Easy Gold With Pandaren Cooking - On A Level 85 Alt

Easy Gold With Pandaren Cooking

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working on leveling my cooking skill to max on my main level 90 Paladin. To do this, I've started 3 other farms on level 85 alts to grow the vegetables needed for all the various Ways now available. I've also kept all of the meats & fish that I gathered whilst questing & that has helped me keep the cost down. I've only done 3 Ways so far but I'm not in a rush so that's ok by me.

But yesterday, I finally hit Exalted with the Tillers & started growing the first of my Motes of Harmony crop on my main so that will reduce the speed at which I can produce enough veggies for leveling and will also then delay me getting my farm produce to the Auction House. So I started wondering what other ways I could use Cooking or Farming to make some gold besides selling veggies or buff foods.

I've seen talk of the Ironpaw Tokens but not taken much notice until this morning when I hit up The Undermine Journal. There I saw this summary of the Ironpaw Token Trades & wandered off to investigate.

Now maybe I'm just a bit slow here but I didn't realise I could turn meats, fish & vegetables into Bundles of Groceries to hand in for an Ironpaw Token & then use that Ironpaw token to buy the materials needed for whatever I want to cook. Well, no, that's not quite true - I did know but the prices on the Auction House for the mats meant that I discounted this tactic & didn't look at it again. It seemed kind of silly to me to hand in 20 meat/fish for an Ironpaw Token & then use that token to buy just 5 meat/fish of the kind I wanted & don't even think about using vegetables for this either! (Hand in 100 veggies for 25 of a different kind, no thanks!)

But I missed the most lucrative items! Just look at the average prices on my server for the Black Pepper & 100 Year Soy Sauce - both are only available from the vendor & paid for with Ironpaw Tokens.

Looking at the Summary screenshot above - almost all the meats I wrote about in last weeks' 'Where to Farm' series would make really good profits if turned into a Bundle of Groceries & handed in for Ironpaw tokens to buy Soy Sauce or Black Pepper but that would take up valuable time which many of us don't have - especially with all the dailies to be done. No, the better option here is to check your own Auction House for cheap meats & fish & bundle those up. It will take a small investment initially but turning 85 gold into about 400 gold is not to be ignored!

I thought I needed to be level 90 to gain access to the quest to open up the Bundle of Groceries function but I tested it on one of my level 85 farmers this morning & all you need to do is the first quest for each of the 6 Ways. Once you have all 6 Ways started in your cookbook, you should have 10 or so Ironpaw Tokens too which is a nice bonus to get your gold flowing. I also thought you needed to be level 90 to get the Ironpaw Tokens from the daily quests in the first place ( well, you do need to be 90 for the dailies but I thought that was the only source!)

If you don't have your cooking to 525 yet, don't worry about that either! You can now level your cooking almost all the way with Pandaren vendor bought items. The only materials I needed & didn't have were the Golden Carp - I think I bought 2 stacks in the end but you can fish those up for yourself if you want to. The trainer in Halfhill is also the vendor for the materials & there is a handy-dandy fire/oven next to her so you don't even have to move from your spot!

Going forward, you will only need one character able to hand in Bundles of Groceries to get your Ironpaw Tokens but as I mentioned above, if you do open all 6 Ways, you should have about 10 Ironpaw Tokens on each character & all without spending gold to make Bundles. Of course, this works best if you already have your cooking leveled fairly high but with the Pilgrim's Bounty festival coming up 18th November in game, you will be able to level your cooking to 350 very easily & then head straight for the Cooking trainer in Halfhill to finish off.

So now I have 2 alts with high level cooking - my Paladin is going for the full collection of recipes & achievements but my little farming rogue has earned me 10 Ironpaw tokens for easy money up front & will continue to Bundle Groceries as I find them on the Auction House using my new spreadsheet to work out best conversion rates. I could level cooking on 4 other alts but I think I'll just wait for the Pilgrims to get to town & take the easy route there too :P

Edited to add: David very kindly left a great comment earlier that I thought I should add it to the post. I have no idea why I didn't even think of this but it's so obvious once pointed out! Oops!

From David : You are also missing another way to get crops to continue cooking. You can buy 20 meats off the AH and bundle them together to trade them for 25 (not 5) of a given crop. Looking at your TUJ screenshot, you can turn 90g (20xTurtle meat) into 625g (25xRed Blossom Leek). You can use them for your own cooking or sell the crop to buy a different kind. I'm 600 in all the ways and still making a profit with that technique.

Oh & by the way - what is it with cats & bags? I went looking for a pic of grocery bags & got cats in bags instead!


image © Mike Disharoon on Flickr under Creative Commons licence