So, we should cover the last crafting profession, even if it’s not a main profession. Cooking provides consumables and has thus been a staple goldmaking profession forever.
One-offs and feasts
Basically food buffs come in two types: One-off foods that give a buff to the player eating it, and feasts that you place down that multiple players can interact with. There’s a huge variety of foods buffs, including both novelty effects as well as regular stat boosts. Since players are always looking for every advantage they can get, crafting food is usually a consistent method to make gold.
Recipe acquisition
All of the relevant cooking recipes are sold from vendors, for the Epicurean’s Token. This is a currency you can primarily get from doing the various cooking dailies you get access to in dalaran. There’s one daily per day, and most recipes will cost 3 Epicurean’s Awards. There’s some overlap in terms of multiple recipes with the same stat gains, in which case you want the cheaper one.
The feast is the best
The Fish Feast that can feed multiple players is just as good as all the best individual foods, unless you want something else than raw spellpower or attack power. I expect a lot of players will prefer to straight up use the feasts, at least for raiding. That does not mean they won’t be buying the one-offs, but it does mean that prioritizing the feast recipe early could be very valuable.
Meat or fish?
There’s essentially two very intriguing fish-based one-off foods. Dragonfin Filets give 40 strength and Blackened Dragonfin gives you 40 agility. This is usually stronger than raw attack power for the physical classes in question. This makes these two probably the most important one-off foods. It also means that most likely the Dragonfin Angelfish will be the most expensive one. It’s not used for anything else however, so it doesnt matter much for balance. Outside of that I expect the meat foods to be cheaper to craft for other stat bonuses, not least because the fish feast obviously only uses fish to craft.
My recipe unlock order
I’m going to tailor my order to what I get the most value from. I’ll be maining a DK so I’ll likely get the strength food first. Then either the agi or the feast, before getting the other one. After that I’ll probably get a one-off Spellpower one, as well as either mp5 or possibly some of the secondary stats if they look profitable. Of course this will heavily depend on what prices I observe. The only thing I don’t think will ever change is getting the strength food first.