Why Is Fishing So Weird Now?

I mentioned in a previous post that my fascination with Midnight professions made me pick up fishing again for the first time since Shadowlands, motivated by a desire to gather all the fish required for my skinner's majestic beast lures. Since then I've maxed out Midnight fishing on two characters and many more are on their way towards the same. As I've learned more about the uses of fish in this expansion, my desire to fish has only grown, even though I'm simultaneously vaguely confused and annoyed by the whole thing. Fishing is so weird now compared to how it used to be!

Fishing in Vanilla was primarily a slow activity that rewarded patience and persistence. It took long to level up, you had to work on your skill in the right zones for your level, and most of the stuff you caught in open water wasn't actually that valuable or useful. For the good stuff you usually had to hunt down specific pools, which were limited and required even more skill. (There've been times in Classic when my character more or less lived in the Bay of Storms, swimming slow laps around the spawn points for patches of elemental water.)

Even though I enjoyed the change at the time, I think things already became a bit unbalanced when Blizzard changed it so that fishing in pools would always succeed, meaning they went from a reward you had to work for to the opposite: an easier way to level your skill. Nonetheless I'd say that by, say, Mists of Pandaria things still had a certain logic to them (as I've had a chance to re-experience in MoP Classic recently): open water was a bit "meh" and fish from pools were more desirable and something you'd specifically hunt for and farm. 

The thing that immediately threw me off about fishing in Midnight is that all pools contain a selection of fish now. So if you fish in a "Bloom Swarm" for example, you're slightly narrowing down what kinds of fish you'll catch compared to open water, but it's still no guarantee you'll get anything you actually wanted.

Pools have a higher chance of containing rarer fish (as Midnight fish also come in the classic white-green-blue rarity colours) but this actually only adds an extra layer of confusion in so far as more rare doesn't necessarily translate to more valuable. A few weeks ago I did a quick price check of all Midnight fish on the auction house and came away with the following:

Common:

• Arcane Wyrmfish - 90g
• Gore Guppy - 32g
• Lynxfish - 8g
• Root Crab - 5g
• Sin'dorei Swarmer - 1g

Uncommon:

• Bloomtail Minnow - 54g
• Fungalskin Pike - 90g
• Hollow Grouper - 50s
• Restored Songfish - 1g50s
• Shimmer Spinefish - 80s
• Shimmersiren - 52g
• Sunwell Fish - 1g50s
• Tender Lumifin - 3g

Rare:

• Blood Hunter - 2g
• Eversong Trout - 46g
• Lucky Loa - 1g50s
• Null Voidfish - 173g
• Ominous Octopus - 42g
• Twisted Tetra - 32g
• Warping Wise - 29g

Prices have probably changed again since then, but the point here is just to illustrate the huge variance in price in each rarity group. White, green or blue, each group contains both fish that sell for barely a gold and fish that sell for close to one hundred or more. This can lead to the bizarre scenario that in some zones, one of the supposedly more common fish is actually more valuable than the rare ones, meaning you're better off fishing in open water and/or using an alt with lower fishing skill as they are less likely to fish up the (less valuable) rare catches. It's wild to me!

Now, you might argue that this sort of variance is just a normal part of the game, as if you look at gear for example, not all items of the same rarity are of the same value either, and that's true, but in general Blizzard has always worked towards streamlining that. If you get an epic drop at max level, there shouldn't be any situation where your old green is actually better, even if the purple item's stats aren't 100% optimal for you. Why make fishing more confusing and complicated by adding indicators that don't actually relate to value at all?

The many different ways in which fish can be used don't help either. Again, in Classic fish were either for cooking/eating (most of them) and some rarer ones were required for alchemy, but it was all fairly straightforward.

The first thing that threw me off about cooking with fish in Midnight is that you can "fillet" any given fish to turn it into the fillet cooking ingredient, but then some recipes still also require whole, unfilleted fish. So you better make sure to only fillet the most worthless ones - check the AH before getting that knife out!

Next we have lure-making, which is what started me down this whole rabbit hole, and here the value of each fish involved varies greatly based on which beast it lures, what those beasts drop, and which recipes those ingredients are used for in turn. 

As far as I can tell, fish are no longer used in any potions, but my mind was blown when I found out that alchemists can turn fish into gems now. I've been doing that a lot since I learned about it, since my jewelcrafter's gains from prospecting ore have been so anaemic. Getting about ten guaranteed gems out of a bunch of fish feels like an amazing deal in comparison. But I wouldn't exactly say that's intuitive.

Then there are additional "fun" items like fishing lures, but most of them are only for worthless fish so why would I want to lure more of them? Or the Aquarius Bloom item which turns any Midnight fishing pool into a "Bloom Swarm". The description for these says that they have a higher chance to contain rarer fish, but again, I wouldn't necessarily want that! When I consulted the Wowhead comments to find out what I could possibly want with that item, the most upvoted comment stated that they just used it to clear some unwanted pools away more quickly (as Blooms Swarms disappear after a single cast, so even if you don't care about what you get, it makes the pool go away and another one, one that you might like better, can respawn elsewhere). There's even more random stuff like that going on that I won't even get into but I still wonder how we ended up in this place.

What's funny to me though is that I'm not even sure whether I like or dislike it. I think the way I described things above, they sound kind of bad and confusing, no? Yet at the same time, it seems to be exactly that friction and strangeness that has led to me being more motivated to invest time in fishing than I've been in in a long while, similarly to how I like the way primary professions are in Midnight for all the same reasons that make many people hate them.

More Notes from Midnight

The husband and I are continuing to play a lot of Midnight, both together and individually. Over Easter we both had a few days off and used most of that free time to binge on the game together. It was actually really nice that we were equally excited to play for once. Often our shared play time consists of one person gently coaxing the other into doing a specific thing they want to do, while the other just goes along for the sake of playing together without necessarily caring that much about the activity. However, right now we're both equally keen on the new WoW expansion.

Delving Deeply

We jumped into delve week with so much gusto that we already have the achievement for doing all the delves on tier eleven as both tank and dps roles. For the first round, I tanked on my warrior while he did damage on his mage, and then we did the whole thing again with him on his death knight and me on my hunter.

Delves were already a source of fast gear in War Within, but with the extra streamlining Blizzard has done, my hunter went from freshly dinged to full champion gear in something like three days. Some of that was probably luck, but they also upgraded the vendor at the end of delves so that he sells gear for other slots than trinkets now, so when he had something my hunter could use, I was able to just transfer some Undercoin from my main and bam, another gear slot sorted.

Despite this I was never running out of keys, and my levelling alts are already swimming in them before they've even hit max level. A guildie surprised me by saying that he didn't like the change because he used to farm key shards via World Soul memories in War Within at the start of the season, and now he felt more limited by being hard capped at six keys per week, which was a stance I'd never even considered. For me the effort required to farm keys had just always felt like too much and often prevented me from doing even four delves on alts because I couldn't bear to go through the same lot of key-awarding activities on every single character. Now that shards come from seemingly everywhere including treasure chests, they've just become a complete non-issue for me and I love it.

I also learned that you can apparently meet yourself in delves. This is my priest (who was my third character to 90) sitting across an "echo" of my hunter. 

Soloing Nullaeus

Somewhat related to delves, there's the new nemesis boss. Let me backtrack to the end of War Within for a second: back in September I stated that I was still planning to do ?? difficulty Ky'veza at some point, but then Legion Remix happened and that was just so much more fun that I never even bothered with Ky'veza again. (Not to mention that I'd already found the regular version of the fight extremely un-fun. Having every single mechanic be a one-shot if you mess it up is just not my cup of tea; I prefer the elation of being able to recover from a slight misstep over feeling like I have to force my brain to achieve 100% perfect execution through endless repetition.)

When Midnight came out I heard that the newest delve boss was really easy, so I went to check him out sooner than I normally would have. Normal mode was indeed a cakewalk and I one-shot him without even having read any kind of guide, but ?? still took a bit of practice (though not nearly as much as Zekvir or the Underpin did).

Nullaeus basically feels a bit like Zekvir with all the edges filed off: there's crap to dodge on the floor, something to interrupt, something to dispel, and adds you need to kill, but everything is easier. The stuff you need to move out of doesn't hurt so much that clipping it a bit will kill you, and when adds are summoned, the boss goes into an immunity state and leaves you alone so you're able to focus on the adds without also having to worry about him.

Finally, this boss is where Valeera really shone as a companion for me as it was noticeable that she'd been tuned to be much more competent than Brann. One of the difficulties with Zekvir was that Brann would only interrupt or cleanse every other cast, but it could be inconsistent when he'd do it, which made it hard to coordinate with his abilities. Valeera in dps mode on Nullaeus just interrupts every single cast that needs interrupting, or alternatively, if you set her to heal, you need to do the interrupting yourself but she'll reliably dispel you at all times so you don't have to worry about that.

Doing ?? Nullaeus on my protection warrior was my first experience with Valeera set to healer and the healing orbs she throws are also much more consistently targeted than Brann's potions used to be - one will always land right on top of you, with the other two to your left and right, so no having to race across the room to find Brann's latest drop in Narnia.

One of the things that challenged me on ?? Nullaeus was, ironically, maintaining focus for the interrupt through the tedium of nothing much happening. On Zekvir it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on, but here there's so little going on that after a few minutes my mind tended to wander and I would lose focus and miss an interrupt (which was a guaranteed one-shot).

The other thing was the tank buster, which I didn't even realise was a mechanic exclusive to tanks until he flattened me from full to dead with the boss at about 1% health. It was only when I googled what the heck was going on that I learned that this one ability exclusive to tanks is meant to be mitigated - while I'd been able to get by with sloppy shield blocking for most of the fight, his damage increases during the final burn and that's why I'd died. Still, after about half a dozen attempts he was down.

Majestic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been very motivated by the profession system and have been enjoying the new "high value beast" designation for skinning targets. This has since intensified with a renewed focus on what are called "majestic" beasts, which need to be called forth with a special crafted lure and have a chance of dropping valuable epic materials.

This is a system that has existed since the profession revamp in Dragonflight, but I distinctly remember crafting my first lure back then, using it, and getting absolutely nothing useful from the mob it spawned - which led to me concluding that the whole system was a waste of time and then never bothering with it again.

In War Within, I became somewhat more aware of the value of these rare materials as certain patron crafting orders kept requiring them, but I just tended to skip those. However, in Midnight the new epic profession tools that Blizzard has added all require the new "majestic" materials to craft, so I've been on a mission to learn how to lure all five of these beasts so I can hunt and skin them every day. While the RNG can be frustrating for sure - the day after I'd crafted my shiny new epic skinning knife with a boost to perception I didn't find a single purple item on any of the beasts - doing my daily tour of the four zones is a routine I enjoy right now.

It's also motivated me to pick up fishing again - prior to this, the last time I maxed out my fishing skill had been during Shadowlands. During Dragonflight and War Within I dabbled a little but found it too difficult to make sense of which fish had value and why. All the beast lures require specific fish, which has provided me with a new motivation to gather that is easy enough to understand.

Nightmare Prey

Seguing from the subject of hunting to the prey system - I did already mention it positively in my last post, but I did want to give nightmare difficulty another shout-out now that the husband and I have had a chance to dig into that too. Basically, I really like it! Sure, we'll both complain when we're on a squishy character and things go terribly wrong when too many random events happen at once, but as I also said to him, it weirdly reminds me of vanilla gameplay in a way, in the sense that one of the biggest challenges of questing in the open world in vanilla WoW is accidentally pulling more than you can handle, and Nightmare Prey kind of pushes the same buttons for me as it expects you to keep an eye on your surroundings and prepare for the worst at any moment whenever you're on a hunt. That's cool and I like it!

They also work pretty well in a party - I haven't fully figured it out, but it does seem like progress is shared to some degree as long as you're not too far apart, as we'll always find our prey at the same time. It even overrides the penalty you get from dying, where it will say that your progress has been reset to zero, but if your partner pushes their own hunt to completeness while you're close by, your own progress indicator will also instantly go back from empty to full. 

Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.

Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail

I don't know much about it since I've barely scratched the surface of that particular part of the game, but I get the impression that fishing has a lot more going on in The War Within than it did in Dragonflight. Specifically, I noticed that there's this new item called an Algari Weaverline, which you're supposed to spin into your fishing pole.

I got some of that and it made me realise that my evoker didn't actually own a fishing pole, since they stopped being a requirement to fish many years ago and I just hadn't come across one organically. So naturally, I opened up Wowhead to have a look at what good fishing poles are out there nowadays and how to acquire them. I was stunned to find that after almost twenty years, the Arcanite Fishing Pole that you get for winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza from Vanilla is still the best permanent fishing pole in the game. There are other options that are very close, but this one still beats them all. It even got a new model at some point. Amazing!

What was even funnier however was that it also looked like the most straightforward option to acquire on short notice, as all the other good poles were either RNG-dependent in some form or required a reputation I hadn't ground out on this particular character (and which isn't account-wide yet). I mean, yes, winning the fishing tournament is not trivial, but I'd done so several times in Classic, so it didn't seem that outlandish to think that I might be able to do the same in retail as well.

Somewhat amusingly, I actually struggled to find up-to-date information on how the tournament works in retail. The reason this was funny to me is that the first time I took part in the event in Classic, I confused myself due to having looked up a retail guide with information that didn't apply to the Classic version. Now it was the other way round.

Ultimately, I came up with the following list of differences compared to the Classic version:

• In retail, the tournament is a world quest. This means you get a little pop-up and tracker on your UI when it starts, but other than that, I didn't see this change making much of a difference to the experience. It still doesn't auto-complete or anything; and you still need to hand in in Booty Bay to pick your prize.
• As I'd observed previously, Tastyfish can be fished up all throughout Stranglethorn in retail, not just along the coast.
• There are no longer dedicated pools of Tastyfish, but the regular pools just start giving primarily Tastyfish once the tournament starts (though you can still get those pesky Oily Blackmouths ruining your day sometimes).
• It's no longer a server-wide competition, so you don't automatically win by playing on a low-pop server, but the first fifty people in the region (?) to hand in their forty Tastyfish all get a prize, regardless of what server they are on.
  

I was very curious how the latter in specific was going to pan out. Azjol-Nerub is considered a medium population server, but I decided to follow the advice to do my fishing in war mode to minimise competition anyway. (Also, I had to google how to turn on war mode because who thought the talent panel was the logical choice for that?!)

So I figured I shouldn't be facing too much competition for pools... but I also wasn't optimised in any way. My Classic fishing skill on my evoker was less than 100, even! And I'd read about all kinds of weird min-maxing to win the competition, such as that if you were after the account-bound heirloom ring reward, it would be best to use a Highmountain tauren druid since they can move between pools more quickly with instant flight form, and Highmountain tauren have a racial that lets them catch extra fish sometimes.

Either way, I was happy to wait and see. Min-maxers might be a threat, but the new expansion is also still pretty fresh, so I figured that might work out in my favour in the sense that there might be fewer people spending time chasing rewards from old content. I changed my hearthstone to Booty Bay, parked myself in my usual spot in northern Stranglethorn and set my phone alarm to remind me just before the competition was supposed to start.

When the time came, I was kind of surprised by how not nervous I was, considering the way the Classic version of the tournament had got my heart racing at times. The war mode gamble was definitely paying off as I didn't encounter a single soul while fishing and had all the pools to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder when the first winner would be announced, considering that in Classic the contest tended to end after 15-20 minutes and that the cast bar for fishing is shorter in retail, the yell to announce the first winner went out, only ten minutes in. I kept calm and carried on, reminding myself that there were 49 more prizes to be won.

After another three minutes or so came a yell that Riggle Bassbait had given out about half of his prizes and to hurry up, but fortunately I was close to done myself by that point. Once I grabbed my 40th fish, I quickly hearthstoned to Booty Bay and handed in - and clearly not a second too soon, as two Horde druids did the same right after me, which then triggered a spam of "that's it, we're done" style yells from the quest giver.

I could hardly believe that it had been that easy! Of course, now I needed about another 200 fishing skill points to actually be able to use my new pole. I figured I'd fly around and fish up a few more Tastyfish for consolation prize money, but oddly all my casts came up empty now. A bit of googling revealed that this is a bug that has seemingly been around forever - that you can't actually get any more Tastyfish like you're supposed to after the competition is over. However, the same forum threads also noted that you'd still get skill-ups for your "empty" catches and that you still had a chance to catch one of the rare fish, so I kept it at for a little while until I ended up picking up a Dezian Queenfish which I was able to hand in for another buff to my fishing.

Now to work on those remaining 100 or so skill points...

More on Starting Over on Lava Lash

This is a follow-up to last week's post about me deciding to try a fresh start in Season of Discovery phase two by re-rolling on the RP-PvE server.

As mentioned, I got to 20 incredibly quickly due to the XP buff, but with basically no cash to train abilities or do anything else. So I decided that it was time to put on the brakes and take care of business other than levelling for a while, namely by doing some travelling to unlock access to additional flight paths (I hadn't even been to Kalimdor yet), working on my professions, and working the auction house to make some money.

Fishing turned out to be surprisingly lucrative here, because for some reason there didn't seem to be a lot of active fishermen about - or maybe they are all still busy levelling to 40; I don't know. The point is, I found pools of firefin snapper, oily blackmouth and sagefish everywhere, and while each fish only sold for a few silver, it added up quickly. I think fishing may actually be my highest skill right now.

I also developed a strange fascination with chests. While I've played dwarf characters before, I don't think I ever got any to a very high level, and they usually had some other form of tracking (ore or herb nodes for gatherers, different types of mobs for hunters) that took priority over using their "treasure finding" racial that highlights chests on the mini map.

My newest priest on the other hand is a tailor and enchanter, so she doesn't have anything else to pay attention to, and I've been very surprised by just how many chests there are about. I always thought I was pretty good at spotting them with the naked eye, but apparently there've always been a lot more hiding in corners and behind sheds that I never knew about. It's turned me into a proper treasure hunting fiend, as I'll randomly fight my way into buildings or caves just to access a chest at the back.

When I revisited Ashenvale, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some life had returned to the PvP event, mainly level 40s that had decided to come back for more reputation I guess. The groups tended to be about 80-90% max level characters, with the rest being made up of levellers like me that just happened to pass through the zone. I now have first-hand experience of how much easier it is to get rewarded for taking part in this event as Alliance, as I hit friendly with Silverwing Sentinels after only two battles.

I also made good progress collecting more of my runes - knowing where to pick them up along the way after already going through the whole process on Horde side in phase one made things a lot simpler. I also found out that Alliance have it significantly easier when it comes to collecting their Meditation buffs, as Meditation on the Light and Elune can be picked up almost right next to each other in Stormwind.

As one of the priest runes drops from the elite orcs in Redridge, I decided to join a group for the quests there. Even considering that Lava Lash's population is much lower than Wild Growth's, it was crazy busy there that evening, meaning we spent a lot of time just running about without being able to tag anything, so people got to chatting.

I was surprised to hear from several of my group mates that they had only just started in phase two, and was slightly amused when our ret pally declared that they were both a mythic raider and a streamer in retail. Far be it from me to doubt the truthfulness of that, but that same paladin stood out to me for not casting a single seal all evening... just goes to show again that retail and Classic are two very different games and knowing your way around one doesn't automatically translate into knowing anything at all about the other.

Not that it mattered either way... we had a good time, and me, the pally and the rogue who had started the group actually stuck together to complete a few additional quests once we were done with the elites, such as collecting pendants from the gnolls and escorting Corporal Keeshan. The whole experience had that good old-fashioned pug feel to it, reminding me of the way I first made friends in WoW nearly twenty years ago.

I also spotted some familiar guild names in town, and in fact am pretty certain that I even ran into the GM of a guild I used to be friendly with on Hydraxian Waterlords back in 2020. I just wasn't able to 100% confirm it as they were AFK when I encountered them and therefore didn't respond to my emote. It's just fascinating to me how these RP server communities persist over the years and across different versions of the game. This is one of those things I love about Classic and that the megaserver aficionados just don't get I guess.

That said, I'm feeling surprisingly little pull to get to level 40 and start raiding Gnomeregan now. I'm not super interested in raiding without being part of a group going into it together, and to be honest what I've been hearing about Gnomer isn't helping. I noted about BFD that while I thought it was fun overall, some of the bosses were kind of bordering on being "too much" for a relaxed Classic raiding experience, and from everything I've read, Gnomeregan is much harder (something that people tend to frame as a good thing, but to me it's not - supposedly it's particularly punishing for healers as well).

So while I'm having fun for now, I'm still not convinced that Season of Discovery is really "working" for me. I liked the level cap being 25, but it occurs to me that when it was raised, it was essentially like a microcosm of an expansion release... oh, you've been working on learning how endgame works and getting better gear? Forget all of it! Everything is different now! And while that sort of thing generates excitement, it can also be exhausting in a way, even more so on a sped-up schedule. I wonder how many players have already dropped off for similar reasons.

Horde Master Angler

Two years ago, I wrote about my trials and tribulations related to winning the Stranglethorn fishing tournament in Classic. I then won it a second time the next year, when Classic era had just split off from BC and I decided to participate again on a whim. However, after that, I didn't really give it much thought again.

Several weeks ago now, I was doing the pirate quests in Stranglethorn on my tauren druid when I noticed a fishing pool in an unusual location. A closer look revealed it to be a school of Tastyfish - I was surprised to see them spawn on the eastern side of Stranglethorn, but it did serve to remind me of the event, and that now that I was playing era again, it might be worth revisiting. About an hour later I was questing in another part of Stranglethorn when the victory yell for the tournament went out - yes, you read that correctly, more than an hour later. My reaction was pretty much: What? It took over an hour for someone to win this thing? I should be able to win pretty much by default then!

Naturally it wasn't much later that I decided to revive my old routine of setting my hearthstone to Booty Bay late on Saturday and positioning my hunter on the coast to be ready for Sunday's tournament - only this time on Horde side.

In case you were wondering though... I did not win on my first try. That time the tournament took over an hour must have been a fluke or something, as when I actually tried to take part again, it was over after only eighteen minutes and I'd only just crossed the twenty fish mark. But hey, I'd learned enough from last time to know that there was a lot of RNG to the contest and that I was capable of winning it if I only kept trying.

Since I hadn't had a lot of good luck in the lower half of Stranglethorn, I decided to revisit my old hunting grounds north of Grom'gol this Sunday. While I waited for the tournament to start, a level 60 undead warrior not from my guild rode up and killed a nearby crocolisk. I just stared at them - I didn't want to be rude, but I'd claimed this spot first. Eventually they moved south a bit.

When the Tastyfish started spawning, I started fishing as usual. The warrior provided competition for a little while, but when we reached Grom'gol, I decided to turn back around while they continued further south. The northern coast always seemed to have fewer pools than the southern one, but I didn't remember it being quite so barren - I'm guessing that the lower number of participants also resulted in a slower respawn rate for pools all over the zone. Rather suddenly it also started to rain really heavily, and while I'm generally rather fond of the weather effects in Classic, I actually had a bit of trouble seeing the edges of the pools in the downpour.

I was doing terribly with catching "junk" fish as well, so that I quickly resigned myself to the idea that this week wasn't going to be a win either, but of course I kept going. I remembered from past contests that the average duration until someone claimed victory was about twenty minutes, so I kept looking for the giveaway yell from about eighteen minutes past the hour. However, it didn't come.

The spawn rate of pools seemed to pick up and my numbers were starting to look better and better. I'd been pretty chill about the whole thing until then, but with only three fish to go my heart started to race a bit. I began to provide running commentary to my husband, who was as usual perpetually bewildered by how much fishing could excite me. "I hope that someone wins soon, because if I get forty fish, hearth, and then they beat me that'll feel pretty crappy."

I was on thirty-nine fish with one more cast to go before exhausting my current pool. I cursed when my last cast resulted in an Oily Blackmouth and quickly continued to the next pool, which fortunately wasn't far away. My first cast there netted me my fortieth Tastyfish, and I hit my hearthstone to return to Booty Bay.

I ran out of the inn and didn't see anyone already there. I clicked on the goblin when I suddenly saw a male human warrior come up next to me (incidentally, I recognised the name as he'd been in my paladin's ZG run on Monday). For just a second, I panicked and struggled to find the right reward to click on, but I managed to complete the hand-in in time to be declared this week's Master Angler. The warrior did a /cry emote on me. The crappy situation I had been so keen to avoid had now happened to him. I gave him a /pat in return.

So now my tauren hunter is properly armed to engage in high-level fishing with her Arcanite Fishing Pole. As a bonus, she also caught the rare fish that rewards the High Eternium Fishing Line during this contest. Now who to take next? Maybe my paladin...

I Am the Master Angler!

You may remember me writing about wanting to win the fishing tournament back in September. I didn't post about it again after that, but in game I kept at it pretty faithfully week after week... it became such a routine that even the husband knew that I was not to be disturbed between 1 and 1.30 pm on a Sunday because that was fishing time.

I also took a screenshot whenever the winner was called out each week, to be able to keep track of my progress. Unfortunately it was nothing to write home about most of the time - I'd usually have only between 20 and 30 Tastyfish at that point, so I wasn't anywhere near claiming victory myself. One time I even got so caught up in chatting with a guildie that I completely lost track of what was going on and even missed the winner being called altogether. There was only one exceptional run, where I was actually on 39 fish and casting for my 40th by the time the winner was announced... that one stung a little.

I didn't really get any closer to figuring out a secret strategy to winning throughout all those weeks. Besides the RNG of getting "trash" out of the pools sometimes, it mostly seemed to be down to the distribution of players along the coast, but that was very unpredictable as well. For a while it felt like I was doing pretty well for myself at the relatively unpopular, very northern end of Stranglethorn, but then it got busier every week, until one time I ended up competing with three or four people for a single pool there and decided to say "screw it" and relocated.

I also learned that one of my guild's main tanks had actually won the fishing tournament before, as he whipped out the trinket that allows you to turn into a fish when we went to kill the giant shark in Azshara one day. I asked him whether he had any advice for how to win and he responded with something along the lines of: "Nah, it's all RNG. Just keep at it and you'll win after a couple of weeks." As I had been trying for more than two months by that point, I wasn't feeling particularly heartened.

The funniest fail came only a couple of weeks ago, when the yell about someone else having won went out and I recognised the name of another guildie who had joined only recently. I congratulated them and asked how long they'd been trying to win, just to get the response that it was actually their first time, and they couldn't even use the Arcanite Fishing Pole they'd just won because their fishing skill wasn't high enough. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry!

The week after that I skipped the tournament in favour of an Uldaman run on my pally. I hadn't really intended to skip it, because I was kind of hoping that we'd be done in time for me to log back onto my hunter, but I didn't mind missing one week. In a way it turned out to be a good thing anyway as I had already positioned my hunter for the tourney but later found out that I'd actually forgotten to set her hearthstone to Booty Bay like I usually do. Imagine if I'd got my 40 fish and then hearthed back to Ironforge by accident! As it was, the guild tank used this opportunity to take part again and got his second win.

It was the week after that when things finally worked out in my favour. I'd like to think it was because a friendly mage (who is also the aforementioned tank's partner... I think?) made a point of wishing me good luck after I'd "let" the tank win the week before due to my absence. I ended up fishing along the middle stretch of the coast and for once it wasn't too badly crowded there. Also, another thing that might have made a difference was that I noticed for the first time that pools were actually spawning before the yell had officially announced the start of the tournament - I think I already had two Tastyfish in my bags before the event was supposed to have started "officially".

Anyway, I got my forty Tastyfish with only a minimal number of "wasted" casts, hearthed to Booty Bay, handed in and that was that! It was a joyful day. I was asked if I was planning to try for a second win to get the trinket as well but I honestly don't know. I don't care about that prize as much as I did about the fishing pole, and as hard as some may find it to believe, I actually found the tournament to be quite an adrenaline rush whenever I was having one of my better runs and it felt like I could be getting close to winning. I'm not sure I can deal with all that excitement a second time around!

Gone Fishing

I've enjoyed fishing in WoW for a long time, and that is the case in Classic too. Knowing that, you may or may not be surprised to hear that I never took part in the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza before. It just wasn't really on my radar as something I had reason to care about.

That changed a bit over a month ago, when I was trying to fish in the Bay of Storms and found that while it was technically possible, every single fish I hooked at the time instantly got away. Now to be fair, I had somewhat foolishly only brought mid-level lures with me, but even so I was annoyed and started thinking about how else I could raise my fishing skill.

While Horde gets a pretty good fishing pole from a simple quest in the Hinterlands, it turns out that the Alliance has no equivalent to this, so that the best way to upgrade my measly +3 fishing pole was to win the fishing tournament.

I'll give you a spoiler right here: I haven't won it so far. But it's been interesting to try.

I started off by not researching the whole thing very well. I ended up watching a video about the tournament by a YouTuber I follow, but it was about the retail version, and while the basic idea is still to be the first person to catch forty Tastyfish and deliver them to Booty Bay, some things have changed. For example the retail video showed the guy fishing in Lake Nazferiti and saying that this was in fact a great spot for pools.

In my first tournament in Classic I therefore started by the riverside, just to discover that in Classic, schools of Tastyfish don't spawn in-land, only on the coast. This meant that I lost the first five minutes or so of that first contest to just running along the river and lakeside, looking for pools that weren't there. Despite of this, that first attempt was actually the closest I've come to winning ever since, as I was on 36 Tastyfish myself when the yell about someone else having won went out.

The next week I decided to start near Booty Bay, but this was a bad idea, as it was insanely crowded in that area. Specifically there was a group of Hordies who I believe were working together, trying to boost one person's score by having the others act as spotters and such. One of them got very annoyed with my presence and kept spamming me with duelling requests, which I found easy enough to ignore, but ultimately the number of people in the area meant that I had only caught less than twenty fish by the time the contest ended.

The week after that, I decided to go for the opposite approach and started at the very northern end of the zone. That went a bit better in terms of competition, but there was still some, and the pools seemed to be more spread out, meaning that I was once again only on a measly 25 fish by the time the competition ended. On the plus side, I caught one of the special fish for the first time and was able to trade it in for a Lucky Fishing Hat.

After that I missed a week because I forgot to log on at the right time, but last week I once again started up north. This time it went even better, because I was completely on my own in the area for quite a while, but unfortunately I got super unlucky with my pools. One thing people rarely seem to mention is that beside the randomness of the pool spawns and of how many people are in the same area as you, what you get from the pools themselves also has a degree of randomness to it, as it's possible for them to give you things other than Tastyfish. That week I just had the worst luck and all those schools that I had to myself kept spitting out things like Oily Blackmouths.

I was on thirty Tastyfish and competing with a gnome mage for a pool when both of our bobbers bounced at the same time, and we both reeled in at the same time as well. Then I saw her hit her hearthstone, and a few seconds later the yell went out announcing that this very same gnome had won the tournament. Hopefully that's one more person who won't feel the need to come back next week.

I'll just keep at it, because even when it goes badly, it's only twenty minutes out of my Sunday and the little goblin lady in Booty Bay pays good silver for the Tastyfish either way. I just remain kind of surprised by how competitive it is, considering that this is Classic, a medium-pop server, and that fishing's never had a reputation for being a sport for the masses.

Making Money

I alluded to it in previous posts, but the money for your first mount at level 40 can be hard to come by. I've been feeling the strain for a while now, and my hunter dropping down to as little as two gold with only three levels to go was a definitive wake-up call.

I suppose to some extent it's my own fault. For example I don't follow the oft-repeated advice to not train all your new spells. I mean, who knows when Eagle Eye could suddenly come in handy? I want to be prepared for anything.

Also, while I don't tend to buy things from the auction house, I don't tend to make much money off it either. It doesn't help that all four of my currently actively played alts are crafters, so from cloth to leather to ore, there's always someone who can use whatever I'm picking up, so that many things that would presumably be a source of income for others just quietly disappear into my personal crafting machine.

It doesn't help that the server economy still feels weird too. I've never been part of a fresh start server like this (as opposed to a brand new game launch where nobody knows how to play the market) so I don't know if this is simply typical for this sort of situation, but there are way more people trying to make money from selling goods than players interested in buying them.

For the first week or so this made sense, as nobody really had anything to spend, but by now most characters should have at least a few silver to spare every now and then, yet there is still seemingly no demand for most trade goods, with many of the lower level ones lingering at buyouts of mere coppers per piece still.

The one upside to this from my point of view is that if you run into a slightly awkward crafting recipe while levelling that requires what you'd expect to be somewhat unusual materials, you can just go to the auction house, buy said "rare" materials for a silver and craft the thing anyway. I still haven't quite managed to wrap my mind around that, fretting whenever I see an engineering schematic requiring gems for example, but then I check the AH and everything I need is usually available for little more than vendor price.

Wrathofkublakhan has been talking about making money with fishing, which sounded great to me since I greatly enjoy fishing on all of my characters. However, I haven't had much luck with that either. The lower level, supposedly valuable fish like Oily Blackmouth and Firefin Snapper, are still going for mere coppers on my server, and for anything even slightly higher level the competition is insane and it's often a challenge to find any pools at all. In addition, supposedly convenient fishing spots like the coast of Dustwallow Marsh or Feralas are a lot less so when you're Horde and your nearest town is a considerable trip away instead of directly on the coast.

I've actually had a bit more luck mining for iron on my hunter, despite of this being something that should be seemingly obvious and highly contested. There are two caves in Thousand Needles that are close to Freewind Post and contain two to three ore spawns each, usually iron, sometimes silver, gold or mithril (but never anything worse) and that few people ever seem to visit. I've taken to going there daily in the mornings, and while it's not the most profitable thing ever due to the aforementioned low demand for trade goods, iron is enough of a pain to find that it's got me at least back up to over thirty gold so far.

I haven't entirely given up on fish either and have mostly been hunting for Greater Sagefish on the coast of Lordamere Lake, but with mixed success. Fishing just isn't the insider's niche it used to be I guess, at least not on Pyrewood Village.

I'm undecided whether I should push onwards in terms of levelling at all while I still can't afford my mount or whether I should just keep grinding money. I suppose it doesn't technically matter, especially on a hunter who can travel at quite a steady clip with Aspect of the Cheetah anyway, but the thought of travelling everywhere on foot throughout the fourties because I can't afford anything else just feels kind of... shameful.

Wholesome Levelling

Levelling continues to go well for our little worgen duo and they are almost ready to go to Outland. In a way I'm almost surprised by how well we are doing. We started out with nothing, on a server where we'd never played before... and while I had quite a blast levelling alts back in Cata, the old world revamp hasn't been without its issues. I had alts that outlevelled whatever content I was doing way too quickly, and where seeing everything go grey just sapped my motivation to continue. Trying to level professions as you go turned into a veritable nightmare - I'll never forget the human hunter I had who spent more time farming grey mobs for leather than actually doing quests, until I eventually abandoned her in frustration. More than one attempt at levelling as a duo died in the early levels when one character was a miner or herbalist while the other one wasn't, as the experience gains from gathering made it bloody impossible to comfortably stay around the same level.

We managed to avoid the latter this time around by having me go herbalist and my pet warrior going miner, but even that hasn't been completely without its issues, as I keep shooting ahead ever so slightly and had to train myself to ignore a vast majority of nodes to avoid making things even worse. If there's any rhyme or reason to how much experience you get from gathering from any given node, it's certainly not apparent to me. Within the same zone I would run into one "green" (slight chance to skill up) herb that gave me fifty XP per pick, and another one that gave me five hundred. Why? Who knows, it's not as if the latter were particularly rare or anything. Meanwhile the ores seemed to almost always be of the (roughly) fifty XP variety, which is why we got out of sync quite frequently.

On the plus side, we never really outlevelled our regular quests too badly, despite of the gathering experience, running every dungeon except the Deadmines at least once and doing the cooking and fishing dailies every day. We were always ahead of the levelling curve, coming into each new zone about five levels late, but by that point experience gains had generally dropped off to such a low level (without stopping completely) that we could comfortably continue completing quests without having them turn grey on us (with the possible exception of the first couple of zones we did - it's very hard to make it through all of Darkshore's over ninety quests without outlevelling any of them for example).

Due to us almost always working on green difficulty content, our levelling speed has been relatively sedate and keeping our professions up to scratch hasn't been too bad either. There are massive amounts of mining and herbalism nodes in the revamped old world, so our alchemy and blacksmithing haven't really been starved for materials (though Goldthorn is still hard to come by for how much of it you need to level up).

The secondary professions have been a bit trickier. For example you move through the "cloth tiers" quite quickly at first, and then end up getting nothing but Mageweave for twenty levels or so (or at least that's what it felt like), which makes keeping up with first aid a bit awkward. I expect that we'll be okay though, assuming that they haven't removed the Runecloth drops from early Outland or anything. Cooking is mostly fine as long as you make sure to save any and all meat drops you come across for later, as you'll often come across a particular kind of meat at the wrong level in respect to your cooking. Keeping up with your fishing also helps immensely of course.

Speaking of fishing, I was very surprised to see that you don't actually need a fishing pole to fish anymore now... and my first gut reaction was to be annoyed at yet another instance of unnecessary simplification of the game, but I soon found that I actually quite like this change. The "stick with a piece of string attached" graphical effect is quite cute, and it's nice not to have to worry about changing your equipment if you're only just stopping at a pool in passing. The fishing hat, pole and lures can still come out if I actually sit down at a dock to fish "properly" for ten minutes or longer.

Archaeology is the one profession I haven't been able to keep up with, as much as I would have liked to. My pet battling has also fallen behind, despite of my initial enthusiasm for it. I believe that neither would be impossible to keep levelled as you go along, but you'd have to focus heavily on travelling around to dig/challenge random pets and neglect other parts of the game in the process. I suppose Blizzard designed these features more as something to do at endgame than as an alternate way of levelling, but I suppose it's good that the option is there for those who want to be really hardcore about it.

We've only really been focused on completing all the quests in each zone we decided to tackle (we went for the Darkshore -> Ashenvale -> Stonetalon -> Desolace -> Feralas -> Thousand Needles -> Tanaris -> Un'Goro path) and doing all the dungeons. After my last post we only did Uldaman, Scholomance and Stratholme via the dungeon finder and had no more issues with unpleasant people in those runs. I had forgotten that Scholomance was also redone for Mists of Pandaria and was therefore a bit confused while trying to keep up with the new story in the usual dungeon finder rush, but it was just about bearable. Dire Maul, Razorfen Downs and Zul'Farrak we decided to tackle with just the two of us and had no issues with any of them, except for dying a few times to the guard captain in Dire Maul North, as his combination of fear and summoning of hard-hitting adds was still pretty painful at the level we went in.

Currently we're planning on finishing up our business in the old world with a quick dungeon finder run of Sunken Temple and an extended tour of Blackrock Mountain between just the two of us. Then it's off to the Dark Portal to see how the Outlands will treat us. As much as I loved the Burning Crusade, I remember the transition from Cata questing to Outland being pretty jarring the last few times I tried to level an alt.

Pondering profession dailies

The one thing that I've spent more time on than anything else since Cataclysm release is not exploring, instancing or working on my professions, it's doing the new cooking and fishing dailies in Orgrimmar. I currently do them on five characters per day, usually before getting started on anything else.

I'm really grateful for the new fishing daily in particular. I've talked about my personal history with fishing before and how it didn't really manage to hold my interest until I started doing the Shattrath fishing daily. The problem with that was that I still had to level to seventy without having much motivation to fish, and starting the profession from scratch every time one of my alts reached the Burning Crusade level cap was impractical and tedious.

With the new daily being available as early as level ten, it's easy to get into the profession right from the start and work on it on the side as you level up. You'll still gain levels much faster than you'll gain fishing skills, but with any luck you won't be as utterly unprepared for any later fishing endeavours as you used to be. Let's not forget that just completing the daily will grant you skill-ups as well, regardless of how much fishing you had to do for the quest (if any). This is particularly valuable in the later stretches of the profession when skilling up by even one point takes quite a lot of casts.

If you're rolling an alt on a new server, doing the fishing daily at level ten can also help your financial situation, as the random reward bag has a pretty high chance of containing a Swiftness Potion, which tend to go for at least one gold if not more on most servers. For a level eighty-five that's nothing, but for a level ten who is trying to pay for his training with nothing at his disposal but a few silvers worth of quest rewards, getting a whole gold or more from a simple daily is a nice boost.

The one negative thing I see about this new fishing daily is that it won't hold the interest of anyone at the level cap once they've maxed out their fishing, because there is nothing interesting about the item rewards themselves. A gold for a Swiftness Potion is about the most you can hope for, which is absolutely not worth the time it takes to do the daily for a level eighty-five character. If you're still after a Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat or missing one of the croc pets from Crocolisks in the City, you'll have to do the fishing dailies in Shattrath and Dalaran, both of which are rather out of the way for max-level characters now. I kind of hope that Blizzard will add a new max-level fishing daily somewhere in a later content patch.

The cooking daily also suffers from the problem of trying to appeal to both levellers and max-level characters at the same time. Mind you, I never had a lot of problems levelling cooking before, but with how fast and smoothly you zoom through the low levels these days, it's probably harder because you don't get to see as many zones with vendors selling recipes and won't kill as many random mobs for useful meat drops. There have also always been certain level ranges where it's harder to skill up than in others (250-300 for me, mostly). Either way, getting extra skill-ups from doing the daily helps.

However, the Chef's Awards for completing the daily are decidedly "meh" for low-level characters, as all the recipes that you can buy with them require a cooking skill of at least 450. While cooking skill isn't restricted by character level anymore, it's unlikely that you'll be far ahead of the "intended" skill range on your average alt, especially with the aforementioned factors making levelling cooking something that might not happen as easily on its own anymore. You can't save up awards for later either as they are capped out at the very low number of ten. You can buy the recipes early and build a stockpile in your bank for later, but that's not really ideal either. Your only alternative way to spend them is the Crate of Tasty Meat, either to stockpile meat instead of recipes, or to sell the contents for gold.

I don't want to scoff at that because it's certainly got its uses... but I just find it odd that the quest itself is very obviously designed for low-levels (as you won't face anything worse than a level 11 thief) but the rewards are very much aimed at high levels. As a result, putting their Chef's Awards to good use is a clunky process for lowbies, while characters at max level get encouraged to repeat a completely trivial level ten quest over and over for weeks in order to gather all the new cooking recipes. It just doesn't sit quite right with me.

In summary, I enjoy both of the new profession dailies and I think that they are fun as well as a great help when it comes to skilling up your secondary professions. However, I also think that trying to aim them at low-levels and characters at the level cap at the same time wasn't really the best idea ever and I would have preferred it if they had introduced separate dailies for different level ranges. Maybe in the next big patch.

Fishing and me

Today I'd like to talk about a slightly random subject for this blog: fishing. I believe that I have a somewhat strange relationship with this profession. I'm generally not interested enough in it to write about it, and I'm not even close to earning the Salty title (and not trying for it either), but four of my level eighties have their fishing skill maxed out and the three others are all working on getting to that point as well. People often tell me that I must be insane when I share this particular bit of information with them; I wonder why?

Interestingly enough my relationship with fishing didn't start out very well at all. I remember my little human paladin approaching Goldshire for the first time and immediately running into the local fishing trainer. I had read in the manual that fishing was a secondary profession so I figured that there was no harm in acquiring it. After asking in general chat where to find a fishing pole (since Mr Lee Brown is one of the few fishing-related NPCs that doesn't actually sell any fishing goodies himself and hasn't got a vendor next to him either) and successfully locating one at the local trade supplies vendor, I eventually gave the actual fishing a go. My biggest problem initially was figuring out how to actually use my fishing pole, because unlike with the other gathering professions there's nothing in the world to click on (I remember trying to click on the water so many times...) and unlike a mining pick or a skinning knife you actually have to equip the pole to use it. To this day I think that's something that's rather inconsistent and probably a bit of a deterrent to newbie fishermen. After some more inquiring in general chat I eventually managed to catch a couple of raw brilliant smallfish I believe... but I didn't persist for very long; after all there were more interesting things to learn and see.

I didn't do any fishing for a while after that, until I came across this quest in Redridge which asks you to acquire a couple of fish either by pulling them out of the lake yourself or taking them off the local murlocs. "Oh, I can fish," I thought to myself and started casting my line... except that almost every single time I seemed to have caught something, it got away. I was so confused and frustrated at the time, because again unlike the other gathering professions, fishing doesn't give you any kind of indication whether what you're trying to do is actually appropriate for your skill level. In fact, at the time I didn't even realise that lack of skill was my problem. I just thought that fishing required some insane reflexes to click on the bobber the instant it moved or else the fish got away. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I just resorted to the murloc-killing solution eventually.

When I rerolled as a night elf with two friends shortly afterwards, I pretty much treated fishing the same way as before. I trained the skill and got a couple of skillups early on, but I came into territory where I couldn't fish efficiently anymore way too soon (even with the slower levelling speed back then) and thus quickly gave up on it again. My friend was into reading guides before I even knew that people wrote them, so she made a point of keeping her fishing at the right level because it was useful, and I remember envying her ever so slightly as she stood there in Booty Bay actually catching something while I wasn't even allowed to cast my line. But fishing just wasn't that interesting!

The thing that brought the turnaround for me during BC was something shockingly simple: the introduction of the daily fishing quest from Old Man Barlo. Nothing to make something interesting like giving it an actual purpose in the game. I mean, I know that fishing was useful before, but it wasn't really obvious that fish was a great source of food, and anyway I wasn't raiding yet so I didn't even know that you were supposed to be buffed from eating. There's a big difference between some outside source telling me what I should do in the game because it's supposedly good, and actually seeing the effects for myself. I suspect that's also the reason why I'm so fond of gemming for socket bonuses even if the min-maxers frown upon it. Seeing that green text light up and tell me that I got an extra five spell power is just so much cooler than watching it stay greyed out and trying to content myself with the knowledge that I'm now naught-point-two percent more efficient according to some website.

But back to fishing. Having got into raiding myself by that point, I came to find that a lot of fish made for great buff food for a priest, and the fishing daily offered a great incentive to slowly increase my skill. Basically my problem when trying to level fishing in the past had often been that I just felt like I wasn't doing anything useful while standing around in the middle of nowhere, fishing up low-level fish just to get up skillups. The fishing daily however gave me a reason to work on it in small chunks at a time while also providing a tangible reward, even if the stuff I fished up beside the quest items was utterly useless. At first I started by just doing Crocolisks in the City whenever it came up (since it only requires a fishing skill of one), then I actually spent some time fishing up Deviate Fish in the Barrens to get my skill up high enough so that I could do the other fishing dailies as well. And from there it kind of snowballed as I naturally started to repeat the process by doing dailies on my alts once I had maxed out my main's skill.

In WOTLK Blizzard continued to make more changes that made fishing even more fascinating, such as the introduction of junk items that you fish up instead of just getting the "your fish has got away" message, allowing you to cast your line anywhere you want regardless of skill level, decreasing the cast time for each fish and the amount of catches needed to skill up, and adding another bunch of extra incentives such as the aforementioned achievement and a rare mount.

I'm actually not entirely sure where I'm going with this post. I think I just wanted to give Blizzard kudos for converting me to fishing when I really didn't find it all that interesting back when I first started playing. Supposedly they have more exciting changes planned for the profession in Cataclysm. Personally the only things that I'd like to see would be for them to bring it more in line with the other gathering professions mechanics-wise, as I already hinted above. If you don't have to equip a mining pick to mine or a skinning knife to skin, then you shouldn't have to equip a fishing pole to fish either. Along the same lines I'd love it if you could just right-click on any body of water to start fishing if you have the skill and a fishing pole in your bags. And there definitely needs to be some kind of indication of whether you're fishing in waters appropriate for your level. Sure, you can always just try and catch nothing but junk, but that's not massively helpful. Maybe some flavour text on the fishing pole that could change colour whenever you're near fishable water, using the same scale as the other skills (green for easy success, red for likely failure most of the time). Either way I'm looking forward to what they'll come up with.