Professions in 3.1 – Fishing
The 3.1 patch will bring a lot of good news for WoW fishermen, and I’m really happy with most of the changes. This profession was in need of some help lately, and Blizzard apparently heard the call.
This is the second post the 3.1 changes series – you can check the whole category on the right sidebar, but don’t expect any serious math from me. And now, on to the changes!
The time needed to catch fish has been reduced.
From 20 seconds channeling to 10 seconds channeling. Quick and easy way to speed up fishing.
You can now fish anywhere, regardless of skill. Every catch has the potential for fishing skill gains, but you are likely to catch worthless junk in areas that are too difficult for your skill.
Catching worthless junk (that sells for a bit of copper/silver to the vendor) instead of just failing. Failing to catch anything was just a huge annoyance, good that they’re getting rid of that. A lot of people tends to disagree here – but I’ll be honest, after the first character on the realm, I’ve never leveled fishing again on the other ones – it’s just too much of a pain in the butt to do it. This change (as well as the next two below) will change it and make it not so annoying.
Players are no longer required to do the Nat Pagle, Angler Extreme quest to gain Artisan fishing. The quest now offers a special superior-quality fishing pole instead. If you already completed the quest, you can visit Nat Pagle in Dustwallow Marsh to receive this new fishing pole.
Not bad. Usually I’m not so cool with removing the class or profession quests, but if the quest is just changing its reward, then it’s fine. Running around the whole world just to learn Artisan level was surely annoying, and the new fishing pole is welcome. It will give 25 bonus fishing, which is just awesome for this level. For comparison – the Kalu’ak pole gives 30, and the Outland one from Terokkar – 20 fishing skill.
You no longer need to learn fishing from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.
Continuing on the change above – you won’t have to chase books and uncommon fish around Azeroth to get you fishing to the next level. I already did that the hard way once, nice to see I won’t have to do it ever again if I decide to pick up fishing on another character.
New fishing dailies are now offered from Marcia Chase in Dalaran City!
We’ve already seen the new dailies in the earlier PTR patch update. There are 5 of them, they require you to fish stuff all around Northrend, and the quest giver works just like the Outland one – giving one random daily a day. It’s about time they added something like this – and I have to say the mechanics of the dailies are fun.
Also, the dailies have quite nice rewards – some epic gems, new fishing poles, a little crab pet, random highly-priced vendor junk…
You can now fish in Wintergrasp, and the fishin’ is good! A new clam, the Giant Darkwater Clam, can be obtained by fishing in Wintergrasp. This mighty clam has a greatly increased chance to drop pearls, and yields up to five times the regular amount of clam meat.
And here we have another thing to get me ganked to hell and back. How cool is that! ;] The Wintergrasp area will give fish that are needed for Fish Feasts (that’s Nettlefish, Musselback Sculpins and Glacial Salmons) in addition to the new type of Clams. Right now, getting materials for a stack of Fish Feasts takes about an hour, and after the patch it could take a bit less.
A new (and very rare) special mount can now be caught from Northrend fishing pools.
The mount was previewed lately on MMO-Champion, and I have to say one thing – I will have that even if it takes me a month of fishing to get. :]
A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man ‘O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food.
And the last change – for a while the Borean Man ‘O Wars were useless, and now you will be able to learn a recipe for them from your local helpful cooking trainer. Not too bad.