On the whole, Blizzard’s done a pretty good job of normalizing the various crafting professions and their products in Wrath of the Lich King, although a couple of professions (tailoring and enchanting) arguably need a bit more love.
They even made sure you could skill up cooking without having to fish as well. Almost all the useful buff food recipes have four variants: a greater and a lesser food made with meat, and a greater and a lesser food made with fish. Look at Haste buff food as an example.
40 Haste Rating & 40 Stamina: Imperial Manta Steak, Very Burnt Worg
30 Haste Rating & 40 Stamina: Baked Manta Ray, Roasted Worg
This pattern continues all through the buff foods, pretty much, until you get to… Strength. Now, bear in mind that Strength is arguably the single most useful offensive stat for warriors, death knights, and any paladin who’s not Holy – so you have a lot of people looking for +Str buff food.
And yet, there’s exactly one strength buff food: Dragonfin Filet, for 40 Strength and 40 Stamina. No cheap-ass food for economy use; no meat-based version for the non-fisherfolk out there.
And just to compound the issue, compared with other in-demand fish, the locations for fishing up this tasty treat are sadly limited. Which means on a busy server like mine, competition for the few pool spawns active at any one time can get really savage.
Prediction: 3.1 will include three new Strength food recipes – a +30 Strength food made with Dragonfin Angelfish, and +40 and +30 Strength recipes using meat.
(This post brought to you by me doing laps up and down Dragonspine Tributary for an hour this morning.)
You know, I knew that this was true (since I am mostly responsible for the catching of my duo’s fish) but hadn’t thought about the fact that we’re missing the meat equivalent. I hope that you’re right and that the meat for strength will actually appear! Especially since it takes two fish just to make one food.
Apart from the river I find the horde camp near the borean border and the lake near Moaki harbor good spots for the pools, its seems less people hit those ones up too, normally find 2-3 pools a pass
As much as I agree with you about the lack of a meat related Strength food, I hope blizzard DONT add these recipes!
Having just taken up fishing in order to cook up my own strength food I’ve realised that they’re worth a damn fortune on the AH!
1 Stack of 20 cooked Dragonfin Fillet +40 Strength food sells for 160-180g!
I’m hoping that this way I can make enough gold to buy myself that Darkmoon Card: Greatness and a Mechengineer Chopper!!
It gets worse… Dragonfin Angelfish is also used for the only Agility food (and consequently, the best bear food in the game). To be even more obnoxious, it requires two(!) fish and one Northern Spice to make one.
What’s funny is that I have an open water spot in Borean Tundra that seems to net me a lot of DragonFin. And, I’ve noticed that by moving to a different open water spot in Borean that I catch almost none. I wouldn’t be surprised if the open water spots also have slight map borders that prevent you catching them with the correct drop rate.
Yep, I noticed some recipes were missing… mainly because of the Agility thing.
I’ve been using AP food though, so I hadn’t realized that those fish were so rare. Maybe I should start fishing those myself :P
It seems like all primary stat food is fish only. Strength and Agility are both the dragonfin angelfish (with agility being more of a pain there, as others have said), there’s no specific Stamina food since that’s on everything, and the only Spirit food is made from Moonglow Cuttlefish, which can be even more of a pain to fish up since they’re out in the Frozen Sea and require 575 fishing skill to not let any of them get away. So it seems almost like it was a deliberate decision on Blizzard’s part to make primary stat foods harder to get, since they tend to be more of a benefit than straight AP (or mp5, in the case of spirit) to a lot of classes.
But there’s no Intellect food at all, which is where I think their real slip-up is. WHERE’S OUR INTELLECT FOOD, BLIZZARD, HUH? :-P
Psst… While your waiting at the summoning stone for AN / OK throw your line in the pool. While it’s not a spawn pool/point, the drop rate is decent enough on the Dragonfin.