.
Here’s my issue: it used to be that leveling cooking and first aid were things that simply happened as a by-product of leveling your character. You got ingredients as you killed mobs and with an almost trivial amount of attention to getting recipes from various vendors (or going to the FA trainer) you would easily level these to the max.
I think the message at the time was loud and clear: these skills were basically “gimme” skills. They were there to make the game a little more fun and give you an easy way to speed up leveling with a very minor amount of effort. FA sped things up because you could bandage up quickly after a fight and move on. Cooking sped things up because it provided a very easy and cheap buff. Sometimes made just enough difference in a boss battle to turn the tide.
This approach persisted all the way through the end of LK when the concept of dailies and points suddenly infected the skill.
I guess it made some sense to give people a bit more of a challenge to do the last few levels of cooking, but the problem is that they’ve now enshrined that concept into the game. Basically all skill 450+ recipes now require you to do the city dailies to purchase. Not only that, but some of the better skillup recipes from 400-450 are still stuck as Dalaran dailies! The only problem is that you don’t spend enough time in Dalaran to do any of that stuff because they reconfigured experience so that you can blow through Northrend without aquiring nearly enough mats to level cooking to 450 if you’re starting a new char.
What they should have done was reconfigured this along with exp. They should have made all the Dalaran recipes buyable with gold and they should have made 450-500 buyable with gold and made the last 25 points a grind for now.
This would have preserved the well known and understood mechanic of cooking: it’s basically a gimme until you get to the very end.
And Athryn, I had already gone to the leveling guide to try to figure out how to make this work, but as it turns out the leveling guides aren’t quite up to date. The item you’re supposed to use to level from like 415-425, Darkbrew Lager, is essentially broken. The hops and yeast you used to buy from the vendor have been completely removed from the game.
So basically I ended up buying a ton of lower level mats at some expense off the ah to get to 415. Now the only three recipes I even have that give skillups are two greens for which it’s impossible to buy mats on the AH and impossible to farm if you don’t do fishing, and Darkbrew lager which is broken. This means that for the next ten points I’m stuck doing cooking dailies to get the skillup until I can start doing Blackened Surprise which you can buy from the recipe vendor.
This rant was TL;DR long ago, so everybody will probably miss this part, but I want to emphasize, it’s not really like I’m actually too angry or upset about this. It hardly matters in the end.
My point is simply that in their dash to get Cata finished they really broke something that used to be very simple and straightforward. It’s just an interesting issue IMO…that they could take something that should have been very easy to redesign for Cata and they completely borked it. Given how polished everything usually is it’s always funny to see something ruined that should have been so easy for them.
I think the fact that the daily gives you a skillup is almost a tacit admission that the system is stupid. They know there’s skill ranges for which your only reasonable option is going to be to do the dailies.
In the end, my gripe is simply that cooking wasn’t broken before, but by turning it into a dailies/points system they’ve completely changed the nature of the skill.
Oh well :D
The way it should work in my opinion is that there should always be an option to level cooking to cap -25 or cap -50 through some very straightforward process. Every level range should have some recipe that can get you to the next tier through killing mobs and making a buyable recipe. Doing dailies for points, buying boutique recipes, or buying rare drop recipes or specific vendor recipes would be the faster, preferred alternative, but there would always be a way to simply motor through it if necessary up until that cap -25 point when you have to do a little more work.
Then when they up the cap, they nerf the recipes previous point based recipes so that you can buy and grind.
