I've found a new entertaining time-waster in World of Warcraft: Fishing

Cafe Society
1

Who would have thought something so seemingly boring and tedious could be so fun?

My friend and I were questing in Westfall. Both of us were level 11, I was a priest and my friend was a warlock. Since both of our characters were inherently flimsy, and because of sheer greed, we were fighting (with great difficulty) monsters that were 3-5 levels stronger than us. Not surprisingly, we died…A LOT. We started to get agitated at each other, throwing out accusations and whatnot. So finally I got so frustrated with the grinding/questing I ran over to a nearby pond, got out my fishing rod and went fishing. My friend calmed down and fished next to me. Talk about therapy! Fishing was a great way to relieve the frustration from trying to find item X, or kill 15 genericmonsters. I was so successful in fishing, in fact, I got enough fishing skill to get ‘journeyman’ fishing. So I went back to Goldshire and trained in Journeyman fishing. Now I could catch even MORE fish! :smiley:

I didn’t think much of it at the time, because when I’m playing with my best friend, it’s not really fair to spend all this time fishing when he wants us to team up to take on areas neither of us can solo. However, after a while, he had to go on an errand, and he’d be gone for an hour. So while he left, I did some more fishing in Westfall, this time out in the ocean (granted it took a while to find an area that wasn’t swarming with crabs and murlocs). I spent the hour killing time by fishing. I was amazed at how much fish I caught- 127 in one hour! :eek: As you can imagine, I maxed out Journeyman fishing pretty darn quick!

Unfortunately my main lament is that apparently in order to train in Expert and Artisan fishing, I need to get a book in Booty Bay. But to get there, I have to travel through areas that have level 35+ monsters. Supposedly I could buy the book at auction houses, but it goes for 3-5 gold, which is far out of reach of a lowbie priest’s pocketbook :frowning:

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So, what kind of stuff do you get? I would imagine fish that you can use to regenerate health like other foods. I had heard you can get items. Are they any good, and how often do you get them?

3

I do a lot of fishing, doing alchemy I need 2 types of fish for some of my better selling potions [water breathing and a boost to fire cast spells] so I have already made the run to Booty Bay for the book [one gold cost there]

I use the cosmo UI, and it has a nice fishing macro - all you do is right click to cast, and it auto casts after you collect a fish. I can get a fair amount of fish in an hour, and since the big fishing nerf the only objects I have caught are crates from teh venture company that have blasting powder inside=( but before the nerf I could be assured of a green item every 50 or so fish [usually some sort of boots or a weapon]

I like getting the different types of fish, and get recipes for them so i can cook them=) The higher level recipes have stats in addition to the healing properties of the foods=)

Hmm, we could always hold a virtual fishing contest, everybody decide on a particular zone, and keep track of everything you catch in a 1 hour period, and report it in a thread=)

4

Do you get boots?

5

Well, if I can’t get green items to disenchant, I’m not going to bother training it. I was hoping the nerf wouldn’t be that bad. :frowning:

6

Ah, someone else has gotten addicted to tradeskilling in an MMORPG… Still, it’s fun, isn’t it? :wink:

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I used to fish all of the time on Ultima Online, having created no less than 4 grandmaster fishermen. In UO fishers would pull up sea serpents carrying loot such as special fishing nets, treasure maps, and SOS bottles which led to coordinates where one could fish up a sunken treasure chest.

Fishing was a fun pastime, relaxing, occasionally dangerous (especially when using a special fishing net and pulling up a kraken :eek: ), and not too bad a money maker, plus the seas of Sosaria had a lot less lag than camped dungeon spawn :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s good to see another MMORPG making use of the fishing skill :slight_smile:

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It’s too bad about the fishing nerf…I got into the game post-nerf so I guess I don’t know what I was missing :stuck_out_tongue: but my friend told me that he would often get green items. He’s kind of lamenting it now because he’s an enchanter and he’s ALWAYS looking for green items to disenchant for essences and dusts. However, I’m having fun despite the nerf. I like the idea that you can catch a ‘big fish’ and put it in your off-hand to show off to people :smiley: Fishing contests would be a lot of fun, especially since they reduced the sell price of fish by 90% :eek: I myself will probably save the fish I catch until I get cooking recipies that require them, or in the (remote) hopes they restore the value of fish to at least a bit more than it is now…I could sell the fish when the sale price goes up.

Something else I realized- I still need to be level 20 to learn Master Fishing anyway…so getting the book now is kind of pointless. Chances are I’ll get the book from my non fishing oriented character (my primary) and mail it to my fisherman Priest. My Priest is also an Alchemist, and I was pleased to catch Oily Blackmouths in a short span of time. Don’t have the recipe that calls for them, but when I DO get it, I’ll have plenty of em on hand to make potions/reagents.

Aruvqan, how have you been doing auctioning off potions? I’m a journeyman alchemist, and right now I really don’t see a market for the potions I make. Lowbies seldom bid on lowbie gear because you find it easily enough in chests. Right now I’m not finding enough mageroyal to make mana potions in sufficient quantity- my priest and my friend’s warlock guzzle those suckers down like there’s no tomorrow :stuck_out_tongue: I think we need to be admitted to MA, manapotionaholics annonymous :frowning: .

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BTW, supposedly Blizzard nerfed fishing because people were using bots (or they were afraid people would) since fishing is a relatively simple task- you don’t have to move, all you have to do is cast, loot, rinse, repeat. To counter this Blizzard made it so that you couldn’t really turn a profit from fishing, the NPCs do not give you much money for the fish you catch (nor the dishes you make with said fish) only a few fish (oily blackmouth, firefin, mabye a few others) are used in other tradeskills/ingredients, and you rarely get a non-fish catch (messages in bottles, crates). If you go on the WoW forums, you can see the level of dissatisfaction with Blizzard’s solution.

I don’t see why they couldn’t just make it so that if you stay still for longer than X minutes/hours, it triggers some sort of monster spawn or something. That way someone using a bot will get killed and cannot farm fish for hours at a time, but an actual player playing the game could shift over a bit or something. But wrecking the fishing economy is not the way to do it.

On the same note, while I share the community’s despair at the fishing nerf, I seem to be one of the more outspoken members of the community in terms of tradeskilling for FUN. It seems like 75% of tradeskillers are nothing more than profiteers- if you can’t turn a profit doing something then it’s a waste of time and ‘stupid’. If you want to make money doing something, fine, but I’d like to think that there are enough ways to make money in WoW that you don’t have to be a savvy businessman/woman to get by in the game. People that make/collect things from their tradeskills for sheer fun (i.e. “check out this neat herb I found”, or “Let me enchant your armor for free so I can build up my enchanting skill” help make the game feel more immersive than price wars at the auction house.

10

UO had the same problem with unattended macroers fishing up tons of loot, so they had sea serpents spawn on some casts, with the good loot in their corpses when you killed them.

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The problem with that is that it would be trivially easy to make a bot that would get around the change you just mentioned. In fact, determining automatically whether a given character is played by a human or a bot is a very difficult problem in general. It’s much easier to just remove the reward for making the bot.

12

Are you horde or alliance?

I play alliance, and have noticed a few things…

lower level - under 20, call it:
nobody herbscrounges in Dun Morough. If you start at iron forge and go counter clockwise around the road in the zone [towards gnomeregan] right at the bottom og the long road down from the city there are 3 dependable spawns of silverleaf. About gnomeregan if you cut towards the lake you can start finding peaceblossom. Further along, say after the frostmane hold area you can find your first earthroot. If you head towards the quarry not along the road, but along the southeastern rim of the zone you start finding earthroot. Head into Loch Moden, and you start to find mageroyal, bruiseweed and briarthorn, and the swiftthistle that you can get from either briarthorn or mageroyal when you harvest it=). Careful near the excavation site, there are 3 horde NPCs that will eat you alive, and then further along on the east side of the loch are some nasty ogres.

Head over to Darkshore, there is more mageroyal, peacebloom, briarthorne, silverleaf and earthroot. Not so much bruiseweed though=( Moving into Ashenvale, you get more briarthorn, kingsblood, wild steelbloom, and a little bruiseweed. FOr grave moss you have to go to duskwood, to Ravens Hill cemetary. Watch out for the undead, there is a level 35 elite that is plain nasty=(.

Stranglekelp is a major pain to find. THere are 2 nerfed spawns in darkshore, but in menethil harbor/baradin bay there is a good trio of spawns but there are level 21-25 crocolisks there. Another good pair of spawns is in mistral lake in ashenvale, and some in the BFD instanced zone.

I find that potions of protection sell dependably for 20 silver each, waterbreathing for 5 silver, shadow protection for 10 silver, firepower for 10 silver, healing for 2 silver each, mana for 5 silver each. I go for serious volume if you couldnt tell. I am getting known where people will send me whispers to see if i am making potions. I usually set aside an hour or 2 a day to forrage for ingredients, and always collect when i am otherwise adventuring.

I have to admit that I have all 10 slot bags because my backpack is full of herbs - 1 stack each firefin oil, bllackmouth oil, stranglekelp, bruiseweed, kingsblood, grave moss, wild steelbloom, mageroyal and briarthorn, and a stack each of empty and leaded vials. I keep a stack each of healing and mana potions for my use there also=) I can pretty much whip up what people need on the run in a pinch=)

I have a bankmule for my herbs, so any i get over 1 stack I mail off to her, and have a ton of herbs in stock for making to auction=) I guess I make about 5-7 gold a week just doing potions, which keeps my 5 characters in goodies, and also my husbands 2 characters=)

I have 5 characters so I can do all the tradeskills, so my green stuff and cloth go to the rogue for breakdown and sewing, herbs go to margali, metal goes either to my pally/smith or my warlock/engineer and leather stuff goes to my hunter. I have a mule for herbs and one for gems, because many different skills need the gems and it is easier to just keep them on one bank mule=)

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I want to know what kind of potions you are auctioning! And what level is your alchemist? I guess some people are better at this than others- Right now I’m having fun doing a little of everything. The problem is that I spread out my play time doing so many different things (Questing, grinding, interacting with other PC’s, messing with other tradeskills, staring at my talen trees trying to figure out what I want to spec in :stuck_out_tongue: ) that I don’t really excel or see much success in any particular aspect of my character :frowning:

Not that it really matters to my alchemist right now, at this point my potion supply is limited to the herbs I find. I have a human priest, so I’ve been in Stormwind/westfall/lakeridge. Like you, I have several alts with different tradeskills (along with my friend). The mule alt is an interesting concept, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard cracks down on it, after all, that is what the bank is for. Don’t go driving up the price of postage, Aruvqan! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I find that potions of protection sell dependably for 20 silver each, waterbreathing for 5 silver, shadow protection for 10 silver, firepower for 10 silver, healing for 2 silver each, mana for 5 silver each. I go for serious volume if you couldnt tell. I am getting known where people will send me whispers to see if i am making potions. I usually set aside an hour or 2 a day to forrage for ingredients, and always collect when i am otherwise adventuring.

Am currently stalled at 200 alchemy, I am capped until I get to level 40 :mad: sigh 9 more levels…

I am in game for about 10 hours a day, mrAru is in game from about 0830 until 1230 when he leaves for work…and I am in game [except for a job interview I am very hopeful about] from 1230 until he gets home at midnight, I break for lunch around 1500 and again to start dinner for when mrAru gets home. They can’t restrain me from sending stuff to an alt via mail, they have no interest in mules…they will not tolerate macrofarming [nor will I, I report people when I catch them.]

Today was a typical day, I logged in and ran around gathering herbs and puttering around for about 90 minutes until my normal hunting partner logged in and we got a group up for gnomeregan. Today I got as my cut 3 lesser moonstones, an iridescent pearl, a malachite, a jade, some cloak of rare/blue, some cloth boots, also rare/blue [soulbound=( so they vendored for 70 silver] and an axe that was green. Those are all in the auction house. I also got about 20 or 30 odds and ends of vendor trash[ oozes, broken arrows, skulls…the usual stuff] and made about 70 silver on all that. Of course I hust blew another 4 gold on a magecloth bag [14 slots, making me have my 16 slot backpack, 2 magecloth bags, and 2 assorted quest bags of 10 slots each. I logged for a long lunch, and logged back in and did another round in gnomeregan with some other friends and made a similar haul of stuff, made back the 4 gold in potions I had on auction and am getting dinner started [sauerbraten, gherkinsalat, will make semmel when the dough is finished rising, and am making spaetzel when mrAru gets home.]

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Hi folks, TeenSthrnAccent is working on upgrading our computer soon so he can install the World of Warcraft he bought today. He’s says he’s paying the subscription and threating me to a character or two.

I enjoyed the old Warcraft II game, but I know enough to know that I’m going to be way out of my league with the new game. I only played it on the cd and never played in the big group online games before, so I’m subscribing to the current threads so I can be learning off you guys.

First tip gleaned: Try fishing!

First question: What is grinding? (Doing a quest?)

Thanks!

16

“Grinding” in the MMORPG world typically refers to staying in one spot killing things to gain XP to get up a certain number of levels. For example, if there’s something you really really want that you have to be level 30 to do, and you’re level 26, you might find a spot where a whole pile of juicy monsters spawn and spend the next 15 hours “grinding” xp to get to level 30 as quickly as possible.

I really don’t recommend doing that in WoW, though. There’s so many interesting quests and it’s all so fun that to just grind XP is kind of missing the point.

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Besides, if you do all teh available quests in whatever your area is, you can level pretty quickly anyway. I have a habit once I have gone to my first major ‘quest/spell’ for my class, I go to one of the other alliance starting zones and run through their level 1-10 [or whatever] quests, and repeat in the 3d starting zone. Gives great faction, and you can usually crank through them fast because the monsters are very low compared to your level=) I have noticed that it has given me a discount on the grifon ride between ironforge and stormwind=) 40 copper instead of 50 copper=) I am honored in all 3 of my alliance cultures. Now working on goblins.

Usually what I do is go to a level appropriate zone, crank through the quests, hop over to the other alliance zones of the same level and do quests=) works out nicely. I dont worry too much if the reward is too low, anything soulbound will still sell to a vendor=)

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Shoulda been a Tauren. I can get to 225 before I hit the level cap.

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Just whipped off 2 levels today, got in a killer group for 7 hours, made 8 gold and a serious amount of xp. Thank god for the little mailbox in gnomeregan instanced zone=) <happy dance> everything went to my bank/auctionhouse mule=)

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Dumb question (I don’t play WoW. Warcraft was OK but I liked Starcraft a lot better, and I’ve spent literally weeks, probobly months over the past 6 or 8 months playing Generals:Zero Hour. Now, WoS, THAT would be something!)

Don’t the fish spoil over time?