Realm First! Zen Master Cook

I would like to say, in response to Damianoxo's post about doing it in 2 hours, that I managed to do this on our server of Demon Soul with my character Hrethgir (Horde) without any kind of help and without any knowledge beforehand. I was actually attempting to get Realm First! Zen Master Angler when a guildmate beat me to 600 fishing by 9 points so I decided to start questing in Pandaria. Almost 2 hours had already passed when I entered Pandaria finally only to realize that no one on our server had done Realm First cooking yet and from what I was hearing it didn't sound like anyone was purposefully going for it either. So I decided to get as much information from friends and CRZ folks as I could and found out I had to run from the Jade Forest starting area to the Halfhill Market in Valley of the Four Winds to even begin my trek from 525 to 600 cooking which I did. I had heard from a fishing buddy in CRZ Undercity that someone on Zuluhed had gotten it in under an hour but with help from guildies (similar to Damianoxo) so I figured if it could be done in under an hour it must be easy and people on our server were just being lazy (even though other Realm First achievements were steadily popping up as the hours ticked by). I was wrong. This achievement was not easy.

It took from start to finish about 6 to 8 hours to complete it solo experimenting with where to go and how to get the mats and trying to figure out which of the different types of cooking I should go with. From just fate I went with Banquet of the Brew (even though I'm a Warrior that needs Str food), and since I had max fishing already I thought maybe fishing from pools and turning those in for Grocery bags to get tokens to get the last 25 points (since at 575 or so feasts are the only things that can level you up but they take a ridiculous amount of mats) but the fishing idea turned out to be a bad direction. All of the pools I would fish from would be unreliable and would give me Golden Carp which instead of needing 20 of a fish per token, you need 60 of the carp for a token. I learned this the hard way so finally I decided to search around the zone a little more and found out that the cranes in the marsh directly north had a 100 percent drop rate to drop 1 Wildfowl Breast meat per kill, and since these cranes had a very fast respawn rate...this seemed like the best spot (since a stack of 20 Wildfowl Breast meat will net one Ironpaw Token). So several hours of farming later I managed to get enough stacks of Wildfowl Breast meat to turn them in to make the +5 skill point 10 man Banquet of the Brews x5 times to get 25 points and net 600 Cooking. Of course there was no one else on our server doing this (minus one warlock alliance who will remain nameless since she used all of her fortune on the alliance side to get 4-5 realm first achievements -_-) so since there was no information on the web easily attainable on how to level up Zen Master cooking quickly I managed to pull ahead of anyone else and get my very first Realm First! achievement in WoW history ^.^ Thank you for reading my story, it will probably be downrated and deleted for being so ridiculously long but this is the tale of one person's drive to get a realm first they didn't even aim for originally in the first place =D If you happen to be on Demon Soul too say hi to Hrethgir of the Horde! (P.S. I shan't delete this very long wowhead post! Some reason when you get past 3,000 reputation every downrate gives you points up also so I guess I'll just let it stay here and get downrated >_<)