Secondary Skills

We've talked about skills for various classes. Today, I'd like to touch on each of the secondary skills. You know, the ones everyone can learn in addition to the two primary trade skills you're allowed. I'm talking about cooking, fishing and first aid.

Let's start with first aid. There is no reason for any character to not learn first aid. Yes, it takes cloth. Yes, the cloth resources may be stretched if you're also leveling tailoring as one of your primary skills. However, it's my belief that there will be (nearly) enough cloth drops from mobs you kill to support both first aid and tailoring. But, I hear you say, why should I learn first aid on my class that can heal? Priests, paladins, shamans and druids can all heal themselves. But I know I've been in situations where I was totally out of mana, in combat and had time to bandage. What I didn't have was the mana to finish the mob and heal myself. Most of those classes have ways to put a single mob out of commission long enough to get a few ticks in from a bandage. Stuns, fears, and roots can handle that job nicely. I think the taunt totem would also allow you a few ticks of bandaging. And sometimes in an instance, a bandage will serve any of those classes well. Please don't ignore first aid. As a tip, you can use some bandages before you can make them. Wowwiki has a nice chart, so if you have other characters that can make bandages and "outgrow" something they've made, consider sending them to a lower level alt who can benefit from the bandage before it can be manufactured.

Cooking also is something that I think everyone should learn. I find a total of 26 cooking recipes that are quest rewards. These quests are likely going to be in your leveling chain anyway as you level. Additionally, many mobs will drop items that can be cooked. Most of the time, I do not "cook in the field." I collect the bits & pieces as I quest and when I'm back in town I hit up the (usually) handy trade vendor, buy the spices I need, find a fire and cook up everything I have. Rarely will there be no fire (or cookpot or stove) handy. In those cases I often carry a stack of wood and flint & tinder. Just in case. The last couple of times I've leveled a character, I found it very easy to keep up with cooking. There is a pronounced deadspot around 270 where nothing you can cook will come from drops. You'll have to fish. This is supposed to be fixed in the next patch, but for now you need some fish to get to 300. From 300 on it's easy. For those of you that have leveled fishing, there's currently a market for fish to get you to 300. I got all of mine from Azshara. Tip for fisherman who want to make some gold. And past 300, some of the easiest to acquire buffs in the game come from eating cooked food. And things like Golden Fishsticks or Ravager Dog also sell pretty well on the auction house.

This leads us to fishing. I do not recommend leveling fishing "as you level." I find that fishing takes too long to make significant gains while I'm focused on leveling my character. I usually get fishing to 75-ish and then carry my pole with me. Whenever I'm waiting on a party member or a boat, I fish. It never seems to go up fast enough. This is definitely a skill that I tend to level post 70. However, keeping fishing in line with cooking will make the cooking even easier to level.

Baking and Speccing

My good friend Owaru has said to me (and anyone else that would listen) that WoW has become a thinking person's game since the advent of Burning Crusade. What he means by this I think are that there are a number of things that you must consider when making choices about gear, spec, rotations and other things. Thankfully just at the same time we were required to start weighing different things that we were used to looking at, Blizzard handed us another way (through jewelcrafting) to customize our gear choices. We already had enchanting, but now we have two ways.

Today I'm going to look at Building a Mage (a class I don't run, so therefore I may be wrong) and baking bread.

Making a mage	Baking bread
The two main ingredients for making a mage are some increased spell damage (mages are all about DPS you know) and some way to make it run. Mana is the power source used for every mage.	The two main ingredients in bread are some flour and some way to make dough. Water turns particulate into fluid and in this case it will make a dough.
Run your mage with only these two aspects for a while	Bake.
Did you find your mage lacked something? Some staying power or something else?	How did you enjoy the cement slab that you baked? Not very satisfying? Need something more? I think what we’ve made here is a tortilla?
Let’s give the mage some staying power. Basically, playing a mage is a resource utilization problem. You have your mana which must power spells. Your life total is also a resource. If you haven’t spent all your mana, but are dead you’ll never get to spend that mana. “A dead mage does no DPS.:" But do we need as much stamina as spell damage? Probably not. The primary goal of the mage is to stay alive long enough for their massive DPS to have an effect. A little stamina (for a mage) goes a long way.	Let’s give the bread some volume. But we don’t need the same amount of yeast as flour and/or water. We’ll use a little yeast and that’ll go a long way. You see, yeast is actually tiny organisms that give off bubbles as a by product. Those bubbles get caught in the dough and make it more voluminous. Bake.
The mage is getting better. But there are still some things missing. Sure, when the firebolts start flying (and actually connecting) they do massive sustained DPS. Awesome. But we’re missing way too often. Let’s add some spell hit rating.	Well, the bread isn’t as flat as last time but it’s still not quite there. Let’s take the extra step of dissolving the yeast in the water and maybe giving the yeast a little food to work with. We’ll add some sugar (or honey) to feed the yeast. Well fed yeast, produces more bubbles and that’ll give us more lift.
Wow. We’re really getting there. But we’re still missing that something. It must be the big number syndrome from when we land a critical strike. We could make that go up by increasing our spell hit just a bit.	Wow. Really close. But it’s missing that certain something. Let’s add just a pinch of salt. It’ll be so subtle you probably won’t be able to identify it, but if it’s missing you’ll know something is.
So very close. Now, it’s a matter of pushing the buttons and doing things in the right order.	Let’s do things in the right order. Yes, follow the recipe. Do all the right things in the right order. Let your dough rest at the appropriate times.
Congratulations. You did it.	Congratulations. You did it.

Now. If you really want to make some bread, I recommend getting this recipe. It makes good stuff.

Google Searchbot says...

Since I'm totally out of ideas now that I've been out of work a week and leveling a lowbie, I took a look at the Google Web Tools and found that one of the big searches that's getting hits on the blog is for the daily cooking quests introduced in 2.3.

I've done the daily cooking quest on at least one of my characters most days. However, I think I've found exactly three different quest varieties. Here they are in no particular order.

1. The Giant Kaliri Wing one. When this is the daily quest, its a good day to do Skettis Dailies! The sky is literally picked clean of these giant, annoying birds. It takes 1 wing and 3 warp burgers. Cook until bubbly in the provided cook pot and you're done. Pretty easy.
2. The Blade's Edge Mountain one. For this one you need to get some Serpent Flesh and some Mok'thanal Shortribs and combine them in a cooking pot in the corpse of a dead elemental in Blade's Edge. I found that you don't even have to kill it, as long as someone else's kill hasn't despawned you can use that corpse.
3. The Spiritual one. This requires some foodstuffs (I can't actually recall which) to be combined in the cooking pot in the spiritual grounds in Nagrand. Pretty simple.

The rewards are either a crate of meat or a barrel of fish. Both of which can contain a recipe. Although I'm told it doesn't matter, I've gotten only meat recipes from the meat crate and only fish recipes from the fish barrel. So, if you're wanting a particular recipe this may affect your chances.

Additionally, I've not seen the berry picking on that Kaliope described from the PTR. But, the past few days, I've not been diligent. It's been all about Bremmie!

Thanksgiving!

WARNING! Lots of Non-WoW stuff ahead!!

So. Today I was going to write a very creative article where I laid out a full Thanksgiving Dinner in terms of WoW food items. It shouldn't have been hard. In fact, I didn't really spend too much time researching it. It became a question of me enjoying my own Thanksgiving away from the computer (and Azeroth) or writing the blog.

So to salvage some of the cooking idea for the day, I'm going to share my Mom's Cranberry Sauce Alternative. She found this recipe several years ago and began making it instead of the jellied stuff with the can ridges in the sides. And as the two kids grew up, we also made it for dinners we were invited for. And it's the one dish that gets asked for again and again. For something so requested, it shouldn't be so simple.

And what better place to share it than on the interweb :-)

So, Here goes.

Mom's Cranberry Salad

1 box cranberry Jell-O (the large size)
1 can crushed pineapple
1 can whole cranberry sauce
Chopped Walnuts

Mix the Jell-O with the hot water called for on the box. Stir in the pineapple (with the juice) and cranberry sauce. Sprinkle the top with the walnuts. Refrigerate overnight.

Blizzard gets patch day right!

So, whatever children, small furry animals, and unidentified spices were sacrificed the to WoW gods seemed to have appeased their wrath. My UI did not completely bust (there were a few smallish coding fixes and some non-critical add-ons that need updating) and the lag was not game stopping. In short, 2.3 was a rockin' success.

Now, I didn't experience everything that changed--there's no way that could be done in just one night. Instead, I ran around like a lunatic swapping from character to character as I remembered things I needed to do. Here's the short list of things I did manage to accomplish:

1. Log into the bank toon, make sure the UI works. Make a few tweaks and call it a day.
2. Log into the priest, drool over the amount of spell damage he does (678). Go kill a quick monster to show myself how much easier it is. Hearthstone. Log out forgetting to check his mana regen.
3. Log into the warlock engineer. Fly out to Wildhammer and pick up the plans for the engineered flying mount. Hearthstone (cuz flying to Shattrath would take JUST. TOO. LONG.) Gather mats from bank, head to anvil, create flying machine of death.
4. Log into the hunter and look for daily quests. Find both dungeon quests and daily cooking quest. See I need a Kaliri Wing and head up to Skettis. Now, I don't know about you, but the damned giant Kaliri have knocked me off my mount about a bajillion times. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of them have cloaking devices considering how they've swooped at me while I'm all unawares. The place was empty--of birds. There were plenty of folks hovering about up there waiting to kill a bird. I flew about a bit and did the daily egg-bombing quest. Then I started buzzing birds on my epic mount. If I trained them carefully, I could ensure I got the first hit in. It only took two birds and I had my wing. Back to The Rokk.
5. Turn in daily cooking quest. Choose box of meat as my reward. 6 Warped Flesh, 7 Chunk o' Basilisk, a random grey and a new recipe, I can now make [Hot Spicy Talbuk]
6. Head over to Nagrand to lay the smack down on some Talbuk. And discover ZOMG -- the deadzone she is dead. *rejoice*
7. Get back to Shattrath. Log the priest back in. Go get Mad Alchemist recipe at the bird guys in Lower City. Make some. Drink one. Woot. Works. Make some sundry pots for my hunter. Log out without remembering to check his mana regen.
8. Log in the hunter. Find a friendly guild leathercrafter who is revered with Honor Hold. Sweet talk him out of a Nether. Get my new 24 slot ammo pouch! Woot.
9. Get into the Heroic Ramparts daily quest. Finish it after some really nasty bugging. The instance went nearly flawlessly (like 2 wipes) up until the dragon boss-which is who we have to kill for the daily quest. He has the two mobs just in front. Their death usually signifies the dragon landing and the last encounter starting. Well. Not for us. Each time we'd kill one of those dudes, another would re-spawn. Put in a ticket cuz I was getting. my. badge. Found out each kill gave 15 rep. And in a never-ending cycle. So..of course, the dragon aggros and starts the final event when we're not ready. Wipe. We think we figured out that if you kill them very close to one another in time that the dragon comes down. Not at all sure. Finally, finally, finally take down the big ugly. Get my item and hearth. Turn in.
10. Log out. Go to bed.

So. What's next?

1. Potentially get invited to a Zul'Aman tonight *cross fingers*
2. Remember to check the mana regen on my priest?
3. MORE DAILIES!
   

And eat first...

While I was leveling all of my characters took up cooking. The tiny buff it gave (although at level 5, +4 Stamina/+4 Spirit is not "small") made that grind a little easier. And I'm so glad I did. Because now I have access to some of the most required buffs for heroics/raids. I've recapped the various buffs you can get from foods and who I think might benefit. (Note: These are only the Outland recipes because that's where I am. A list of lower level food could be ascertained by visiting any of the big data sites or Kaliope's Crafting Blog.)

• Hunters/Melee DPS:

1. Ravager Dog (+40 Attack Power, +20 Spirit)
2. Grilled Mudfish, Warp Burger (+20 Agility, +20 Spirit)

• Casters:

1. Blackened Sporefish (8 mana/5 seconds, +20 Spirit)
2. Poached Bluefish, Blackened Basilisk (+23 spell damage, +23 Spirit)
3. Crunchy Serpent (+23 spell damage, +20 Spirit)
   

• Healers:

1. Blackened Sporefish (8 mana/5 seconds, +20 Spirit)
2. Golden Fishsticks (+44 Healing, +20 Spirit)

• Tanks (Warriors - Paladins might like caster food and druids think about melee food)
  

1. Roasted Clefthoof (+20 Strength, +20 Spirit)
   

• Anyone:

1. Buzzard Bites, Clambar, Feltail Delight, Talbuk Steak (+20 Stamina, +20 Spirit)
2. Spicy Crawdad, Fisherman's Feast (+30 Stamina, +20 Spirit)

If you leveled fishing and cooking these buffs take nothing but a few minutes to get. If you stick to the non-fishing variety there's also something for everyone. Heck, get a fellow guild member to cook for you if necessary. It's polite to provide them with the raw materials though if you're asking them to cook, for instance, in the entry hall of Karazhan too. Most of the above recipes don't require any materials other than the meat/fish.

Most of the ingredients are completely easy to figure out, but if you need to check out Kaliope's Crafter's Tome if you need to know for sure what the ingredients are.