So you’re level 70 and you never dropped a point in cooking. And now you see all these spiffy stat foods floating around, but you always have to buy them from the Auction House or ask a friend to make it for you. Sick of being a slacker? Here’s how to power your cooking to 300 the quickest way possible.

1 – 90

First, train the base cooking skill from the Cooking trainer of choice. Now, noobs don’t really know to put the low level meats on the AH, so you’ll likely have to kill your own. As Horde, go to Durotar and kill boards for [item]Chunk of Boar Meat[/item] as well as Scorpids for [item]Scorpid Stinger[/item]. One thing I found handy here was to actually send tells to low level characters offering to buy any meats they produce. Travel to Razor Hill and buy the [item]Scorpid Surprise[/item] recipe from Grimtak.

Farm and cook these meats until you hit 90. You will need to go back to the cooking trainer to train up to Journeyman when you hit 70.

91 – 125

Once you hit 90, head over to Barrens and talk to Grub. You can find him just NE of The Crossroads. He will give you a quest for [item]Dig Rat Stew[/item]. Head down to the southern end of Barrens and kill Dig Rats in the excavation area. You’ll need 40 – 50. Unfortunately there are not many spawns here so kill ‘em when you can. Turn in your quest, get your recipe and skill up on [item]Dig Rat Stew[/item] until 125.

On your way back to Grub, stop off in The Crossroads and buy the recipe, [item]Hot Lion Chops[/item] from Zargh the butcher. Once you are 125, you can learn this recipe.

126 – 175

Now you need to train Expert Cook. Head to travel to Shadowprey Village in Desolace and by the [item]Expert Cookbook[/item] from Wulan. Go out to Hillsbrad and kill lions by the dozens. You’ll need around 60ish [item]Lion Meat[/item] to get your skill to 175.

176 – 225

At 175, move on to Grom’gol and buy the [item]Roast Raptor[/item] recipe from Nerrist. Kill raptors around Grom’gol until you have about 45 [item]Raptor Flesh[/item]. Cook these up and make sure you hit 225.

226 – 300

At 225, you will need to go do the Artisan cooking quest. Go to Gadgetzan and speak with Dirge Quickcleave to get the quest. While here, also buy the recipe for [item]Tender Wolf Steak[/item]. For the quest, you will need 20 [item]Alterac Swiss[/item], 12 [item]Giant Egg[/item], and 10 [item]Zesty Clam Meat[/item]. You can buy the Alterac Swiss right here in Tanaris by heading down to Caverns of Time. You can get the Clam Meat from the turtles along the coast. The Giant Eggs will drop from the Rocs but have a fairly low drop rate.

Go to Bloodvenom Post in Felwood and buy the [item]Monster Omelet[/item] recipe.

Head to Hinterlands. You’re going to spend a couple of hours here killing every Owlbeast and Wolf you come across. You will need enough Giant Eggs and Tender Wolf Meat to push you all the way to 300. The last few points could be painful as [item]Monster Omelet[/item] and [item]Tender Wolf Steak[/item] both grey out at 305. You will need about 100ish combined to get you to 300.

300+

The hard part is now over! At 300, travel to Thrallmar and buy the [item]Master Cookbook[/item] from Baxter. Skill up using [item]Clam Bar[/item], [item]Ravager Dog[/item], or [item]Buzzard Bites[/item] until you hit 325, at which point you will now be able to make [item]Talbuk Steak[/item], [item]Roasted Clefthoof[/item], and [item]Warp Burger[/item]!

Now, that seems like a lot of work. Another option is to simply get your faction with Sha’tari Skyguard to honored and you can just buy [item]Skyguard Rations[/item] from the Skyguard Quartermaster at the Skyguard outpost in Terrokar Forest. They only cost about 40s for 5, but you can only buy up to 20 at a time so you will have to make frequent trips back to buy your foods.

Enjoy

Continuing with his Build a Better Threat week, Veneretio has posted on TankingTips.com about a proposed Threat Forumla evaluation based on Equivalent Threat Points (ETP). Basically this is a method of normalizing everything based on stats that increase the items value as a threat producing item.

It is loosely based on Gingamok’s Rule of Thumb:

0.6-0.7% hit = 1% crit = 29 block value = 49 AP

Which Veneretio derives the following values:

• 1 Hit Rating = 10 ETP
• 1 Crit Rating = 4.76 ETP
• 1 Agility = 3.45 ETP
• 1 Block Value = 3.57 ETP
• 1 Strength = 4.17 ETP
• 1 Attack Power = 2.08 ETP

I think this is an interesting concept so I took these values and hopped over to one of my favorite loot evaluation sites, Lootzor.com.

It is interesting to see the results filtered for Low Raid zones and below. Remember, that this does not value any defensive stats other than agility. Armor, doge, nor stamina get any rating here.

Of these drops, I’d pay good money to see the MT battling it out with the melee DPS’ers over most of these items.

I’m sure the melee DPSers in your guild will gladly pass the [item]Drape of the Dark Reavers[/item] to you!<

One easy way to increase your threat generation is by the use of [item]Adamantite Sharpening Stone[/item] for sharp weapons or [item]Adamantite Weightstone[/item] for blunt weapons.

Either of these grant an extra 12 damage to weapons plus 14 to melee crit rating. In my opinion, the added damage will grant you more additional threat than using a shaman with Windfury when using a low damage main hand weapon.

At 1 x [item]Adamantite Bar[/item] and 2 x [item]Mote of Earth[/item], the Sharpening Stone can get expensive, but the Weightstone uses [item]Netherweave Cloth[/item] instead of [item]Mote of Earth[/item].

A less expensive alternative is [item]Fel Sharpening Stone[/item] made from 1 [item]Fel Iron Bar[/item] and 1 [item]Mote of Earth[/item], or the [item]Fel Weightstone[/item] which is made from [item]Netherweave Cloth[/item] instead of [item]Mote of Earth[/item].

All in all, adding weapon buffs can be an easy way to add that little extra bit of added threat, and being the awesome tank you are, you are always looking for ways to increase your threat, right

TankingTips has posted a short little note on things you should and shouldn’t do when tanking mobs that hit like pansies.

It is worth pointing out how Shield Block Value can be used to increase your threat generation through the use of Shield Slam, one of the best threat generating abilities warriors have at their disposal.

He makes some other good points as well including not using Thunderclap nor Demoralizing Shout to help further increase your rage generation