Guild Wars 2 Cooking Guide, Build - Craft The Best Consumables!

Guild Wars 2 Cooking Guide

Cooking is one of the crafting disciplines in Guild Wars 2. The character that learns cooking unlocks the non-combat profession of a Chef. They can use various materials, or ingredients to create consumable items like meals and dyes. Check out this GW2 Cooking Guide to learn all the most important things of Guild Wars 2 Chef, if you want some basic information about other crafting disciplines, make sure to read our GW2 Crafting Guide.

All types of products that can be crafted by Chefs in Guild Wars 2 are cooking ingredients, dessert, dye, meal, seasoning, snack, and soup. At level 400 they can use recipes to craft gifts.

Reasons to level GW2 Cooking

In general crafting in Guild Wars 2 isn’t the most important aspect of the game. Cooking is no exception to that rule, but there are a few reasons that might motivate you to try it out!

Experience gains

There are two parts to this. First of all, every cooking-related consumable grants you a bonus of +10% extra experience gained from slain enemies. Even if you don’t really care much about the extra stats that they provide, popping a meal or a drink every 30 minutes might be a meaningful acceleration of leveling your alts.

The second part comes from the direct experience gains that you can get from cooking. Leveling any crafting discipline 1-400 should provide you with seven levels of character experience, no matter what level you are when you start.

Progressing a Chef through crafting multiple consumable products is usually the fastest and the cheapest option from all the crafters.  Getting all nine disciplines to 400 will give you around 56 levels of character experience, but some of them can be really expensive. Cooking will give you seven levels without the necessity of spending too much gold.

Valuable Consumables

Definitely, not every item that can be crafted by a Chef is valuable. Most of them even have lower prices than their ingredients! At the same time, there are some that can prove to be really helpful in Dungeons, Fractals, and Raids. There also are some that you will really love if you enjoy playing World versus World.

PvE foods

Bowl of Sweet and Spicy Butternut Squash Soup – the meal with biggest Power and Ferocity boosts, great for builds that are based on dealing damage through sheer Power and Critical Strikes. If you can’t get it, the slightly less powerful, but still worthwhile variant, is an Avocado Smoothie.

Bowl of Curry Butternut Squash Soup – the greatest boost of Precision and Ferocity available, good for builds that have decent DPS, but can get amplified by more Critical Strike and Critical Damage. Bowl of Butternut Squash Soup is the slightly weaker option.

Bowl of Seaweed Salad – grants 5% extra damage while moving (mobility spells don’t count as movement). It’s a great bonus for characters who can effectively move around and kite when dealing damage, making full use of the bonus might be a bit difficult. The cheaper alternative is the Bowl of Asparagus and Sage Salad.

Fried Golden Dumpling – powerful buff for activating Might. Useful on characters that can profit from this mechanic, mostly DPS builds that apply conditions to deal damage. The good alternatives are Plate of Roasted Cactus and slightly weaker Plate of Prickly Pear Sorbet.

Peach Pie - provides additional health regen and vitality. It's made from a Bowl of Dough (consisting of Bag of Flour, Stick of Butter, and Jug of Water) and Bowl of Peach Pie Filling. It's fairly cheap to make and it adds a lot of survivability to tanks. 

Plate of Truffle Steak – biggest Power and Precision bonus. Good on Power DPS build that could use some more Critical Strike.

Slice of Allspice Cake - if you have gold to spend for the open world, this dessert provides a lot of life steal on critical hits. It can let you sustain and drain tank against enemies that can't one-shot you.

WvW foods

To help your allies during World versus World, you can drop Feats – AoE consumable buffs that will help all the nearby players on your side.

Tray of Saffron Bread – a defensive buff that decreases the damage taken while knocked down, knocked up or stunned, decreases the time of conditions

Feast of Seaweed Salad – again, good for builds that can DPS while moving. In WvW you can form a highly mobile deathsquad and roam around killing enemies, this food definitely helps with that

Pot of Lemongrass Poultry Soup – grants +70 Vitality (in turn increasing max HP) and -20% incoming condition duration. Really powerful defensive buff. Poultry and Leek Soup is a slightly weaker and cheaper alternative.

Feast of Cactus Fruit Salad – grants life steal and +100 Expertise, which increases the duration of inflicted conditions. Great for condi spamming builds.

Tray of Mango Pies – definitely not the most powerful buff, but it’s really cheap and provides some decent defensive stats. Extra health and health regen are always useful.

Remember that food bonuses don’t stack. You can only have one active at a time and the last one you used, will replace the previous one. Make sure that you don’t replace stronger buffs with weaker ones because it’s just a waste of resources.

Mystic Forge

Another good reason to max out a Chef is the ability to craft three special items that you can unlock with recipes after you get cooking level 400. They are Gift of Color, Gift of Water and Vial of Liquid Flame.

These items can later be used in the Mystic Forge to create exotic and legendary weapons. Gift of Color is a part of the recipe for Bifrost. Gift of Water is used to craft Frenzy. Vial of Liquid Flame can be used for creating an Exotic greatsword Volcanus and Legendary weapons Incinerator and Rodgort.

GW2 cooking guide 1-400

As we already mentioned, Chef is the cheapest one of the crafting disciplines to level up, which makes them a great choice, if you need to get some character experience. Unlike weapon and armor crafting classes, Chef can only progress to level 400. To get there as fast as possible, you should take advantage of the discovery mechanic and the cheapest ingredients currently available in the trading post. 

Another unique aspect of this discipline is the lack of ingredients tiers. Different recipes are unlocked when you’re making your way through the leveling process, but there are no higher level ingredients like it is with wood, metal, cloth, and leather.

The optimal items to craft may vary depending on time, market prices of some ingredients and some other variables. Most players don’t really look at the usefulness of their cooking products. You will start crafting the good items after you get to level 400. It’s really not expensive and with this leveling guide, it will probably take you about half an hour to max out. An example of a good and fast leveling route looks like this:

Ingredients to buy from an NPC Vendor

137x Bags of Sugar

82x Packet of Salt

81x Jar of Vegetable Oil

55x Bags of Flour

55x Jug of Water

28x Bags of Starch

28x Packet of Baking Powder

28x Bell Pepper

27x Glass of Buttermilk

27x Packet of Yeast

27x Bowl of Sour Cream

27x Jar of Vinegar

Ingredients to buy from Trading Post

55x Rutabaga

54x Black Peppercorn

54x Raspberry

52x Chili Pepper

28x Potato

28x Turnip

28x Strawberry

28x Parsnip

27x Passion Fruit

27x Slab of Red Meat

27x Corriander Seed

27x Tarragon Leaves

27x Dill Sprig

27x Head of Cabage

27x Zucchini

27x Thyme Leaf

27x Vanilla Bean

27x Chocolate Bar

27x Head of Garlic

27x Egg

27x Bowl of Creamy Portobello Soup

27x Bowl of Cauliflower Sautee

List of the recommended recipes to follow on different level thresholds are:

Level 1

54x Pile of Salt and Pepper

Level 25

27x Bottle of Simple Dressing

Level 50

Use Cheese Wedge and Chili Pepper to discover Chili Pepper Popper and make 23 of them.

Level 75

28x Bowl of Baker’s Dry Ingredients

Level 100

28x Pile of Paprika

Level 125

28x Bowl of Strawberry Pie Filling

Level 150

Use Egg, Jar of Vegetable Oil, Bowl of Baker’s Dry Ingredients and Zucchini to discover Loaf of Zucchini Bread and make 26 of them.

Level 175

Mix together Bag of Sugar, Bottle of Simple Dressing, Bowl of Sour Cream and Head of Cabbage to discover Bowl of Coleslaw and make 26 of them.

Level 200

Discover Bowl of Fancy Creamy Mushroom Soup with Bowl of Creamy Portobello Soup, Thyme Leaf and Dill Sprig.

Level 225

Use Rutabaga, Pile of Salt and Pepper and Jar of Vegetable Oil to discover Roasted Rutabaga and cook it 26 times.

Level 250

Mix together Slab of Red Meat, Head of Garlic and Coriander Seed to discover Plate of Coriander Crusted Meat, prepare 26 plates.

Level 275

Use Plate of Coriander Crusted Meat and Bowl of Cauliflower Sautee to discover Plate of Coriander Crusted Meat Dinner, make 26 of them.

Level 300

Discover Loaf of Tarragon Bread with Bag of Flour, Packet of Yeast, Jug of Water and Tarragon Leaves. Bake a total of 26 loaves.

Level 325

Mix together Glass of Buttermilk, Bag of Sugar, Chocolate Bar and Raspberry to discover Chocolate Raspberry Cream. Prepare 26 of them.

Level 350

Use Passion Fruit, Raspberry, Bag of Sugar and Vanilla Bean to discover Raspberry Passion Fruit Compote and cook 26 batches.

Level 375

Make 28x Bowl of Winter Vegetable Mix.

This should be enough for you to reach level 400 and rank Master in cooking. This also means the ability to create every cooking item in the game (for some special cases, you’re going to have to acquire a recipe, but there’s not much of them).

As we already mentioned, you can also use Chef to create dyes. Blackberry is used for blue dyes, raspberry for red, carrot for orange et cetera.

Guild Wars 2

First released in 2012, Guild Wars 2 is a successful MMORPG developed by ArenaNet. While strongly connected to the first game of the series, the sequel takes us back to the world of Tyria, 250 after defeating the Great Destroyer. Two major expansion packs have been introduced to the game: Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire.

This time the players can choose the race that they want to play, there are five options: Human, Norn, Asura, Charr, and Sylvari. At the same time, there are nine available professions: Warrior, Guardian, Revenant, Thief, Engineer, Ranger, Mesmer, Necromancer and Elementalist.

Guild Wars 2 offers its players a well written, wonderful story and a fantastically designed world full of different regions and locations. Furthermore, it’s a Living World that undergoes significant changes as new chapters of the advancing storyline unfold in front of the players’ eyes.

Come back to Tyria and play through the fascinating campaign full of adventures, battles, and dragons and take part in the epic, huge scale World versus World wars! Make sure to visit our blog for more guides, news, articles and other content related to Guild Wars 2 and other hot MMO games!