Realm First! Illustrious Cooking

My all-time most viewed post is this one where I detailed possible plans for getting one of the realm first feats of strength for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Some of those hits were from the same few people who read the rest of my posts, but some people actually got here from the outside world likely expecting help and instead were treated to a bunch of drivel about what I might want to do and not a lot about how I would do it.

Well, if any of those people end up back here I have a "treat" for them. I got tipped onto the fact that you can likely do cooking in less than an hour and decided to look into it further. I'll detail the steps needed here, but the window to get on board is steadily closing.

Why is that? Well, it turns out they actually enabled the Cataclysm cooking and fishing dailies in the shattering patch. The fishing dailies don't matter at all but the cooking ones sure do. The new dailies award new cooking tokens which are used to buy recipes or meat and can be stockpiled before the Cataclysm launch. (They also award one cooking skill so you can save one up in advance.) Most of the dailies award one token, but one of them gives two (currently the active one on Vek!)

Now, for the most part the new recipes fall into one of 3 categories for our purposes.

• They require skill 450, go yellow at 465, green at 477, and grey at 490. 
• They require skill 475, go yellow at 490, green at 497, and grey at 505. 
• They require skill 500, go yellow at 515, green at 520, and grey at 525. 

Finally, existing recipes from the Wrath era can take you all the way to 475 if you work at it, though they start green and require spices each so you'd have to have a real stockpile and spend a lot of time at it. Certainly good enough to beat anyone who isn't trying to twink it out but has no chance against someone going optimal speed. Fish feasts from Wrath go grey at 465 but actually stay orange until 455 so they're quite feasible for a few skill points.

Assuming you're going whole hog you need to buy 3 recipes, one from each category above. They each cost 3 tokens, and the tokens are soulbound, so you need to have 9 tokens on your main when Cataclysm launches. Counting today there are exactly 8 days left before Cataclysm launches, so you need just one doubler to get there. (If you're going the Wrath to 475 plan then you only need 6 tokens which will be good enough if no one else on your realm caught on in time.) Note this does include the day you log in (dailies reset at 4am, game comes up at 3am) but if your realm has a favourable timezone you may be able to get around this. I don't. As an aside, you want to save that last daily for after you've trained to go above 450 so you get the free skill point, and probably want to save it for skill #500 or #525.

You also need to have the cooking hat from the Dalaran dailies. Someone with the hat will beat someone without the hat guaranteed since it pretty much triples to quadruples your cooking time.

Ok, so we have our hat and our recipes and our free bonus skill... How are we getting the mats to get the rest of the skills? Well, for 2 of the new cooking awards you can also buy a box of meat. Each box of meat contains between 2 and 5 of a random Cataclysm meat. There are 9 such possible meats that can be pulled out of the box, of varying uses. Yes, I know, you need all your awards to buy the recipes. Your alts don't, though. Your guildies don't. People willing to make a quick buck certainly don't. The recipes are BoP, the tokens are BoP, but the meat can be traded. Anyone who is both level 10 and has at least 1 cooking skill can do the dailies, buy the boxes, and mail you the meat. What are the kinds of meat and what can they do?

• Basilisk "Liver" - min skill 500
• Blood Shrimp - min skill 450, min skill 475
• Giant Turtle Tongue - min skill 475
• Crocolisk Tail - min skill 500, min skill 500 (thanks Blizzard)
• Delicate Wing - worthless for our purposes
• Toughened Flesh - worthless for our purposes
• Dragon Flank - min skill 500
• Snake Eye - min skill 450
• Monstrous Claw - min skill 450

Personally I'm doing the daily on 7 alts (and may level 2 more characters to 10 in order to bump that number up). I expect to get about 12 tokens per character (I started 2 days ago before checking on the feasibility of the whole plan just in case) which is 42 boxes of meat. So I'm likely to end up with around 15 of each meat type which is clearly not enough since I need to get 25 skillups per recipe. I looked at the AH this morning and the meat was going for 200G a pop, which is a little extreme. Hopefully I'll get lucky on a couple types of meat and can borrow/buy/steal some from some friends to get to the needed amount...

But what is the needed amount? Well, to get from 450 to 465 is 15 and then I need another 10 skill from a yellow recipe. Probably that's only 12 or so, but to be safe I'd want at least 20, so I need 35 of the first tier meat.

To get from 475 to 490 is 15. Another 7 at yellow and another 3 at green is going to be in the 25 range to be safe I'd think, so 40 of the second tier meat.

To get from 500 to 515 is 15. Another 5 at yellow and 5 at green is even rougher, probably in the 30 range.

Plus, if you're going all out to get something you really want to safety the contract, so I'd really want to add on an extra 10 in each category. Nothing would suck more than to do all this prep and end up stuck at 499 skill desperately begging people for turtle tongues. You'd still be fine if you're the only one going for it, but if someone else planned better you're sunk. (Note this would be a good time to cash your saved up daily quest for +1 skill!)

So, ideally, I would want...

• 45 Blood Shrimp OR Snake Eye OR Monstrous Claw
• 50 Blood Shrimp OR Giant Turtle Tongue
• 55 Basilisk "Liver" OR Crocolisk Tail OR Dragon Flank

Remember you can get some early skill from the fish feasts (and the first 5 are guaranteed so no need not to use them) so really you only need 40 of the first tier meat. (Note since I can only afford one recipe per tier I have to get all 55 as Liver or as Tail, not a split.)

All told I think I can hit max cooking in about 5 minutes assuming I have the meat in my inventory in advance. This seems totally worth going for and like it won't really hurt going for realm first fishing either. Time to beg for meat I guess!