For the new player, your first visit to one of the major cities can be pretty discouraging. You watch the chat roll by with people advertising items for sale with prices like “only 150 gold, cheaper than AH.” And you think to yourself, I only have 22 silver! How in the world do you ever get 150 gold? A couple weeks later you are in your first instance run and have saved up 3 gold and hear a guy in the party say how he’s saving up for his mount, only 70 more gold to go before level 40. It took you until level 20 to get 3 gold so at that rate you imagine should be able to get your mount at level bazillion.

Don’t let it get you down; it’s really not that bad. And what we’re going to show you today can make those first few levels a lot less painful. Anyone can buy their mount, even the epic and flying versions. If you bought all four mounts in the game the cost would be around 6000 gold! But lots of people do it, pretty much everyone has at least their level 40 mount, but there are certainly ways to make gold that are faster than others.

Now, this is not for the guy who has time to play WoW 8-10 hours a day. This will really cut into your raid runs. What this IS, is a great way for someone working on their first toon to make some decent cash without having to know the ins and outs of professions and the auction house. So let’s get to it.

There are several professions in the game that are freebies. Your character can only learn two professions at a time, but you can learn all three of the secondary skills: fishing, cooking and first aid. Personally, I always max out first aid on every toon I make just in case. But I will only max fishing and cooking on one character and leave the other toons to do the main professions without worrying about the secondary skills.

You may know some advanced players who ridicule fishing and cooking as a waste of time, but you will hardly ever find high level players who will go to a major raid without having a stack of crafted food items. This plays right into what we’re about to teach you. Because very few people will ever level cooking all the way to 375, and even fewer will take the time to get fishing to 375, you have a great way to make some extra cash with limited competition.

A great example of this is Spicy Crawdads. A main tank for a raid will need to take 5 or 10 of these into Kara, and they will run right to the AH to buy a few. It’s easy to see why from the +30 stamina buff:

Spicy Crawdad

As a new player, I recommend that you run right now and get fishing and cooking started. Here’s why: everybody has to eat. Even more specifically, hunters have pets to feed. And pets can eat piles of fish. Most pets will eat cooked fish, or at least most hunters will have at least one cat, bear, or pig.

Now you are not going to make a fortune this way, but even my level 70 hunter makes some decent change (about 100 gold every week) selling golden fish sticks. Above all that, there is probably a savings of about 10-15 gold a week from not having to buy food for me or my pets. The other nice thing is that all my characters always have that extra little stamina buff, or other nice things like agility and intelligence from the fish I can cook. So I sell what everybody else wants to eat, and keep the rest for myself and vendor the leftovers. Even though a stack of 5 Spicy Crawdad goes for about 6-8 gold on my server, you don’t have to be at level 65 to make money selling fish in the AH. Even at level 10, there are food issues people have to deal with.

This technique will get you up to skill level 225 very fast in both fishing and cooking with the least amount of time, effort and money for cooking supplies since most fish recipes do not require spices. The other nice thing is that you can level up your cooking all the way to 375 and never cook anything but fish. No running around trying to get mystery meat from buzzards or anything weird like that. Fish it, cook it, sell it - the only running you will do is to get new recipes if you can’t find them on the auction house.

Here’s how this works. Go fishing for an hour or two in your major city. The cool thing about fishing is that you could skill all the way up to 375 and never fish outside of your starter area. I know this isn’t precise, but the point is that you don’t have to fish in higher level ponds to level up. Fishing skill-ups are tied to the number of catches, not the level of fish you catch. It’s a great thing to do while you’re in line for a battleground. If you’re just waiting around with nothing else to do, throw a line a few times and get several skill-ups. Remember to use lures to make sure you never lose a fish.

Next, you can do the first cooking quest and then run straight to the cooking trainer in your major city and get the first fish cooking recipe. You don’t have to do the cooking quests, but if you only plan on having one toon do all of your cooking, it is certainly nice to have every recipe you can get your hands on. I simply mail everything used in cooking that drops from mobs to my cook, and decide later whether to fry it up and put it in the AH.

Just catching and then cooking with the brilliant smallfish and longjaw mudsnapper recipes will get you to over 100 in both fishing and cooking, and the next fish, bristle whisker catfish should easily bring you over 175 skill in cooking. You can catch all three of these fish in most low-level ponds, so you can see how easy this makes leveling up your cooking skill.

After that, take your stacks of cooked fish over to the auction house and put them up for sale. Very rarely will anyone be selling low-level food, so it may be a little tricky to get your pricing right at first (I highly recommend using auctioneer mod to make this MUCH easier). Lather, rinse and repeat all the way through the game into outlands.

You can see here that there are only 4 cooked catfish on the AH on a very well-established server. If you were to post 5 or six full stacks, they would easily be nabbed up in an hour or two by some level 15-25 hunters needing a little kitty food. On this server the catfish go for about 1 silver each, so those six stacks would net you 1 gold. Considering that it’s pretty tough to come by gold at level 5 or 10; that’s a nice bit of change for a lowbie toon to work with, all for about 20-30 minutes worth of just leveling your fishing skill up at the same time.

It would be a rather longer article to go through the specifics of when you need to train, where to fish for certain fish and where to do the fishing and cooking quests and we have guides for that, BUT you don’t really need an extensive guide for any profession, what you need is to learn to use Thottbot effectively. All you need to do for this is browse Thottbot for the recipes or fish that you need under fishing and cooking and you can find out everything you need to know; which is the subject of another article you can look forward to reading very soon at Dominate Your Server.

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