Guild Wars 2

Regarding Cooking, my friend had this to say: “For a game that does so much else in the name of convinence, cooking is a pain in the [butt].”

And this is true. While I can deal with cooking taking massive cash and bag-space to pull off, my biggest gripe is going to be this:

I have to travel all over the world to find my materials.

On one end, it’s kind of cool, and it encourages exploration. Kudos. It also means I don’t get some materials until I’ve delved deeper into the game’s content.
On the other, I’m never going remember where I bought kidney beans, limes, or cumin. This is actually a huge problem.

I’m not saying that I should be given the stuff as an easy out, but let’s try something less annoying. So, a few suggestions:

After opening up a heart vendor or buying the spice/ingredient, it them becomes available at the in-town karma-spice vendors. It’s currently a joke and a nuisance that they only have three (3) items in their inventories.

Similarly, have a spice trader that lives near the cooking station. You surrender a pack of 25 materials, and he makes it available for Karma or silver (depending on whether it’s account bound or not). The accounting is a tad more certain at that point, over the previous idea.

A wonderful idea for an expansion or the gem store: Access to a farm via instance.
It’d be awesome to have our own little slice of Lion’s Arch that we can go to and plant things to get more of them. Refresh them when the daily quests reset, and you’d have people coming every day to get more materials for their cooking. If you wanted to be extra mean about it, make it still require a gathering tool.

Use the wiki.

Having to travel all over the world for cooking materials is a major design decision. Cooking was designed to be that way.

It’s been a while, but when I went to learn cooking, I’m pretty sure the trainer warned me that it was a more expensive and inconvenient craft to level.

That said, in game, type in /wiki [name of ingredient], and you’ll be told exactly where to get it. Much like weaponsmiths have to go to particular areas to get the appropriate ore.

No need to remember where the Karma vendors are:

http://dulfy.net/2012/08/28/guild-wars-2-karma-vendor-list/

It makes sense to have to travel for ingredients since not all things grow in all climates, it makes the world a bit more alive imo.
If we all had access to our own farms people would just stash everything in there and while cool would completely negate the need to harvest in the world.

Neferteri, Morrigan, you two are life savers!