by Meadowflower

Hi, I've just gotten my baking to 191 in a few days, and thought I would share the method I used.

I am a Wood Elf Druid, and my main skill will be Fletching, but I am working on baking, brewing, pottery, smithing, tailor, and fletching. Jewelcraft I think I will leave alone for now =)

When I bake, my wisdom is 215, and when I sell my charisma is 132.

Preparation for any trade skill:

1) Find yourself as many 10 slot bags / boxes as you can, A good method is to go to Iceclad and get the Deluxe tool boxes from the gnome camp there. they are 3.5 wt 10 giant slot containers for less than 1.2p and make great bank boxes, because unlike the bazaar bags, they are light, and tradeable. Bear skin potion bags would work well too, if you have a tailor friend or can make them yourself.

2) Get Smarter! Go to the bazaar and get some wisdom gear! Well this depends on your class =) the highest of wisdom or intelligence applies to baking, so do what you need for your class. Wisdom might be easier for the non-caster classes. Put your race/class and wisdom(or int) as the stat to look for in the bazaar window, and shop to your hearts content. you should be able to get 3-5 wis in every slot you have without much trouble, Int, I don't know much about.

3) Brain food! Buy a few Misty thicket picnic's (str sta wis int 5) and a few Qeynos afternoon tea (dex agi wis int 5), each one provides 5 wis or int, whichever you need. To gain the benefit from these foods, they need to be the topmost food/drink in your gear. What I do is keep a giant-slot bag in the top left slot and keep my brain food in the top two slots, below them I keep a stack of food and water. Why the food and water you ask ? As you work, occasionally force feed yourself food and water, to keep yourself full. (place REGULAR food and drink in main inventory slot and right click to force feed) this keeps you full, and you wont eat your brain food ! no need to buy stacks of it!.

3) Dress nice for the merchants! A pair of the opal encrusted steins will run you from 25pp to 100pp each, and at +25 charisma each, even the merchants that don't like dwarves and halflings start to think they are really cute and ask for phone numbers =) I have heard with indifferent faction, you only need about 107 charisma for best price. One way is to keep a gem, that you know the best price for, the one I keep is peridot, best possible price is 9p524c, Even if you start with a really low charisma, say 45, a pair of opal steins and a pair of 7 charisma gold cats eye bracelets would take you to 109 charisma.

OK! down to cookin' !

4) Now we need something to cook with! You need to decide if you are going to run back and forth to an oven (around 30 seconds from the meat merchant in shadowhaven) or take a spit with you and sit at the merchant. Other items you will need are a fillet knife, and a frying pan, both made by smithing, and can be found over on the smithing recipes page if you can make them, or find a friend who can. Raising your smithing to 74 isn't too hard, or expensive, at 74 smithing i made 5 out of 6 non-stick frying pans and got 3 skill increases =)

5) Down to business, clean out all your bags as much as you can, bank too. Can prolly get this down to 2-3 trips from Norrath to Luclin, including the trip to buy brain gear =).

6) Production line ready to go! Lets get some supplies. Count all the slots you have open, divide by 2, then subtract 2. So if you have 100 slots open total this gives you the number 48 (I had half as many slots open when I did it) Go to town and buy 48 stacks of bread, then go to Jaggedpine and get 48 stacks of cheese, this leaves you with 4 open slots to move stuff around, and buy the meat, and stack finished products. Now, head up to Luclin, go find the Soulbinder in ShadowHaven, If you have gate, or can get translocated, its faster than waiting for the port back to Luclin, if you need to get more supplies from Norrath.

Across the pond from the Soulbinder are 2 halfling merchants, the cute one on the right sells unlimited supplies of lion and bear meat, being a druid, I only used lion meat, so I wouldn't support the killing of bears =)

skill 1 to 143:
Buy lion meat. Make lion fillet. recipe: lion meat, fillet knife, in spit or oven.

This is not for the faint of heart (or wrist)

Got that done ? that was the easy part =)

skill 143 to 191:
Buy lion meat. Make patty melts. recipe: lion meat, cheese, bread, non-stick frying pan, in spit or oven.

Hopefully your bank was near empty and you got lots of bread and cheese and won't have to make a trip back down to Norrath. If you do, try to figure out how many skill gains you got on average per stack of attempts, then buy enough meat (or more) to get your to 191, and go back to Norrath, get more bread and cheese, and get back to work. I chose to just go buy more bread and cheese, then gate back to Shadowhaven for meat because I am working on pottery there right now too. Whichever works for you.

skill 191 to ???:
What comes after? For you I am not sure. I am only taking my baking to 200, so I have a ranger out killing pixies and foraging cinnamon sticks (and morning dew) to make pixie powdered cinnisticks ( 3 pixie dusts, 1 cinnamon sticks(foraged) in a mixing bowl trivial 202 skill. Others are using the Ohabah Truffles, which take foraged mushrooms, frosting, and dark chocolate creme(cream, frosting, brown algae, eucalyptus) to make, same trivial 202. As you can see the Truffles require less chasing critters.

After that its pretty much what you can get to cook with, ranging from brownie parts for holy cake, to Tae Ew, Dragon, Anaconda, and griffon meat.

Check the recipe page.

Safe travels friends.

Meadowflower