So, this is the third one of these I’ve done. The first two times, I found the three required fish within 10-15 mins.
This time, I spent literally the entire hour searching, and only managed to find 2/3 fish. I couldn’t fish the Trophy Queen’s Lurefish, despite finding at least 7-8 Royal Ripples. The Trophy Arathor Hammerfish also took noticably many more attempts than the previous two weeks to find - I didn’t get it until about 40 mins in.
This was one of the most compounding miserable experiences I’ve had in WOW in years. Here’s why this is so awful:
RNG piled on RNG. It is RNG to get the fishing pool you want, and it is RNG whether you will fish up the specific fish you want. Royal Ripples especially seem to share a spawn with other pools and are very hard to find.
When you manage to find a pool, you are competing with other players. Why in this day and age are fishing pools shared with other players. It is beyond infuriating to FINALLY find a pool, to start fishing, only to have two other people immediate zoom in next to you and use it as well, leaving you with only 1-2 casts before it disappears. This happened a LOT this time, and it just makes the stress of the experience worse.
The timer. WHY does there need to be a timer on this. Why couldn’t it just be a buff for the day, that would make the RNG and competition for pools just a bit more bearable. But no, you literally have a timer counting down the minutes under the quest to make you increasingly more stressed out as you zoom around the map in increased desperation.
You can’t get the buff again, even if you abandon the failed quest and try it again. It won’t even let you spend another hour trying again (not that I would want to). I failed my quest, and out of curiousity flew back to the quest giver hoping that she had an option to re-buff me if I abandoned it. I got the quest again, but nope, no buff.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt the game so aggressively wasting my time. I guess I got a few Mereldar Derby Marks that I fished up but not anywhere near the amount if I completed the quest. Whether you fish up extra ones of those seems to be RNG as well, yay.
I doubt I’ll play this quest again unless changes are made, which really sucks because I saw this as a cool addition to what is otherwise a pretty neglected profession, and I’m a collector and want the Derby Marks to buy items. I’ve got a fairly high tolerance for grinds in this game, but this just sucks.
Time based RNG upon RNG isn’t fun and shouldn’t exist. But here it is.
To put this in a greater perspective, due to the nature of the rewards they have placed on this vendor for this time limited upon time limited upon RNG based “event”.
You will need a combined total of 1,140 Mereldar Derby Mark’s to get all the items on this.
Now if you win the derby getting the quest reward of 25 marks, and lets say get 10 marks on top of it from the RNG based fishing you’re being asked to endure. You will need 32.5 weeks or about 8 months. Now thats only if you win.
Now lets say you’re unlucky like me, and only get those 10 RNG based currency. I will now need to endure attempting this event 114 times at the maximum. Or for the next 2 years. How fun. How gracious of them. What a lovely event
Seriously, why does this fishing derby require very specific fish on top of needing very specific fishing pools to get those fish?
This isn’t fun. I’ve been flying around for the past hour attempting to do this and I still have yet to find the final “Queen’s lurefish” because this mythical fishing pool doesn’t seem to exist. – Was not able to finish the quest. Yet another week of missing out on getting the rewards needed to get these cosmetics.
As a better fix for all players:
This quest, because it is time constrained to 1 day per week. Meaning you only have 52 attempts per year should be an all day quest. It should stay with only needing 3 fish, none of which should be ultra rare or have a low percentage drop rate, and should be available for you to complete all day. From 00:00 to 23:59
I went for the mount this evening and got very close. I caught all but the Specular Rainbowfish and the Arathor Hammerfish (the Blood in the Water pools were all very occupied and I only found one to fish from within the buffed hour…no Hammerfish).
I’ll get it next week. It’s only the 2nd week. These things are supposed to feel like they have actual stakes. It sucks. I am disappointed, as well.
I bought my Ghoulfish Delight recipe and slumped off in a huff for a few minutes, but there is always next Saturday to hit it again and get the mount.
You catch the currency quite frequently in treasure pools. I had 12 of them before ever going into the derby just randomly. The derby weekly 10 or 25 reward isn’t the only way to get this currency.
It’s still a slow grind, but that’s clearly by design. It’s just not as slow as it might first appear. You can supplement actual derby winnings with the random coin drops from fishing schools. All schools have a chance to drop them, but the treasure pools are naturally a higher drop rate.
I’ll get it next week. It’s only the 2nd week. These things are supposed to feel like they have actual stakes. It sucks. I am disappointed, as well.
A fishing derby is meant to have stakes? I think that’s a misread of the audience for this activity, and even if it was intended, making people fail a quest and feel like they’ve wasted an entire hour to reinforce the ‘stakes’ is out of line with how the rest of the game works.
You catch the currency quite frequently in treasure pools. I had 12 of them before ever going into the derby just randomly. The derby weekly 10 or 25 reward isn’t the only way to get this currency.
Yes, but these are even more rare to find than Royal Ripples, and spending time fishing from those would be a trade-off in limited time prioritising searching for the actual pools you need that will return a higher number of Marks.
It’s still a slow grind, but that’s clearly by design. It’s just not as slow as it might first appear. You can supplement actual derby winnings with the random coin drops from fishing schools. All schools have a chance to drop them, but the treasure pools are naturally a higher drop rate.
Azerothian Archives was a slow grind, but it happened semi-frequently and was repeatable, and didn’t make you feel like you failed something. Nah, this will be beyond slow.
The mount is a really good one, and if it were easy to get on the first go, it wouldn’t mean very much or feel very good to win it.
It was bad luck on the royal ripple, but in future, the key is to fish out the calm ripple pools b/c they share a spawn. If you come in late, all the early people fish out the royal ripples and they end up with a zone full of calm ripple pools.
If you fish the calm ripples and wait, some will respawn as royals. That’s the strategy. Also, get a hammerfish lure an use it on a Blood in the Water pool. It will help ensure victory on that one. The Rainbowfish are also quite rare, so a rainbowfish lure would give an assist.
I purchased the Ghoulfish Delight recipe after my failure this evening, and that increases fishing skill by 30 and gives a chunk of perception. That will also help next week.
You’re welcome, thank you for taking the time to read it and comment on this very important decision of fishing being rng. Never mind all the things you can do to increase your fishing and the chance to get certain fish its better to just write a essay saying. Wah Wah fishy no no droppy wah
You get 25 marks from catching the 3 target fish within the hour time limit
You get one mark from each unique fish type you catch. This is automatic and does not require turn in. This is not actually random. Try to get as many different fish types as you can.
You can fish in ANY zone that has the pools you need. This lowers competition
You can fish up Warbound currency token that convert to Marks. I got mine from the salvage/flotsam type pools.
The hard one this week is the Queen’s Lurefish from the relatively rare Royal Ripple pools in Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet. There is a way to increase chances by throwing in other fish.
Wowhead has it covered here for today
Side Note: Don’t forget to finish the Darkmoon Faire on your alts for quest XP and Profession Knowledge points!
Yeah, they changed something this week. I also couldn’t get that fish as well and had no problem in the other weeks. Luckily I have the mount so this event can rot if they don’t revert what they nerfed.
Did you throw any Regal Dottybacks into the water while fishing from Royal Ripples? They increase your chances of catching a Queen’s Lurefish. I caught 3 of them from my first Royal pool after using a Regal Dottyback.
It sounds like a lot of people may not know about this trick. It makes catching a Queen’s Lurefish easy once you find a Royal Ripple.
If the journey is long and unfun, don’t do it.
I noped out as soon as I figured out how long this would take.
Maybe the rewards get tossed into the Trading Post, or maybe they’ll buff the rates or whatever, but as of now, it’s better to treat this as either “nonexistent” or “downtime” “content”.
Yeah, this one sucked - full stop. I completed the last two weeks of the derby, and I wouldn’t mind failing if it felt like I had committed grievous errors or floundered off. However, this was not the case, the game simply wouldn’t allow me to be successful despite my best efforts. Felt awful, and watching that timer wear down was shockingly stressful in what has otherwise been a fantastic expansion experience.
