A Market for Fishing?!Follow

Am late responding and my Pally is capped in fishing. I still have her fish wreckage in lower zones if passing by and do all pools, Oily whatever as I sometimes get boxes of runecloth, mageweave bolts, leather, stranglekelp and such.

Now, she can fish in Shattered Strand, the beach there and Bay of Storms. In Bay of Storms, even being capped she still needs bait (usually use Attractor). What do I find? wreckage, regular pools and pools of Elemental Water items, all in Shattered Strand. I also find Steelscale Eels there and I keep going back till I have a stack of Eels and 2 or more Elemental Waters, etc. This is good money in AH. In Bay of Storms I can fish Lobsters which have excellent health repair. The Lobsters dont seem to sell in AH but helps me out while fighting for sure.

Not without peril there for sure but think worth the risk.

Even if no wreckage or pools you could fish out health and mana potions. Armor, weapons etc. Not all the time. My 27 gnome warrior is leveling her fishing by doing Deviates and then makes them into Savories. I usually dont sell them I give out the cooked fish to friends but some player the other night was trading 20 Savories for 10g.

lobster stew is great for health regen and pet food. you can also catch the large raw mightfish in bay of storms. not bad stat food/pet food also. it gives +10 stamina for 10 mins.

I made so much money off of Stonescale when the Dungeon 2 craze first hit it was ridiculous. I would fish for hours at night after midnight server time in Tanaris and mail them to an alchemist friend to have them turned into oils. Made lots and lots of money. Since I still see people LFG for 45 minute UD Strat, I assume people are still doing those quests so that might be a good money maker.

Horde side you can sometimes get really lucky and find the Deviate Delight recipe for 10g or less. Good money maker there as well. I have one friend who would buy that recipe super cheap Horde-side then flip it over to his Alliance character via the cross faction AH and sell it for 90g. It would consistently sell too.

Thanks, Thermal- I've always been wary of Thottbot's results- simply because looking at them, I see Bay of Storms listed twice... once at 10% (in Tirisfal Glades of all places) and the other at 14.2%. I also used the wrong name- I should have put the Shattered Strand as my other fishing spot- which, according to Thottbot, has a 9.1% chance, which means I was actually better off in Steamwheedle Port (with a 9.2% chance)!

Edit: Mind you, at 16.1%, Scalebeard's Cave seems to be the winner according to Thottbot. Noting one reply there in particular:



Edited, Aug 29th 2006 at 2:09pm EDT by Wondroustremor

You can use that book at level 20. So, what you're saying is that once you're level 20, you are no longer a low level "pre-50" (as people were stating) player?

Deviate fish makes gold for lower levels before Stonescale Eels. Sure, for the end-game player the gold isn't as great as, say, Essences of Water, but for lower levels it's awesome. You can easily get to Deviate Fish level in a few hours or less of fishing in a city... No gold, silver, or copper required to "skillup", aside from your first fishing rod and expanding your fishing cap. Fishing allows players to create money from thin air, without the need of finding (whether it be drops, harvested, or bought) materials.

Onto the topic of Fishing + other professions..


Wondroustremor makes astounding points (as he does on FFXI forums, as well :D), and prices do make a difference.

I have Fishing, Cooking, Skinning, and Enchanting at 300.

Skinning has been a constant flow of income while leveling.. not an overabundance of gold, but no "farming" required either. Enchanting has been more of an income, seeing as how I can DE BoPs for mats that are worth more than the BoP items. I have yet to "advertise" in Trade channels for my services. Basically I just DE items, enchant for myself and my leveling partner, and occasionally for a person looking for an enchant who has a hard time finding an enchanter. My income is from selling mats. (No "farming" required for this either, unless I run a low-level instance, which I've only done two or three times for crappy mats, so I don't really count it. :P)

Cooking is solely for my friend and I to have consumables with well-fed effects. I didn't even level my cooking with fish.. I leveled it with mats we got while leveling. I do, however, turn fish into cooked food once I started fishing Raw Greater Sagefish and Raw Nightfins. (I'm a mage, he's a hunter.. the mana-regen is awesome for both of us). And once winter rolls around, I'll be fishing up some Winter Squid for his Grilled Squid. The Sagefish Delights and Nightfin Soups sell on auction, but for a comparable price to the raw fish. I just keep them to use anyway.

I've made enough gold from my choices in professions to afford my epic mount by level 50 and to buy some pricey "rare" enchanting formulas.. without having to "farm" anything, unless you consider fishing for ~4 hours a week to be farming.

Now.. Fishing! Fishing is my biggest source of income, and I've done some research into the Fishing + Alchemy side of it, also. Stonescale Eels sell pretty fast on my realm, for alchemists and for players with a Craftsman's Writ getting Argent Dawn rep. I have access to an Alchemist 300, and I have attempted to sell the Stonescale Oils. Unfortunately, they sell for about the same price, and take longer to sell. I have attempted to sell Greater Stoneshield Potions. It's less than double the profit compared to selling the raw fish, and it also takes forever to sell. (Guilds that have their own alchemists make their tanks' pots would be the reason for this.) Flask of the Titans would be an option, but is too much of a nuisance (you need an alchemy lab, found in Scholomance and BWL(?) and tons of bag space if you're making quite a few [30 Gromsbloods and 10 Oils + other stuff for each flask]), compared to just selling the fish when I get it.

For Firefin Snappers, I have tried selling Fire Oil. This also doesn't sell very fast, although it is about 4x as much profit than the raw fish on my realm. The raw fish sells alright, as I assume people might skillup alchemy on it since it's a cheap fish. Admittedly, though, I have not attempted to sell any Elixirs of (Greater) Firepower, nor am I a Fire Mage to want to use them :P, so I don't know if I'd have better luck with them. I just sell the "cheap" Firefins for pocketchange.

Oily Blackmouths I occassionally do craft into Free Action Potions, however the fish sell faster than the Potions. (Usually I just make the pots when I'm out of stock and need to make more for myself.. so I'll make a few extra stacks to sell.) The pots are about a 4x profit, but like I said, they don't sell nearly as fast as the fish. (And it's not that there's competition on the pots.. There's usually very few, if any, listed on auction. The same for all the other pots/oils I've mentioned.)

So, in conclusion!, from my personal experience, having the Alchemy profession does not significantly improve my results from my Fishing skill. If the Alchemy profession was on my main character and not my friend's, I would drop it in a heartbeat for my Enchanting<3. But those values and markets are those of my realm, and those are my results. I'm not going to preach that Alchemy + Fishing is the only way to go if you want to Fish, nor am I going to say the opposite. (~.^)b

Thermalnoise -- I've had really good drop rates on Plated Armorfish from the Blackwood Lake, smack-dab-center of Eastern Plaguelands, northwest of Corin's Crossing. Thottbot says it's 14.1%, but my results were more like 25%. <.<

425.
Essence of Water makes it worth it.

Just curious, how much Fishing skills is it possible to get, with gear/lure after 300?

Despite all the negative garbage people have thrown in here, I make at least 20G/hour running the coasts of Tanaris or Azshara, just fishing up the floating wreckage and stonescale swarms, as well as anything else worth throwing a lure to.

The difference between farming instances and fishing when it comes to gold/hour is, fishing is in my experience far more constant. Stonescale Eel sell consistently whether in raw or various potion forms. Greens, the rare blue here and there, and cloth bolts from floating wreckage boxes sell nicely as well.

When it comes to fishing, farming, or crafting, you should always ask yourself this question. Could I be consistently making more gold/hour by doing another activity? Please note that this does not apply if the activity is one of your favorite things to do in the game. However, I assume many players do not enjoy farming/fishing as much as running instances, PvPing, or various other activities.

When I first started to concentrate on making gold (because before then I was always broke) I started with fishing. I went from almost nothing to 50g so fast it made my head spin. Most of this gold came from Deviates and Stonescale Eels. I fished steadily (30 minutes to one hour per evening) for a time and managed to get mounts for both of my mains at level 40.

However, as my primary toons reached higher levels and improved their crafting skills, I found methods of making gold that had a better gold/hour ratio than fishing. Since then, I have done almost no fishing at all. I have three characters that are between 225 and 230, but none higher. I plan to level one of them up to 300 for Azshara expeditions, but Steamwheedle just doesn't rank anymore.

In summary, fishing is an excellent way to accumulate a bit of gold at lower levels when crafting professions are not that profitable, and does provide a nice, steady, source of income. However, try and imagine the hours required to fish enough Eels for an epic mount and training. Just my 2 cents.

I like fishing for fun. I am a new player and I never really thought about making money with it, however I have used some fish for cooking... but I ate all the fish :)