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The OverAchiever: More Accomplished Angler

Allison Robert
Updated ·6 min read

This week we'll finish our look at the Accomplished Angler meta-achievement. As with all matters concerning WoW fishing, El's Anglin is your best friend here, and more particularly their page on fishing-related achievements (which also addresses a few we don't cover here, as they're not part of the Accomplished Angler meta).

Continuing from our previous article on the first set of Accomplished Angler achievements:


The Old Gnome and the Sea

Apparently someone at Blizzard is a Hemingway enthusiast. At any rate, this achievement's easy as pie, and you'll get it after fishing successfully from any pool of fish in the game (although it does have to be fish -- it can't be the wreckage pools you need for The Scavenger). You can get this doing either of the following achievements --




Outland Angler

All of these pools are fairly easy to find:

Northrend Angler

As with its Outland counterpart, Northrend Angler requires you to fish in all of the available fish pools located in Northrend. However, its waters play host to a much more varied bunch, and you'll spend more time hunting these down. Keep in mind that these aren't the only place to find these fish, but they are the places you'll find their corresponding pools:

  • Borean Man O' War School: These can be fished up from most coastal waters in Northrend, although the easiest place to find them will probably be off the coast in Borean Tundra.

  • Deep Sea Monsterbelly School: Interestingly, you can only find these pools among the icebergs you'll see floating around the Frozen Sea, south off the coasts of Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. Hop on a flying mount and start nosing around them -- one should pop up eventually.

  • Dragonfin Angelfish School: The inland waters and rivers in Dragonblight.

  • Fangtooth Herring School: Inland waters in Howling Fjord.

  • Glacial Salmon School: Inland waters in Grizzly Hills.

  • Glassfin Minnow School: The small river running through Crystalsong Forest.

  • Imperial Manta Ray School: Coastal waters in Northrend -- they share spawn points with Borean Man O' Wars, so you'll probably run across one of these while looking for the latter.

  • Moonglow Cuttlefish School: As with Deep Sea Monsterbellies, you'll only find these pools spawning in Frozen Sea territory off the southern Northrend coastline. Keep hunting among the icebergs and you should find both.

  • Musselback Sculpin School: Inland waters in Borean Tundra (Lake Kum'uya is usually full of sculpin pools).

  • Nettlefish School: Inland waters in Sholazar. Seriously, you can't throw a rock in this zone without hitting a pond or river stuffed with these pools.

Master Angler of Azeroth

To be frank, I feel uncomfortable offering advice on how to complete this because I have yet to win either contest. I'll grant that I've only been trying intermittently since Wrath hit (weekend afternoons are usually a bad time for me to play), but this achievement continues to elude me.

Given the heavy competition involved for both contests on most servers, this is generally considered the most difficult achievement needed for the meta -- and there's a big dose of luck involved for both. El's Anglin has a page on strategy and information for both contests that I've been using, and I highly recommend reading it, trying for both contests each week if you still need Master Angler, and when necessary making burnt offerings to the RNG gods.

Other than that, I'd rather not offer personal advice that just hasn't worked for me, and I've been kicking around the idea of devoting a special edition of OverAchiever just to the fishing contests alone.

Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box

This is easier than it was in Burning Crusade due to diminished competition for the Highland Mixed Schools, but -- as with so many of the achievements required for the Accomplished Angler meta -- there's a depressing amount of RNG involved.

Every time you fish in one of the Highland Mixed Schools in Terokkar (located in the ponds and lakes only accessible via flying mounts -- Jorune, Ere'Noru, and Blackwind), you have a very, very small chance to fish up a Mr. Pinchy (and no, he can't be caught anywhere else in the game; you're stuck in Terokkar). The item grants you a "wish" every 2 days, if by "wish" you mean right-clicking him to get what is usually a somewhat useless or outright hostile result.

The five potential results?:

  1. Mr. Pinchy's Blessing: This is, in essence, a free "flask" granting you increased health for 2 hours. I'm straining to remember whether this stacks with other flask effects.

  2. Package of potions: While this was once 5 Super Mana Potions and 5 Super Healing Potions, a Wowhead commenter's noted that it seems to have scaled up to Runic Mana and Runic Healing Potions for Wrath. He/she even got 5 Speed Potions too. What I'm not sure about is whether these are now the pre-set results or whether the rewards are scaled to the fisher's level, but at least there's a good chance that the potions you'll get will be useful at 80.

  3. Furious Mr. Pinchy: You may very well make a "wish" and wind up with a hostile (albeit low-health) mob on your hands. Regrettably, he doesn't drop anything, but at least he's easy to kill.

  4. Benevolent Mr. Pinchy: Or you may get the version of a giant Mr. Pinchy that's a guardian pet. He'll only stick around for 10 minutes and his damage is lousy, but it's funny as hell.

  5. Magical Crawdad Box: Wonder of wonders, you may finally get this -- and it's the noncombat pet that you're really after.

In your quest to get the little pet, you're going to be fishing out these pools a lot, and -- because the actual noncombat pet is only a 1 in 5 chance for each of the 3 wishes you get (with each Mr. Pinchy taking 6 days to "wish" through) -- it's just RNG piled on more RNG. There are players who have managed to get a Mr. Pinchy pet within a day's worth of fishing, and then there are others (like me) who went insane trying to get it. I tanked my way through Burning Crusade and thus fished in the Highland Mixed Schools a lot to make Spicy Crawdads, and it took me the better part of a year to get a Mr. Pinchy.

All I can say is, good luck.


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