Master of Cooking Recipes – Alliance Only

ETA:  Apparently this is old news (VERY OLD NEWS – he was added back in patch 1.11.1!), but I’m leaving the post up because if I didn’t know this, chances are there are some other people out there who don’t know it either. I hope. Or I’m going to feel hella silly.

Yesterday, I’m running around Stormwind on Krikket doing the new cooking dailies (and so far? I hate the new cooking dailies. Just sayin’), and I find this guy hanging out in the Old Town Inn.

He’s got 13 cooking recipes that were previously only available by doing quests out in the world, usually quests of the annoying super-low drop rate variety.  Alliance characters who are working on their Chef de Cuisine achievement probably want to pay the man a visit. I haven’t looked up every recipe he carries, but I believe they’re all former quest rewards from quests that are no longer available post-Shattering.

I was hoping there’d be a Horde equivalent, but according to WoWhead, Kendor Kabonka is the one and only master of cooking recipes in Azeroth. I’m not sure if this was an oversight, or if Horde didn’t lose any of their quests that rewarded cooking recipes, or if the model of having one or two recipes on different vendors in different areas was the way they decided to go for Horde.

Is Inscription the New Engineering?

When it comes to professions, I’m a bad raider. I say this because I don’t choose my professions in order to min/max my character for raiding. I choose them because either (a) they look interesting or (b) it’s something I want for convenience.  Very rarely do I choose a profession for its money making potential.

Except this one time.  When I first moved Alix to Azgalor, she was an RaF toon with no gear, and although she robbed all my other Shadow Council toons blind, very little money. She also had no professions. I had read a few places that with some time & determination, playing the glyph market was a way to make a lot of money in a very little bit of time.

Since my Horde guild is amazing about profession sharing, I figured I could, just this once, do it for the money. And it worked. I’d spend about an hour every two days on the glyph market, and go on a once-weekly herb-picking binge, and neither myself nor my boyfriend wanted for anything on Horde due to my diligence with it.

Of course, the perma-glyphs in 4.0.1, combined with the increased cost of crafting, made inscription somewhat less profitable than it was (after a very brief period, at least on Azgalor Horde-side, where everyone was buying up glyphs at ridiculous prices), and the change to the ink trader and the ability to buy enchanting vellums from vendors in 4.0.3 was the final nail in the coffin for any last minute attempts at money grubbing before the expac proper.

I’ve read that a lot of people have already dropped inscription and started power-leveling other, more useful professions. Not me, I’m planning to keep inscription both on my Horde main, and on an Alliance alt.  Yes, a big part of that is the ability to make my own Darkmoon Cards, and the cheap shoulder enchants are nice, sure, and it’ll be great to never have to buy glyphs for alts.

But what I’m really intrigued by is the new fun stuff that inscription is getting in Cataclysm.

These are just toys – and I really hope they’re not BoP. I’d love to be able to gift Apple a stack or two of each.  They’re cheap and easy to make, and if I can level off them? You bet I’m going to.

Then we get these: Mysterious Fortune Cards.  Not only are they like a WoW-lottery ticket (when you flip them, they’re a vendorable item, worth anywhere from 10 silver to 5,000 gold!), they’re a cooking reagent.

Once my cooking is leveled, I’ll have some pretty decent buff food (90 stamina and 90 in “some other useful stat” – I’m guessing probably intellect for my casters) that’s cheap to make. The cards are STILL vendorable after you eat the cookie, so these are basically going to cost one flour to make. There’s no excuse NOT to have them.

Scribes will also be able to make Forged Documents, which start a quest that rewards a Bulging Sack of Gold – which is rumored to be about 10. Small sack, I guess, but it’s a nice way to make sure that ink prices don’t bottom out completely. I have no idea if the quest is going to be completely repeatable, or just a daily, and if there’ll be a cooldown on the documents.

Finally, inscription will be making relics (those silly things that fill the ranged weapon slot for paladins, druids, shaman and death knights) and offhands. This will likely be a limited market, and not terribly profitable, but if Blizzard follows suit and continues to drop higher level recipes as we progress through the tiers of raiding (and doesn’t make vastly superior ones buyable with valor points, let’s say), this has the potential to be profitable through the expansion.

Finally, we can still make Runescrolls of Fortitude – updated for level 85, and scrolls of stats, which now count as Battle Elixirs (sorry alchemists!).

Sure, inscription will likely never be the money-maker that it was in Wrath, but I don’t think the state of the profession is so dire as to be no longer worth pursuing.