Cooking Travels

So today's rant springs forth from my epic quest to level my cooking skill.

What. The. Fuck.

Okay, so firstly, I discover that everything trainable or even easily purchasable goes green at around 225 cooking skill. Which means that I'm going to have to buy recipes at the far ends of Azeroth, a nuisance in itself given that I've been Horde for this huge old chunk of playtime, and I have no idea how to get from Point A to Point B as Alliance - the problem being exacerbated by the whole problem caused by The Shattering.

Hello, wowhead. So my first excursion into purchasable cooking patterns reveals the other problem caused by The Shattering, which is to say removed NPCs and patterns.

What.

Well, apparently the things that made leveling this skill tolerable from 225-300 were utterly removed with the loss of the one NPC in the game who sells them. Namely, say, Nightfin Soup and Poached Sunscale Salmon.

And the NPC who sells those patterns also sells a few others, and all of them helped to get over a rough, awful patch of cooking levels. Why should these be removed? Because Blizzard saw fit to kill off a few NPCs just to drive home how inconvenient the end of the world is. That's all well and good, but I'm sure the knowledge they alone possessed has been spread about somewhat by the recipes they sold all that time!

So, I went to Tanaris for an NPC who is dead. Well, that's awesome.

This leaves Fishing as my only source of cookable materials - even the Auction House has nothing for me fully half the time.

So I go to learn Fishing, and that's annoying enough.

I discover that those removed patterns are the only use for half of the fish I'm catching. Fully half of them. Then there's the Plated Armorfish, which isn't even useful for obsolete cooking quests: it's an item for a removed Argent Dawn quest. Hooray.

And the one fish I've caught that's still useful for cooking has the lowest drop rate of all the fish in the game, as far as I can tell.

Well done, Blizzard.

Well done.