Guild Wars 2

It appears that there is not much in the way of margin if you are trying to cook for a profit? Other than the achievements and desire to mix things up in game, is there even a reason to craft my own food now that I have hit 400 cooking?

I am guessing that if gold generation is my objective there are better ways to be spending my time than toiling at the ovens in Lion’s Arch?

Crafting in general isn’t all that great for generating gold although it can help generate a steady couple extra gold per day.

The thing about gold generation via crafting: everyone can do the same things, so there’s little profit to be made unless you come up with a twist, because the game already has hundreds of thousands of r400 chefs.

In general, the stuff that’s most profitable in cooking (or the other seven disciplines) is going to be gated by time, by recipe, or by ‘effort’.

That should give you enough of a hint to get started. If you go a week without figuring out anything, message me here or in game and I’ll give you something more specific (I won’t do so here because as soon as I mention it, 10 other people will try the same thing and do away with any competitive advantage you might have).

Congratulations on reaching Chef 400!

Back in the old days we mostly used chef to powerlevel our characters cheap and fast. You were able to make ~ 10 levelups and the materials are still the cheapest of all crafting professions. So you may assume that a chef 400 is not that special.

Yet it is not a useless profession at all. If you check the tp for the expensive food, you may come across a few you want to craft yourselves. Some of them are very complex recipes, with dozens of branches in the crafting-tree. You can also craft feast-items. Those are foods you can drop down in the field and whoever comes across and touches them gets the food-effect (like eating the original item). Feasts do not sell bad either. The major issue of gaining profit out of a crafting profession, no matter which, are the ingredients/materials. However to craft feasts, you need to create recipes with the mystic forge, a bunch of the original food and some other ingredients (check the link).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feast_

Another way to get some money out of the crafters, the time-gated crafts. The original crafting professions (armor/weapon) have a few of those, the chef has at least one. Those are items which can only be crafted once per character per day. Out of this problem, there is no unlimited supply, which results in better prices.

[As the guy above me insists in keeping this a secret. I removed the link.]

Even if you buy all the materials straight out of the TP, you get a good pay off, just for the crafting job only.

At last I want to mention the personal benefits of having a chef at 400. By now we have a huge collection of recipes which are account bound and the foods resulting are account-bound as well. Some are used for guildhall expansion, while others just offer good buffs. Some of the foods offer better buffs than you can buy on TP. But as they are account bound, personal use only.

Thank you both for taking time to reply. I appreciate it.