COOKING
Cooking buffs are no laughing matter. They come in every variety imaginable such as + spell power and spirit, +crit rating and strength, or just about any other combination you can think of. So in basic cooking buffs can be as good or even better then some of the buffs you can recive in the game from other players. Another great thing about these buffs is if you are the only person in a group or raid that has there cooking skill to 450 you can use food such as fish feast.
You can set out fish feast just once and your whole group can eat it and get the full benifit of it (not divided per person who eats from it). Fish feast restores 22500 HP to everyone in your party who eats it and 19200 mana plus the well fed buff is amazing at 80 attack power 46 spell power and 40 stamina for 1 hour. So not only can you fully restore mana and hp to almost full in most players at level 80 but you give a buff that would be a manditory buff given to partys in raids and instances if a player like a mage could do such a buff.
If you have made a new character or are at level 1-30 you can level up this skill while just playing the game. On the other hand if you are already a high level character this is going to take about 10 hours of dedication to take the skill from 1-450 but that is actually a really small amount of time for any proffesion. Just save ANY and ALL meat you come across for two basic reasons. The first is that getting all the recipies for a certain skill level is not always the easiest thing to do, some drop, alot come from vendors and you can even get a few from lockboxs. The thing about it thought is that meat that you get from a a certain place that lets say has level 25 beasts in it could be used for a recipie that can get you from skill level 100-150 and meat from another animal in the area with the same level could be used from skill level 75-100, so you never know when the meat will come in handy. Also if you save all of your exta meat you can either give it away to people in your guild that are maybe just leveling there cooking or that you tell them about how great cooking actually is.
So now that i have your attention you are thinking to yourself, so how do i go ahead and level my cooking skill up? well this is how its done!