Quick Fishing Guide / PSA

Community General Discussion
1

There is some confusion as to why people are getting tons of greys while fishing, so here are some clarifying points.

I leveled from 1-300 in roughly 3 hours, standing next to the trainer fishing in Dornogal. No pools were fished in.

This let me buy lures and vendor the endless greys from early fishing.

First, I tried to fish in Azh-kahet but got a bunch of greys and thought I must be doing something wrong.

  1. The fishing guide shows each zone. Notice how they’re greyed out? That’s because they have a recommended level to them. Assuming your skill is the main designation of drop rate here.

MOST IMPORTANT: People have reported taking 3x longer to get there, others 6 hours, via whatever their fishing spots were. I just did the spot right at the fishing trainer and never moved. The one thing they have in common is that they moved around the world, so if accurate it seems that the different zones / spots have different skill up chances relative to your skill. It’s just anecdote, but when you can use the pool the literal starting area fishing trainer is fishing in and “potentially” get to 300 in 3ish hours, I know what I’m doing on my alts.

  1. Go to the AH / craft the new engineering fishing rod and the new tailoring fishing hat. They give stats specific to this expansion. This should get you hundreds of perception. People with 0 perception are not going to have a good time.

  2. Get your lure on, and fish away. You will not get consistent fish for a while, see below for my breakpoints.

3b. You will get notifications / unlocks well under the skill that is “recommended” for each zone. Like 25+ skill under the recommended. No idea what the unlocks do, but you can get them all in that starting spot.

  1. Save up the skill and perception white fish until you have 10 of each. You want to have a big buff and save time by spamming throwing the fish back.

  2. For the blood fish, it seems like the tooltip is off. I was basically guaranteeing a fish when I got to 10 stacks but under 10 it would always fall off… so 100% seems to mean “guaranteed” and the other percentages are either bugged or buffing a miniscule amount and 100% is what’s bugged. Dunno. You can throw the fish in with seconds to go and it will up your stack by one and reset the timer, so don’t spam these. It may be dubious to use them at all here, because I know some pools require them. Once I would catch a rare blood fish at 10 stacks, the buff would go away.

  3. hotkey the throw ins and the fishing rod cast, also put the rod itself on your bar so you can apply the lure to that.

  4. you can throw the lure in and cast immediately, don’t wait for it, you want to keep the short buffs rolling.

  5. as high as I could go skill/perceptionwise I was not able to keep both buffs up indefinitely.

  6. There is a side progression which is huge, you can enchant your rod with a thing that lets you infuse peception and skill into it up to +100/100. None were for sale in my AH so I didn’t use this.

  7. Fishing in TWW has general pools where many different fish come out of them. So you want higher perception to tilt odds towards the better fish / away from other things.

Here is my list of breakpoints:

with 268 perception:
at 60ish skill i was catching a fish 2 out of 10 casts.
my first green was around 60

at 120skill i was catching a fish 3 out of 10 casts.
my first blue was around 100

250 skill and 90 more perception due to buffs
6/10 casts
4th blue

315 skill and keeping the buffs up
8/10 casts = fish

I ended up with 10 blues, 1 fishing derby token, 20 greens (including the bug zone fishing green)

That’s not a lot of fish for that time.

That said, I did one or two rounds of pools. The idea for pools is you keep the buffs rolling while flying around. No idea if a pool has a better chance for skill point or not based on zone, as above, BUT the most important things about pool hopping over open water is that you’re targeting “real fish” not “buff fish.” AND crucially getting the special pools that can buff your fishing / and have the chances of higher things.

I’ve confirmed the above across 4 characters/friends, so the anecdotes of “open water not giving ANY fish” are likely one or a combination of not having high enough perception and/or not having the zone unlocked / skill high enough.

9 Likes
2

Thank you for posting this, I’m gonna try some of these methods when the servers come back up!

3

Good info to have. I like what they’re doing with fishing this expansion. I’ve been enjoying it a lot so far.

1 Like
4

this sounds like an awful lot of work for a profession that used to be the simplest one in the game

2 Likes
5

Its seems like they were trying to nerf the AH resale of gathering skills. Noticed that not once I didn’t get any cloth while leveling and read somewhere that only tailors will gather cloth. This didn’t stop the gold farmers from operating day 2 of pre release though. Found at least 4 groups of them as I was passing through areas.

6

I just hopped on my pandaria fishing raft and cruised around the open water in the first zone hitting pools. 300 in no time. I did have the fishing pole from TWW.

7

I think it’s the opposite. Getting that amount of fish for that much time and effort will make the prices huge because it will basically require actively pool hopping for good yield of targeted fish.

darkmoon cards don’t drop for just anyone, limiting supply to the crafter. same with cloth, though both of those just eat up hyperspawn farmers professions so that’s a wash.

The nerf here is to dampen the value of standing in one spot botting fishing over flying around hopping pools. The bots are hurting themselves in the long run without gathering the enchant items, where a little bit of activity goes a long way.

In my whopping two loops of pools that I tested on, there seemed to be a TON of pools relative to past expansions which means AFKing at a single pool is less profitable. But the more sophisticated bots would run between multiples so this only really deletes the laziest of automations.

8

Got a point on that one. I don’t focus too much on professions. I gather enough to spend on repairs or buy something if I really want it. I am just happy that fishing isn’t completely pointless like DF and I don’t have to throw half my fish back to restock the stupid pools.

9

You, good sir, are in a very small minority imo. But I have a feeling you like what they’ve done to all the professions starting in DF. To me, they broke professions (something they have hated since Cata) and “forgot” to put them back together in a reasonable way.

I super appreciate the OP’s post, but… … … What a major bother and waste of time.

10

The blood fish thing definitely feels useless to use, I used 9 of them, reapplying the buff right before it ran out-45 minutes of going from 10% chance to 90% chance and I didn’t catch a single blood fish. Maybe it is indeed bugged?

And if the buff drops off after catching one of the good fish—10x of the blood buff fish= 260g
1x of the fish you catch with that buff—170g

At the moment, it seems dramatically more worthwhile just to sell any and all buff fish instead of using them.

1 Like
11

How do you check your perception?

12

What’s not to like?

  • Lots of different fish to catch, including rare fish
  • More uses for fish than ever before, with some buffing you just by catching them
  • Variety of pools to make pool hopping fun
  • The Mereldar fishing derby gives fishing it’s own new event with comestics, items, and recipes to work toward, PLUS the mount for the achievement
  • MoP Remix style stat buffs for your rod with the Algari Weaverline

Fishing before was too simple. There wasn’t enough variety in how you fish and what you can fish for in my opinion. DF was a step in the right direction with the special fish, but fishing in TWW is even better. Personally I would love even more depth and variety, so I hope they keep going in this direction.

My only disappointment with TWW fishing is that the new rod doesn’t have a new model. The TWW rod uses the same model as the DF rod… transmog for fishing rods when?