World-of-warcraft – Fishing schools in shallow water

world of warcraft

I have encountered several fishing schools that I could not cast into because the water was too shallow.

How can I catch the fish in schools of fish that reside in shallow water?

I did some research and found the following post on the forums

This is a single post that mentions an occurrence of this phenomena in the vicinity of "Lost veil anzu" in the Spires of Arak. I have not been fishing in that place myself. Most recently I encountered this near to "Mok'gol watchpost" in Nagrand, I have also noticed it in several other places so I do not think that it is a feature of a specific place.

Best Answer

This has been a minor problem in WoW going back to when they introduced fishing pools in the first place.

Pools spawn in predetermined spots just like other resource nodes do. There's enough of those spots that it looks mostly random. Problem is, those spots aren't always placed precisely for usability. I don't know what Blizzard's internal tools are like, but I imagine they just spray dots on the map and run a basic point-check to validate it. Once it's in game, the fishing mechanic doesn't care that the pool is right there, it just cares that wherever your bobber landed, doesn't work.

Chances are, unless it's way out of whack, some portion of a "too shallow" pool is in a valid area and can actually be fished. Whether that's a large portion or a small depends on the spot though. It would be up to you whether it's worth your time to find the exact positioning needed to try your luck at landing the bobber in it though.

I don't have clear sources except experience - Blizzards response over the years seems to treat each pool as an individual bug - but there are more threads like the one you found (trying to find more, but it gets drowned out with general complaints about fishing).

Related Solutions

World-of-warcraft – How does one’s fishing level relate to what one catches and when one catches it

What used to be the minimum required skill to fish in any given area is now the minimum required skill to not catch any junk. Once you meet or exceed this minimum for a zone, whether natively, or through the use of equipment, buffs and consumables, you will no longer catch ANY junk. If you are below this skill level, the chance of catching junk is proportional to just how far below it you are. The further below the threshold, the more junk you'll catch.

The exact formula for the chance of catching a fish when your skill is below the threshold is ((current skill/threshold skill)^2).

For example, the Dalaran Fountain has a no-junk skill of 525. As we can see in @GreatBigFish's answer, this junk threshold is above the (unbuffed) WOTLK maximum skill of 450. Fishing at max skill in Dalaran with no lure would yield a 'fish' roughly 73% of the time. The other 27% of the time, you will catch one of the 13 'junk' items found around the world, all of which vendor for mere copper. To never catch junk in Dalaran, you'd need to use a +75 lure or better at 450 skill.

There is one notable exception to this rule: You will never catch junk in a pool. Fishing from pools gives a 100% catch rate on whatever type of fish spawns in that pool. This has caused many to claim that actively leveling fishing skill is now pointless because it provides little practical benefit - fishing from pools is always more efficient anyway.

For more information, El's Anglin' provides a tremendous resource on the subject of fishing.

World-of-warcraft – Is it possible to change the fishing sound

The Sound.MPQ file contains these four files relating to the splashing:

Sound\Spells\FishingBobber_ver2_1.ogg
Sound\Spells\FishingBobber_ver2_2.ogg
Sound\Spells\FishingBobber_ver2_3.ogg
Sound\Spells\Tradeskills\FishBite.ogg

I can't quite tell if all of them are still being used, but I'm pretty certain there aren't any more than these.

Override them as usual, by placing new OGG files with these paths in your Data directory.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

World-of-warcraft – How does one’s fishing level relate to what one catches and when one catches it

World-of-warcraft – Is it possible to change the fishing sound

Related Topic