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Mists of Pandaria Beta: The Angler's Wharf makes the perfect fishing hideaway
Fishing is both my favorite and least favorite WoW profession. I love sitting lazily around, watching a movie and click-fishing. That seems weird, but it's very relaxing to me, considering you don't have to move as much as you do in archaeology. But I digress. Mists of Pandaria is introducing a brand new faction, The Anglers, and their adorable fishing village to the new continent. This new hub features a cast of fishing characters, their village, daily quests, and a faction to work on with, presumably, rewards. We like rewards. The ever-angler, El, previewed the new fishing village, showing off the gorgeous buildings and the fun cast of characters. I'm sure that we'll get to know these guys pretty well over the course of the expansion, since we'll be hanging out with them on a daily basis. Well, at least I will be. In fact, hopefully Blizzard sees these new little hideaways as places players want to set their hearthstone in order to get out in the world rather than be cooped up in the capital city. If this little village has some cool features, like a secret bank or something, I might just never leave.
Patch 4.3 changes make leveling fishing a breeze
Do you loathe leveling the fishing profession? Can't stand spending hours casting in pools? According to El over at El's Professions, there was a change put through in patch 4.3 that nobody noticed, one that will make your plight a little easier. In patch 4.3, the number of catches required to level fishing from 1 to 525 has been roughly halved. In addition, the number of catches per skill point above 300 fishing and especially above 450 also seems to have had an adjustment -- one point of skill can take between one and 13 casts to gain. El has put together a new skill-up table over on El's Extreme Anglin', but be warned, the pattern may not be fully understood just yet. El is welcoming any observations over on the El's Extreme Anglin' forums for fishing enthusiasts. At any rate, if you've been putting off picking up your fishing pole and finishing off those skill points, now would be an excellent time to start fishing! Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
15 Minutes of Fame: Fishing for insights with El's Extreme Anglin'
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Admit it: You thought the person behind the curtain at El's Extreme Anglin', the web's preeminent World of Warcraft fishing resource, was female, didn't you? Just one look into the soulful blue gnomish eyes of El, blinking innocently from atop her guides or curled up at the feet of the intrepid Nat Pagle, beckoning you through your first steps as an Azerothian angler ... You were hooked. You're not alone -- most players seem to have bonded with El's friendly female face. In reality, the blogger behind El (and El's Extreme Anglin') is none other than British analyst, consultant, writer, and thinker Tim Howgego. He's known for his penetrating blogging about public transport policy, market development, the application of internet-related technology -- oh, and of course, game design and WoW fishing. "To be honest, El is a lot more interested in catching fish," he confesses. "Tim is more interested in patterns of human behavior." Whatever the focus, it's wildly successful. El's Extreme Anglin' Googles in as the top result for searches on "fishing guide" -- that's just plain "fishing guide," nothing to do with the World of Warcraft. In a unique twist on our usual interviews, 15 Minutes of Fame managed to catch up with both Tim and El this week to talk shop about fishing. (Does that mean this is really 30 Minutes of Fame? 225 Minutes of Fame? No, wait -- with a gnome the size of El, perhaps it's more like 18 Minutes of Fame.) Between El's sagacious gnomish observations on Azerothian angling and Tim's insights into game development, there's something in this interview for everyone.
The Queue: My pet is adorable too
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Mat and Gray aren't the only ones with adorable pets. I can play that game, too! Look at that Roomba up there. It's so cute, what with its glowing cycloptic eye, its massive, unyielding grin and its manic, electronic chittering. Just adorable. lazymangaka asked: What is the most efficient way to grind guild reputation?
Fishing with explosives
The goblin fishing style is a reality. By way of El's Anglin', we've learned that you can indeed fish with dynamite in the World of Warcraft. EZ-Thro Dynamite to be specific. Watch the video embedded above to see it in action. There are some very strange limitations, however. Only EZ-Thro Dynamite (of both flavors) works for this. Other Engineering explosives do not! You must be between levels 10 and 19 to loot the items blowing up a fishing pool creates, no higher and no lower. Despite this level limitation, some of the items that come out of this are Burning Crusade era items such as Jaggal Pearls. Booze makes up most of the other items. How long has this been in the game? We're not sure. Judging by the quality of the items "dropped" by blowing up fishing pools, we would guess it was a Burning Crusade addition. If that's true, has this gone unnoticed for 2-4 years? That seems unlikely, but it's a definite possibility.
The OverAchiever: More Accomplished Angler
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 --
The OverAchiever: Accomplished Angler
Once WoW's most disparaged profession, Fishing has experienced a resurgence in Wrath -- and it may get even better in Cataclysm, with developers studying fishing from other games like Animal Crossing in order to make it more fun. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they cook up another distraction like the Dalaran fountain in Cataclysm, I'll be happy. As with everything else concerning fishing in WoW, El'x Extreme Anglin' is your best buddy and a fantastic source of information on where to find fish, drop rates, information on pool spawns, and Fishing achievements. Accomplished Angler is a very work- and time-intensive meta-achievement, so I've taken the liberty of splitting this guide up. The first set of achievements you'll need: Grand Master Fisherman Sorry, folks, there's no real way to shorten this one; you've just got to keep fishing. One of the nice things about the profession is that you can level it anywhere -- the only penalty to leveling it in an area with higher "fishing skill" than you currently have is the amount of junk you'll catch versus actual fish. But on your way to Grand Master, you'll have put a lot of work in towards:
The OverAchiever: 5 lucrative achievements
Last week we discussed a set of achievements likely to drive the average player to the poorhouse. This week, in the spirit of consoling people who may not necessarily have a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth in their immediate future, I'd like to present a series of 5 achievements where at least one of the following is true: They're an unusual means of making gold in a way people wouldn't necessarily expect, or: It would be almost impossible not to make a pile of gold while doing them. Now, a disclaimer; the most obvious picks here would be achievements like Got My Mind On My Money or The Bread Winner, but they're more a record of your previous looting and questing rather than being something you really have to go for consciously. I'm on the lookout for slightly more interesting ways to grow rich from achievements that are not so directly concerned with moneymaking:
The OverAchiever: 5 of the best lore-related achievements
Let's be honest; the best lore-related achievement is without question Loremaster, which requires you to do the vast majority of the game's quests. But that's pretty self-evident -- "To get the best lore experience in-game, do the quests, which contain virtually all of the actual lore!" -- and thus kind of a cop-out from my perspective. So what I'm going to do with this edition of OverAchiever is pointedly ignore the fact that Loremaster is the most important thing you should do as a dedicated lore junkie, and turn to some other options that tend to be overlooked. As with our article on Twenty-Five Tabards, this is not an exhaustive guide on how to do each achievement, but simply a starting point if you're either interested in Azeroth's history, or interested in your character becoming more deeply involved in the developing story. As an early warning, 1 of the following 5 achievements is no longer doable, but I've decided to include it as I think the inability to do it at this point in time could be considered part of Azerothian history.
Fishing for profit
I'm an admitted and proud fishing junkie, but had long ago resigned myself to the fact that my favorite ingame pasttime was never going to be a source of revenue. But Alterac Volley has a great post on the degree to which fishing has actually (gasp, shock, horror) become a moneymaking endeavor in Wrath. While I'll grant that on most servers it's probably nothing compared to, say, Mining or Herbalism, there's gold to be made in them there streams -- and this is all the more true if your server hosts a large raiding population.AV observes that there are four types of fish most likely to be lucrative, and it's no accident that three of them (the Musselback Sculpin, the Glacial Salmon, and the Nettlefish) are the main ingredients of the Fish Feast, a valuable (although generalized) raid buff. I spend roughly an hour a week fishing up the materials for these to cover our raids and had never even looked to see what they retailed for. After reading over AV's comments, I took a peek at my server's AH and had a /headdesk moment discovering that my main could have been a much wealthier character if I'd just spent a little time yanking up a few extra fish here and there. So if your character is at or close to the Northrend fishing cap (and especially if you're still on the lookout for the Sea Turtle, which requires you to fish in Northrend pools anyway), give your AH a look and see how the fish are selling. You might be pleasantly surprised. And, as always, I highly recommend El's Extreme Anglin' as a great resource for the beginning and advanced fishermen out there.
Fishing dailies and other goodies in patch 3.1
The latest build on the Patch 3.1 PTR has introduced a lot of Fishing love to Northrend. The first Fishing-related addition that I noticed personally is the brand new set of daily quests in Dalaran, similar to what we had in Outland. When I bopped around trying to find out what random items you could get as quest rewards this time around, I discovered there's a lot more fishing love than just some quests!El's Extreme Anglin' is always the place to go for Fishing information, and you can bet your patoot that I ended up there in my search. Not only are there new quests, but there's a whole bunch of fun new items to accompany them. Pets, new fishing poles, new lures, new just-for-fun items. Pretty much everything that people love about Fishing in WoW has been cranked up a notch. Artisan fishermen will find that Nat Pagle has a fishing pole for them, too.There have been some achievement changes, and some changes to make fishing a little easier on the eyes and ears. It's really a lot more than I expected for a secondary profession, though I suppose it makes sense given the fanatical nature of the people who actually partake in Fishing. We love this kind of stuff!If you're interested in an early glimpse at the new daily quests, check out our little gallery below. If you want more details on what else is coming our way in Patch 3.1, El's Anglin' has all you need and more.%Gallery-47155%
The many benefits of being a high-level Cook
I agree with Relmstein: Cooking is awesome. Unlike, say, fishing (which I said on the podcast last week will never really stop being boring, since boring is "working as intended" for that one), cooking has really transitioned over the years. Back in the day, it was kind of a silly way to make new foods to eat, in Burning Crusade it became a pretty solid extra buff to have, and it Wrath it has really become a necessity for anyone looking to make their characters and their raids the best they can be.Plus, as Relmstein notes, there's added functionality -- the feasts let you lay out an entire meal for your party, and the addition of the Dalaran cooking quests (and the recipe rewards) have turned the daily cooking quests from just a few extra gold and mats per day into a whole currency system on its own. Fooding it up ingame has become a minigame of its own, and with food giving out such diverse (and significant) stat bonuses, not to mention that it often fetches great prices on the AH, there's no reason for your level 80 character to not have worked a little bit on leveling up cooking.Sold yet? One of the last things I did at level 70 was level up both cooking and fishing using El's Angling's great guide, and though it took me the better part of two weekends in a row, it's paid off many times over since. Cooking has definitely moved from kind of a fun third profession to mess around with to something that will seriously benefit you as a character in quite a few ways.
Fishing daily bug gives you the right fish first time, every time
And I thought I was just lucky -- apparently there really is a bug going around with the daily fishing quests that means you'll always get the special fish you're looking for on the first cast. The first time it happened, I was like hey, that's awesome. The second time it happened, I was like wow, I'm really getting a break on these fishing quests, and the third time it happened, I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. But Blizzard knows about the issue now, and I'd expect a hotfix soon.The one exception, of course was the Shrimpin' Ain't Easy quest that required you to fish up more than one Bloated fish to get at the shrimp inside. On that one, I can actually confirm that you didn't get the right fish every time, and it did take you the requisite 10 casts or so (which is what it's supposed to take for the other quests also, according to El's Anglin').I have to say, I've really enjoyed both the fishing and cooking dailies (as I said on the podcast the other week, I just finally got my Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe for the "Cake is Not a Lie" achievement). Can't wait to see what kind of fishing and food we'll find in Wrath.
Insider Trader: Crafting achievements pre-Wrath
Times are changing. Where previously you could merely craft epic swords and new-fangled flying machines, you can now craft success. Achievement points, the latest addictive means of displaying your awesomeness, are all the rage, and can be crafted up in a jiffy. Well, maybe two jiffies.As a level 70, there is one achievement you almost certainly have, and that is "Professional Master." This is awarded once you train the highest rank of any given profession, and serves as a little pat on the back for a job well done. Ready to go further? Get ready to maximize your fishing, cooking and first aid skills!
Insider Trader: Fishing, the final stretch
Until very recently, with patches 2.3 and 2.4, fishing was a skill mainly taken up by those players aching to relax. Casual questers who couldn't play for hours and be all business, or raiders looking to escape the pressure, took to their favorite remote and beautiful areas with a rod, some music, and a <DND> tag. In my small and tight-knit guild, fishing often meant story time. While I was feeling Zen fishing from the Forgotten Coast, another guildmate was storming the shores along Stranglethorn Vale, and we would exchange anecdotes and gossip. We took pleasure in our secret source for cloth, leather, ore and greens, as well as fish for alchemy, and helped finance our level 40 mounts through fishing. Still, many players, if not most players, seemed to find fishing boring, slow and annoying. Fortunately, fishing has never been necessary for any character if it does not provide pleasure. Even cooks, who stood to benefit the most from fishing, could work around it, and push through any rough patches by buying small stashes of certain fish from other players. Of course, now that fishing is more lucrative, its secrets more widely known, more people have shown an interest. As cooking became more important, so did fishing, not because you couldn't maximize cooking without it, but because some of the best buff foods are made with fish. Those who need a constant supply can't rely on the auction house. Recently, Robin Torres wrote up some tips to leveling fishing at level 70, and this week, Insider Trader is taking an in-depth look at maximizing your fishing skill. For the inside scoop on reaching 375 as quickly as possible, or as profitably as possible, head on through the break.
