Part 1:World of Warcraft Guide: How To Level Fishing and Cooking To 300

World of Warcraft Guide - Level Your Fishing and Cooking To level 300 in 20 hours

If you are like me you have neglected the possibility of leveling up your fishing and cooking skills to level 300. I have recently followed this guide and it has helped me out greatly! I leveled up my fishing and cooking to level 300 together in under 20 hours time. Fishing and cooking are great money makers IF they are totally maxed out at 300. You need to take these seriously if you really want to have MASSIVE amounts of gold available to you, or you could just go HERE if you don't have the time available to get the gold yourself. Ultimately, the choice is yours!
For fishing, there is no concern over which zone you are working. As long as you can fish that zone, you get the same skill points for catching whatever drops as you can just going for the Small Brilliant Small fish of the newbie zone. The fact is you could get to fishing skill level 225 without leaving the n00b zone.
Cooking is a different matter. It is like all the other skills besides fishing, once you do so many of the little stuff, it turns gray to you and you no longer get skill-ups from cooking it.
Thus, while you could stay in the n00b zone to catch the 700+ fish to get your fishing skill to 225, you would not be able to follow it with cooking skill ups after level 120, which is where Long jaw Mud Snapper (the highest fish you can catch in the beginning zones) turns gray for you.

Now before I go any further, please understand that while it sounds like a fishing class, the cooking is, for me, a necessary adjunct! If you are going to fish, you are leaving serious money on the table by not cooking them up!
Each of the races has a local starting fish-pond (or sea, as the case may be).Undead: It is the lake east of Brill. Taurens: The lake just north of Blood hoof Village. Orcs, Trolls: The sea just south of Sen’jin Village. Humans: Start fishing near Gold shire. Dwarves, Gnomes: North of Brown all Village in western Dun Morogh Night Elves: Can choose the lake south of Dolenaar, the waters in and around Darnassus, or the sea near the boat dock in Rut’Theran Village.
Not surprisingly, each of these starting zones has a fishing trainer right there, directly beside the water in which you are going to fish. There are other fishing trainers scattered here and there, the most curious to me is the Goblin in Iron Forge, standing beside water which cannot be fished. However, since you must start in water’s you can fish, use the start zones as discussed above.
If you are starting late in life, so to speak, it doesn’t really matter where you start fishing. You could even go to the fishing n00b zones for the other faction if you were minded to piss people off just out of principle. Alternatively, you could grow your fishing with your character by spreading the 20 hours across many levels. In fact, there is a strategy in the Guide that suggests that mixings your fishing at 150 for level 10 would make you an UBER fighter using just your fishing pole as a weapon.
Now, there is a formula for how many fish you need to catch in order to get one skill point. It is N = 1 + (SkillLevel-75)/25. Roughly, 1 skill point per fish up to level 75 then adding another fish every 25 fish. The formula is approximate, there is an element of random distribution around the calculated number, but it means that you can expect to catch between 1300 and 1500 fish to reach skill level 300.
OK, how am I going to catch 1,500 fish in 20 hours? That is like 75 per hour! Actually, it is more like 100 per hour with an hour for moving from zone to zone, another 3 hours for doing the master fishing/cooking quests and an hour for cooking it all up. 100 fish per hour is very realistic, if you are in waters at or below your level and you use the right bait!
The only thing you have to remember is to use a lure! If you can fish a zone without a lure, you will start by getting a lot of “Your fish got away”. That ruins the 100/hour rate. Try the zone without a lure, if you can cast, then add night crawlers or better and you will loose very few fish.
Further, since you are leveling your cooking at the same time, when your bags are full of fish, cook up the most common fish until you get no more skill ups from it. You might, at this time, try mailing off full stacks of cooked fish to your AH mule to see if you can create a market for it.
Here is the program:
Level 1-75: fish the shit outta the n00b zone. You can do the whole thing in less than an hour. Just make sure you start by adding Shiny Baubles to your pole every 10 minutes for the first 30 minutes. Now, every n00b zone fishing trainer has a fishing supplies vendor or a Trade goods vendor very nearby who sells cooking recipes. You get the recipe for Brilliant Smallfish or Slitherskin Mackerel. Cooking just the fish you catch will get your cooking skill above 50, which is a necessity before moving on the the next zone.