Cooking and Grinds

The one part of this silly Pilgrim holiday I am participating in is the whole cooking thing. It was easy as pumpkin pie to level my paladin’s cooking skill from 1-350 or so with nearly no effort. I say “nearly” because damn it, travelling is difficult when you can’t port wherever the crap you want.

I’ll probably end up grabbing the ranks on several other characters, too, but maybe not. Euripedes can already make basically any buff food he or any other alt would need at end game, so I really don’t need another cook.

But still… easy as pie leveling for a profession that otherwise is just a stupid ass grind.

There are multiple kinds of grinds, but they can be generalized into “bad grinds” and “good grinds”. What category any specific grind falls into depends on your personal opinion.

Grinding dailies is dull, grinding the AH even worse, but grinding honour isn’t a grind at all for me. Rather, continuously running BGs is a hobby of mine that I dearly love.

Then we have what I call a stupid ass grind. Most professions are stupid ass grinds in the 1-300 area, featuring difficult to get mats, difficult to get recipes, and requiring you to spend literally hours running your pretty ass all over the expired old world.

Jewelcrafting, for instance, requires all sorts of gems that are rare drops on mining nodes, or require you to prospect massive quantities of raw (and very expensive) ore, in order to have a slim chance at the same gems. It’s a long, hard grind that is nearly impossible if you aren’t leveling a miner at the same time.

Then, there’s engineering, and… well, let’s talk about cooking, as that’s the current fulcrum of discussion.

Cooking is tedious to level. In order to get from1-300, you have to run all over both continents, collecting recipes from vendors located as far away from capital cities as possible, then you have to collect meat from mobs that, somehow, are located as far away from flight paths as physically possible.

Some day you’ll get to a higher skill level, where you can level your profession in the BC and LK eras, where it’s far less stupid to do so.

There’s nothing wrong with leveling professions requiring a bunch of mats. That’s fine. What, to me, isn’t fine is forcing someone to go all the way to Silithus to pick up a recipe so they can kill a bunch of worms for a ton of meat with a low drop rate so they can get 10 skill ups.

The 1-300 area for every profession is in desperate need of an overhaul. The current design is horrendously outdated, just ask anyone who’s tried to power level a profession recently.

Consider the difference between, say, the draenei and blood elf starting quests and the starter quests of any other race. Consider the difference between the horde totem quests (especially water) and the draenei totem quests. Consider the difference between questing in your mid-40s to questing in your mid-70s.

It is painfully obvious what content is designed better.

Switching gears, attunements and their relevant quest chains are being dragged out again.

Things like the Karazhan quest chain were removed because they were pointlessly tedious.

Sure, it was fun and felt all sorts of good when you first got the key. I’m right there with you, it wasn’t the hardest thing in the world, but it wasn’t a complete walk in the park either.

But what about the second time you did it? What about the twenty-third time you were running Durnholde Keep to get someone into Dark Portal so they could get their Kara key?

Some of you have fond memories of that quest chain. Me? I’ve done Steamvaults so many times I can tell you exactly how many trash mobs there are between the entrance and the kara key fragment, where they’re positioned, and what their abilities and patrol routes are.

I, for one, am glad guilds don’t have to run SSC/TK from start to finish every time they pick up a new recruit or an officer rerolls a healer or tank to keep the raids going.

I would prefer if attunements were still around, I just don’t want to have to do them over and over again. The Kara key chain, for instance, would have been fantastic if it attuned your entire account and all characters past, present and future instead of just one character.