Guild Wars 2

I just hit level 400 with cooking, and looking at it now, it appears to be far more cost efficient to just sell cooking ingredients rather than food. Is it possible to actually make a profit? Or should I plan to only ever use cooking to prepare food for myself? How often is it even worth cooking myself things given that food is usually cheaper than ingredients?

I mostly ask because now I’m feeling a little silly for how much time and gold I spent leveling cooking..

If you understand that cooking is not about profit margin but about volume (ie. creating a lot of food), then yes, it can be quite profitable. It is, however, way more time-consuming than other professions to make it very profitable. Particularly, monitoring the prices of all the mats needed for the foods that sell well can be somewhat time-consuming and boring.

I have made most of my money with cooking. Granted, I only have about 30g ish net worth, but after getting to 400 I turned 2g into 20g in about 2 weeks of light trading. By light trading, I mean about 15 minutes a day spent on the TP and the rest of my play time in WvW.

Like Buttercup said, it’s all about volume and return on your investment. Pick a recipe that has decent margins and pay attention to the price of each mat for a week to get a feel for how you can make it profitable.

The biggest challenge for me is knowing when I need to back off and let the market sort itself out for a week or two to get prices back in my favor.

Ah, okay. Because when I checked everything looked breakeven or worse. If it isn’t always like that, though, I’ll keep an eye on the market and draw up some spreadsheets.

The biggest issue people have with making money is not getting ingredients for the right prices. Its kind of amusing to watch the ebb and flow of food items based on the material prices. The listing price and the sell fee also make it more difficult to turn reasonable profit for time invested, especially when you have a low margin.