Can anybody tell me where I can find _____________?

You see this constantly in chat. It drives me nuts. I might be having a great conversation with guild mates only to have 47 people alternately flaming or giving 47 different kinds of advice to a guy who asked a very simple question in the general chat channel. Now, I’m not an elitist. I’m not against asking questions in chat. Heck even “pros” can’t know everything about Wow – there’s just too much to it and it changes with every patch. As a matter of fact, jut the other night our guild was doing an instance run that we had never done before, but it turned out fine. Why? Thottbot.

Thottbot is a massive database of World of Warcraft data. Hundreds and thousands of players upload their game statistics to Thottbot every day. Need to know where you can find the recipe for savory deviate delight? Thottbot can tell you that this recipe has dropped 148 times from Greater Plainstriders in the Barrens out of 341,943 times they have been looted. It will also tell you that this recipe will only drop off of mobs in the barrens, and that there is no particular mob that drops it much more than any other. It is a truly random and unique recipe, thus the normally high prices in the AH for this recipe and also for what it produces, savory deviate delight.

But Thotbott can be very confusing to deal with for the first-time user. So we’re going to talk a little bit today about using it for professions, and after that you’ll understand better how to use it for almost everything else. Now Thottbot isn’t the only resource out there, but it does have the biggest and most up-to-date information pool, which makes it the first place I visit when I really need to know something and don’t feel like rooting for it on Google.

Go to Thottbot and you will see five links under the search box. Hover your mouse over professions and then click cooking for our example. It’s under the dark blue header for secondary professions. You are now taken to a page where every cooking recipe in the game is listed in skill level order.

The first recipe listed is Spice Bread. The information is divided into five columns: skill, recipe, components, slot and source. Let’s go through these one at a time so that you know what each column is telling you.

Column one lists three numbers. The first and largest one is black – this is the skill level at which you can use the recipe. For spice bread you can use it at level 1. The second number is smaller and gold. This is the level at which you will stop getting automatic skill-ups for cooking this recipe. Spice Bread goes green (meaning you will only gain a skill-up every few times) at cooking skill level 30. The smallest number at the bottom is in gray and represents the skill level at which you will no longer receive skill-ups for this recipe; in this case 40. So now we know that we can start cooking spice bread as our very first cooking recipe. We also know that we can cook 30 of them to get to skill level 30 and that we will never get our cooking skill higher than 40 using this recipe.

The second column lists the Recipe name and icon as a hyperlink. Clicking this will take us to the Spiced Bread page. At the top is a screen shot of the finished product.

The next box shows what it takes to make it.

The next box down shows items with similar cooldown counts (this is absolutely useless information in this case, but come in handy at other times) And finally, is the comments section; very short in this case with only two comments showing.

We hit the back button on our browser to return to the recipes list for column 3 which will list the components, or materials (mats) required to make this recipe. Hovering over the icons will show the screen tool tip for simple flour and mild spices as well as a hyperlink to go to each of those pages. Let’s go to the page for simple flour.

This page is a little different than the page for spiced bread. It begins the same with the screenshot of the tool tip followed by the recipe that it is used in. But this page has a new information box that lists the vendors from whom you can buy simple flour.

No comments for this item. I might post one just for giggles. Click on the first vendor name “Cookie” Mc Weaksauce (a little WoW humor). This will tell you everything you never thought you wanted to know about Cookie. It starts with his tool tip, then a map of where he is located in the zone, the quests he can give (if any, in this case one) It will also list everything he sells (again, if any, 7 things can be purchased from cookie). It will list what he drops if you kill him and then any comments.

A word on comments, these will become you most valuable asset for things that are hard to find. Players post forum comments on how exactly to get or do or survive whatever is being discussed. Not much to talk about with most of this cooking information, so comments are limited, but some comment lists go on for pages and pages.

Now let’s go back 2 pages to the recipe list. The fourth column is not used here; recipes go IN a bag, they do not have a slot. So the fifth and final column is where to find the recipe, the source. Recently, sources seem to have dissapeared from thottbot, but if you want to know where to get a recipe for something just type it in the search box.

type in “recipe brilliant smallfish” and hit the “> ” This takes you to the page for the Brilliant Smallfish recipe. You can see that there are 12 vendors for this recipe scattered all over Azeroth. Clicking on the name of these folks will, of course show you everything about them specifically if you are having trouble finding them.

Ok, so now you can see that if you will get a little click happy, Thottbot has a TON of information about everything you could ever want to know. Our first article talked about how to make decent money as a lowbie using fishing and cooking. Now let’s see how what we’ve just learned can help us do that.

On the recipes page we now know that there are two different fish we can cook at level 1 cooking. We also know that the first 45 of either one will get us to level 45 cooking and that if we continue to cook these we can level cooking all the way to 85 without cooking anything else. Scroll down a bit to the next fish recipe – longjaw mudsnapper. We can cook this at cooking level 50, all the way to 130, but it goes green at cooking skill 90. Rainbow fin Albacore is exactly the same. Scroll down a bit more to bristle whisker catfish. It requires cooking 100 to cook, and will give points all the way to 180, going green at 140.

So how does this help us? Well, we know we don’t have to cook anything else before we learn brilliant smallfish. Since we checked the fishing page (well I did) we also know we can catch brilliant smallfish right in Stormwind city at fishing level 1. Catching these will level fishing up to 85, this also is true for slitherskin mackerel, although night elves would be fishing it in Auberdine. So by catching either of these fish to skill level 50 cooking, we can then move on to longjaw mudsnapper to level cooking to 100, and then bristle whisker catfish to 150 and so forth. By doing it his way we’ve only had to cook the very minimum of extra fish to get our cooking skill ups (only 15 skill points from green level recipes).

So now you can see how to use Thottbot as a guide to the really mundane stuff. This will save you mountains of time searching for recipes. Just check Thottbot to find out where to go to get it, or even find out if it’s available to find for your faction. Some things simply are not worth the trouble it will take to find them, so this can save you a ton of frustration.

If you will start to use Thottbot to help you with your professions, you will figure out more and more how to use it to find just about anything you need to know, without getting beat up in chat.

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