Power Leveling, Fishing, and Cooking (WoW)  

Before you can set your eyes on the lofty title of Chef and Salty, you need to start at the bottom rung.

Cooking and fishing can be somewhat boring to level... if you don't keep them up as you get xp, they'll fall behind and you'll then have to visit lower level zones. But who wants to stop and fish for a dozen hours when there's level to be gained? The eternal dilema.

Weither you decide to use this guide once at level cap or while leveling doesn't matter, this guide does however try to make you win sometime by showing you how to strategically fish in order to increase your cooking skill.

A couple things to know

Fishing is pretty much always going to be lower than your cooking. Fishing just takes a lot more time and patience than cooking ever will.

The formula for leveling fishing is has follow:

current unmodified fishing level - 75) / 25 = total # of catches required to level

Minimum of 1 catch per level.

Fishing in higher level water can still be done, and you will still catch things... just rarely fish. You'll get gray item such as Sickly Fish and Tattered Cloth. Those still count as 'catches' and can still give you skill up. Raising your skill level increase your chance to actually get fishes or other valuable items and speed up your cast time. Lures are useful because of this and mostly dirt cheap, so there's no reason not to grab a few.

You can definitly level from 1 to 450 in Stormwind, Orgrimmar or Dalaran. It works. The reason why this guide makes you move around is because it attempts to make you catch the fish you will need to level cooking.

During your travels, you'll most likely come across school of fishes or wreckages. Those can be fished out of. You have an increased chance of getting the fish for which the pool is named after by doing so. Fishing out of a pool is a bit counter-intuitive, you simply need to be standing in front of it and cast your line... and hope it falls in it. It can take several cast and there's no real way to improve your odd. In Azeroth, most of the fish school are used to get fish that are Alchemy components, and thus won't be much use for someone trying to level cooking. Things change in Outland and Northrend however.

This guide will send you all over Azeroth and Outland to gather cooking recipes, whenever possible, you should grab all possible recipes from the vendor, not only those suggested in the guide, as knowing more recipes will help you get Sous Chef & The Outland Gourmet.

Getting Started, 1-100

The first thing to do of course, is to get Fishing and Cooking. You can click on the link to find out where the trainers are, or simply ask a guard.

Once that's done, find the nearest body of low level water - Stormwind and Orgrimmar are too good spot, but other lowbies zone such as Elwynn Forest, the Barrens (off the coast) work just as well.

You'll want to buy Recipe: Brilliant Smallfish and Long Jaw Mudsnapper. As you can see, there's plenty of place to buy those from, but if you've picked Orgrimmar or Stormwind as your first fishing spot, the Fishing Supply Vendor right beside the trainer will sell those.

Just keep fishing until you get up to 50 fishing and cook every fish you ge, keep any mudsnapper in your bag. Once you hit 50, you can learn how to cook them and that recipe will stay orange until you hit a 100, at which point you need to move out.

It's not a bad idea to raise your cooking to 125, even if the recipe become yellow and green - the extra cast will past your fishing skill and being able to become a Journeyman cook right away will save you having to come back to train during the next step.

Getting Serious 100-150

Make your way to Hillsbrad Foothill. You'll need to buy Recipe: Bristle Whisker Catfish from either Lindea Rabonne in Southshore or Derak Nightfall in Tarren Mills. Now head over to the river that split the zone in two, find a comfy spot, sit down, grab a few cold ones and fish away :).

You'll need to fish here until you hit level 150 and get up to 175 cooking from those fish. If you did not train journeyman cooking, never fear, you have to go back to train fishing anyway. Just make sure you keep an ample supply of fish in your bag.

Since you're in Hillsbrad, this is a good time to get some achievement done. You should find some floating wreckage in the sea, fishing from one of those will give you The Old Gnome and the Sea as well as give you credit for the Schooner Wreckage toward the The Scavenger achievement.

You might as well totally fish out any wreckage you find, you have a good chance of fishing out a crate that will contain at Weather-Beaten Journal, which on top of granting you the Fish Don't Leave Footprints achievement will also give you Find Fish which is a very useful ability later on. Don't obsess over getting the book however, you'll have several occasions to get it later if you don't fish it out now.

If you're Alliance, make sure you grab Recipe: Mithril Head Trout from Lindea Rabonne and train up to journeyman from Donald Rabonne before you leave.

Journeyman 150-225

The Horde and Alliance path split up here, Alliance players should already have their Recipe: Mithril Head Trout, Horde players will need to ever to Desolace to buy it from Wulan. They'll also find a fishing trainer, Lui'Mala there. Alternatively, you can also buy the recipe from Shankys and train there as well.

Once you're all set up, it's time to fish again. There's several place to get the Trouts, but you might as well go to the closest one.

For the Alliance players, from Hillsbrad Foothill, the closest spot are the ponds in front of Stromgarde Keep in Arathi Highlands. Just head over there and start fishing.

Since the Horde just flew all the way over to Desolace, backtracking to the Arathi Highland would be a pretty big time waster - your closest spot from there is Thousand Needles. There's a small lake by the centaur camp, you can fish the trouts there. If you've decided to train in Orgrimmar, than it's up to you weither you want to go back to Arathi or hit Thousand Needles.

This one of the first of many long stretch in fishing, you have to fish those trouts until you hit 225 fishing. Your cooking will easily reach 225 from cooking them all. At this point, it's time for another visit at the trainer and a change of scenery.

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