When you create your first character you look at cooking and probably think "Why would I want to cook, I'll just buy what I need". At some point later on, you probably realized it saves some money and is useful and picked it up. However unless you raid you probably never went all the way in cooking. Raiders in general focus on cooking as a way to buff themselves while learning new content and to minimize their costs while doing so. Many casual players, never see the obvious and cheap benefit.

More players are now starting to see the huge benifits that you can gain through food buffs. While the buffs from food are fairly minor prior to entering the Outlands, once you do they become well worth the effort (or gold) to gain them. Any time you are working on content that is at all difficult for you, you should use a food buff as it is a cheap and easy way to gain a slight advantage in either health, damage or another ability.

Even if you are one of the many players that never bother learning how to make the food themselves, you can instead buy it on the auction house from other players. Once you learn the benifits though, realize that you will be buying food for the rest of your characters life, so it may be worth the effort to learn it yourself.

Stamina buff foods are the most common type of buff food around. Once you reach the Outlands the buffs are fairly substantial and the two main ones that you will be getting are +20 Stamina/+20 Spirit and +30 Stamina/+20 Spirit.

The most common, easiest and cheapest to get is the 20/20 buff food. You can gain this from the following five foods: Buzzard Bites, Feltail Delight, Clam Bars, Talbuk Steak and Mok'Nathal Shortribs. Of these foods the easiest to get are the Feltail Delight and Talbuk Steak.

If you are a fisherman, then spotted feltail can be fished for very easily and is ussually sold off to the vendor anyway. Save it and turn it into Feltail Delight. If you never spent the time leveling fishing, all you need to do is visit Nagrand and hunt the vast number of Talbuk. In no time at all you will have several stacks of meat that can be cooked into steaks.

The better stamina food buf is the +30 stamina variety, which can currently be gained from either Spicy Crawdads or Fisherman's Feast. Both are difficult to get though as they require you to have maxed out fishing and spend a significant time fishing for either furious crawdads or huge spotted feltail.

If you are a non-caster DPS player then these are the foods you will be looking for. There is a variety of buffs that can be gained, everything from strength, hit bonuses and more.

For players that control a casting character you are probably very familiar with many of these foods. The best caster foods offer +damage, +healing, spell crit, +mana per 5 seconds, intellect and spirit.

These are relatively new to the game, but offer some nice bonuses for your hunter's pet. At first they may confuse you though as while they are pet foods, you do not feed it to your pet, instead you eat it and it passes the bonus to your pet. Don't sit there like most hunters wondering why you keep getting the message that your pet does not like this kind of food.

Have any comments, concerns, suggestions? We would be happy to hear them.

Email me at: Byron Mudry - ([email protected]) or post in our forums!