Guild Wars 2

After leveling both Jewel crafting and Tailoring to 400 nearly exclusively through discovery, I find that this technique does not work with cooking. Currently my cooking is stuck at 80 and I have my entire discovery panel filled with ingredients and most are only 3/4 to be able to discover. What am I missing here or is it simply that leveling via discovery for the majority of the level process not possible and I will simply need to level via crafting instead of discovery? As a result I have been gathering on two different characters for weeks in hopes to fill in the gaps but all that did was give me a surplus of ingredients that still won’t allow me to discover.

I hear that a good majority of the ingredients can be purchased via gold or karma but after buying just about everything I can find, it still does not open discovery.Any help would be appreciated and yes I did look at the leveling guides but they don’t seem to take into account discovery.

Thanks as always!

You might need to make some of the intermediate ingredients in order to discover the recipes you need. You’ll find that quite a lot of the cooking recipes tend to involve these kinds of intermediate steps; sometimes more than one.

If you go to the “Production” tab and go through each recipe you already know, you will find that a good portion of the recipes you already have actually make other ingredients, and those can then be used to make other recipes in turn. Have you checked all of these as well?

lackofcheese is right, it’s likely that the ingredients are created from recipes that you already know (such as Bowl of Baker’s Wet Ingredients and Bowl of Baker’s Dry Ingredients). If you have at least 1 of each “collectable” ingredient, and 1 of each result from recipes that already have, you should have no problem discovering what you need.

I will take a closer look at that but as it sits I have a great surplus of food which only seems to fill my bank/inventory rather than being able to use them as ingredients.

Are there any vendors outside the capitol city karma vendor as well as the cooking vendor that may have materials that I could have missed?

Thanks all!

Yes, there are a lot of random karma vendors (mostly renown heart karma vendors) that offer produce in bulk for karma – like cherries, pears, and peaches for example. Pretty sure I got coconuts from a karma vendor somewhere also….

I just hit 400 this morning, and I’d estimate that I used discovery for 85% of my crafting leveling. The only time I’d mass craft an orange colored recipe for crafting XP was when I was close to opening a new tier of ingredients and I had the ability to craft that recipe from ingredients on hand. I had one entire bank tab dedicated to intermediary cooking items, so take that as a warning. You’re going to have a bunch of items like creamy soup base or basic poultry stock that are going to be used for multiple tiers of recipes.

The downside is that a lot of the stuff you make is crap, and I ended up just eating it (works towards a community achievement) rather than trying to TP it. Of course there is something oddly fun about making good food and mailing it to guildies which you just can’t account for in normal terms.

Thanks Ska, if you did 85% then that is all I need to know and I need to try and fill in the gaps with what is missing.

Do you find with cooking, you will need to revisit much lower level zones and re-farm base materials? Or will it keep up with the zones you are in?

I also was going to level cooking purely through discovery but gave up after my inventory and bank filled up. In the end I was mostly just baking pies and making other sweets. I don’t remember the % of discovery vs. producing though. Anyway, I’m at 400 now. but I also did a lot of that just with discovery.

For levelling in general I did revisit lower level zones but mostly to find karma vendors for bulk items or special farms (strawberries, potatoes, etc). However I already did several zones anyway at that point and I did gather everything on my way so I had quite enough mats in my collections. If you’re an avid gatherer anyway I don’t think there’s anything you’d have to “farm” (unless on those actual farms of course).

I’ve got two cooks at about 350, done almost purely through discovery (caveat being that I consider making the necessary ingredients that get revealed in the Production tab as part of the discovery process). I didn’t make uselessly massive amounts of things like frosting or whatever just to bump my skill. However, when a few magic find dishes came up to give me skill, I made several of those for my own use.

However, now that I am 350, in evaluating my few missing raw ingredients, I’m starting to wonder if pure discovery gain is as viable between 350-400 as it was in lower levels.

Anyway…. The main thing that helped me is, when an ingredient would be revealed in production, I’d check it in the discovery pane to see how many possible dishes it would be used in, so I could make that many of the ingredient while it was “hot” for skill gain.

My main warning is that this method is slow, requires making an appearance in practically every map to get ingredients, and uses a ton of inventory space. That said, I found it very fun and satisfying. And it prompted me to actually want to get out there and complete the maps (I didn’t look up the locations of karma ingredients on the wiki).

I can say this about the level 350 area – artichokes I had from running around Straits of Desperation came in very handy…. and certain spicy steak recipe that was simple and also involved ingredients that I had a ton of already.

That’s where the mass crafting part really kicked in. I’m staring at 350 and had something I could make 20 of with no additional effort on my part.

Now that I’m at 400 I’m still going to try and find those recipes where you combine some different meals and make a scrumptious meal item, if only to mail to people for the lulz.

For crafting materials and a file specific to cooking and food/karma locations, check my signature. I’ve checked the locations and harvested everything in my path for this information and all of it done after the crafting patch. This is current information, it’s downloadable and printable. Though the food mats is about 8 pages

I’m up to about 200 now. Every time I hit a snag in “discovery” it was usually due to not having enough mats. This is what I did on my 2nd chef (which went much better than the first which I tried to use a leveling guide).

1) Every type of food item you can bank you should have. Do a search for stuff on the TP in your cooking range. With rare exceptions (Vanilla Bean comes to mind) it will be cheap. Always try to have 2-3 of them minimum.

2) Craft in at least 75 point intervals. That way you can start using some of those precursor ingredients you’ve been crafting a long the way like balls of dough that don’t go in the material bank.

3) Pay attention to how many unknown recipes there are with those components.

4) If you do find a cheep food that you will consume, don’t be afraid to make a few along the way. (I consume a lot of +MF food).