How to Level Fishing and Cooking to 300 in WoW

Leveling up, you may find little use for fishing or cooking. Cooking allows you to use up some of the trash drops you get and create some basic buff food - i.e. +2 Stamina and +2 Spirit. Nothing special.

Likewise, fishing allows you to pass the time and gather some fish to eat. You may use this to feed your pet if you're a hunter. However, it's more of a (enjoyable?) time sync than a useful leveling tool.

Once you reach the end-game, though, both fishing and cooking are extremely useful. Cooking allows you to create a variety of buff foods. Tanks will tend to utilize stamina foods, but there are plenty of other buff foods to improve DPS and healing. Some of these foods can only be made with fish - most notably the healing buff (Golden Fishsticks) and the max stamina buff (Spicy Crawdad).

You should at this point be convinced that fishing and cooking are good - but what is the most efficient way to level them?

Leveling Fishing

Step One: Go to Stormwind.

Step Two: Fish.

The strange thing about fishing is that you don't really need to do anything special to reach max level. Aside from the Nat Pagle fishing quest, you could continuously fish from 1-375 in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.

With that in mind, there is really no "efficient" way to level fishing. You need to invest time - roughly 10-11 hours to reach 375 - and fish. It helps to break up the time into smaller increments (10-20 minutes at a stretch), but if you're insane you can do it in one long marathon session.

Fishing and Cooking in Tandem

There is, however, an efficient way to level cooking. Like other crafting professions, you need to cook yellow/orange recipes to increase your skill efficiently. (Note: Here's a list of useful fish recipes for leveling cooking)

If you've started fishing, you may realize that you end up with a lot of useless fish sitting in your bags. These don't vendor for a lot of money, and very few of them will sell on the Auction House for money. What is a fisherman to do?

Cook! You can get all of the materials you need to level your cooking from 1-375 from fishing (aside from the occasional spice or water). If you strategically choose the places that you level your fishing, you will end up with more than enough fish to level your cooking without investing any extra time. If you're going to bother to level your fishing, you may as well use all those fish for something.

There are few places you'll want to go to during your fishing leveling. You'll always start in a starting area. Any one will do. You need to get your fishing to 50 before you head into the major city.

From there, you'll want to hit up Stormwind or Orgrimmar, then Redridge or Ashenvale, then Arathi Highlands or Thousand Needles, the Western Plaguelands, and finally the Eastern Plaguelands. Here's a fishing guide that lays out how many and what type of fish to catch in each of those zones.

You may as well do this as you're leveling, too. There's no need to wait until your level 70 and go back. You should hit all of these zones on your way from 1-60, so all you need to do is break it up into smaller 10-20 minute increments and you'll be 300 fishing and cooking by the time you reach Outland.

Happy fishing, and remember. Be patient!