Guild Wars 2

Hi there,

I’ve not really done much with the Chef craft and I was wondering if people actively do this, or see it as a less important craft? What are the pros and cons of doing this as a main craft and also is it a way of making gold?

Apologies if this has been asked before but I can’t seem to find it.

Thanks in advance, Melon

There are literally no cons to any craft. Get them all on 4+ characters, always gonna be usefull.

Crafting is a way to get ascended weapons/armor with exact stats you wish.
everything under 500crafting level can be bought on tp.

conaidering its much much cheaper to buy an exotic crafted weapon from tp than it is to lspend money and crafting materials to lvl up crafting level up to 400, crafting is mostly used as a way to power level a character or geting ascended gear.

cooking crafting has very little usefull food/items that cant be bought from tp

Chef isn’t as useful as it used to be. Not with food you can buy cheaper from the trading post than the ingredients used to craft them or with the holiday foods that the game gives you for free. It’s worth doing just for completionist sake or if you prefer not to buy from the trading post, but for myself I haven’t crafted any food in a very long time. I either buy a food cheaper than the ingredients cost or use holiday food.

Hmm true i’ve been buying holiday event buff food myself, just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing a trick

For making gold, not really but u do need it to make materials for making ascended backpiece or such.

Maxing Chef requires spending somewhere between 3 and 8 gold max. How much benefit does it have to provide?

Pro: You get to swear like Gordon Ramsey.
Con: You don’t get your own TV show.

Well there are some achievements like Feeding the Hungry cats that require certain account bound foods that can only be crafted by a 400 chef.

+ some really good foods are account bound so there’s that.

EMPTY KEGS!!!!!!

Guild halls need them for upgrades and only a 400 Chef can make them. I’ve turned a nice profit from them even after buying mats for them. If you farm the mats yourself, they are an easy 2.5G profit last I checked.

High end food and other unique food is only craftable via chef. But it’s rather expensive stuff anyways.

However, it’s cheap to level chef anyways. And you can save gold over time for some food by making it yourself. It’s much harder to profit from said food because you need to pay a 15% fee to sell things on the TP.

Chef is also required for Incinerator, if you are looking to craft a Legendary.

Pros:
-Ability to craft Food for your characters to use. Certain foods are cheaper to craft in the long run and can save a couple of silvers. Some foods are account bound so you can only craft them.

-Achievement Points (5AP per 50 levels, capped at 40AP at 400 Cooking).

-Experience equal to 7 levels, useful for any non-80 as well as central tyria mastery exp. It gives a percentage of experience and not a flat amount, meaning it can be used to level from 10->17, 30->37, 73->80, etc. You can 1-400 whenever for the experience points.

-Required for crafting specific weapons (Vial of Liquid Flame needed for Incinerator/Volcanus)

-Cheapest craft to max. Using gw2crafts, it costs a couple of gold (under 7g at the time of this post). You can save a little more gold if you have map completion as you can buy karma ingredients. The difference is negligible.

Cons:
-Like all crafts, the crafting system is a bit of a mess. I’d strongly recommend using a guide to get to 400 rather then trying random recipes to get to 400.

-Some foods cannot be obtained via crafting, thus you must purchase them off the TP. E.g Wintersday foods that give +10% Karma which were introduced last year.

-You can just buy the food you need off the TP. Some foods aren’t even worth crafting as the ingredients themselves are worth more then the final product. Its also more convenient to just buy what you need off the market and skipping the crafting process.

If you like powerfull expensive Foodbuffs like me, then yes, level your chef skills asap

There are some account bound food. Whether or not they are worth it is up to you to decide, most aren’t all that useful.

Bowl of Lemongrass Mussel Pasta ftw.

That is probably the second least useful Mussel food.

Muusic.2967:

Pro: You get to swear like Gordon Ramsey.
Con: You don’t get your own TV show.

“WHO USED ALL THE kittenING COOKING OIL?”
“SALT AND PEPPER AGAIN, I JUST kittenING MADE A PILE… I NEED TWO PILES?!?”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS RECIPE IS ‘LEARNED’? I’VE GOT THE kittenING INGREDIENTS RIGHT HERE!”
“DO YOU KNOW HOW kittenING LONG IT TOOK ME TO GET THOSE CHILLI PEPPERS? AND YOU kittenING BURNED THEM! "

This was some of the thoughts of when I levelled my chef (exaggerated for effect). :P

There is no reason why you shouldn’t have 1 chef on your account. You have 5 slots (f2p can’t post here), so at least one of them should be a chef.

Khisanth.2948:

That is probably the second least useful Mussel food.

Dude I need those food to bypass the 3000+ armor for my roaming wvw war (wich is the perfect tanky nummer for war) without having toughness in my armor or trinkets.
10% damage reduction. + 70 toughness. You can see the 10% damage reduction as a passive toughness buff If you convert the reduction into toughness. What do you know about theory-crafting? Only bcause you dont use it doesnt mean that it isnt usefull at all, dont try to act like you know If you dont have a clue LOL

Roundabout.1752:

+ some really good foods are account bound so there’s that.

This. Granted, free food is great, but some of the crafted account bound food has unique and powerful effects. Combined, means there’s no reason to not have food buffs at all times you’re fighting in non-PvP environments.

I’m probably too late but here is my experience as a casual player:

1) The craft is and makes a huge mess.
That can be seen positively in a sense of exploration or – like I did – as annoying. There are so many recipes it’s hard to not lose yourself without a guide or the wiki and you’ll almost certainly end up with spare ingredients that can neither be stored in the resource bank nor sold for what their initial ingredients are worth.
Thus inventory clutter is rampant and you’re likely to waste a lot of ressources and money.

2) It adds very little value to your charcater.
Aside from the fact that you can cheaply buy ingredients with karma for low level food so you can constantly level up your characters with +10% experience there is very little to be gained here. There are pretty good food buffs but they’re not essential to anything except raiding perhaps but they’re expensive as hell. Some of those ingredients are more expensive than oricalcum which constantly makes me question whether all this food I just cooked is really worth having (or eating, since all I do is farming achievements, mats and events).

3) The prices are messed up.
Buying the final food product on the TP is less expensive than buying/ selling the ingredients and crafting it yourself. I think that speaks for itself…

Conclusion:
Wouldn’t make a chef again… unless there is no way around it as achievement requirement or something. Chef is nothing more than a time and money sink for overly rich accounts, so they can have a minor temporary stat boost while burning mats from the general economy.