Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

So long, and thanks for all the fish

I've never imagined that fishing can be profitable. I mean it is the simplest possible goldmaking way. It doesn't need any primary professions, gold investment, addons, goblinish skills, nothing.

All you have to do is go to the AH, and check out which fish is expensive. Tip: the materials of the top feast are likely to be in demand. Then check out where you can catch the fish and off you go. When you fished enough, sell the fish in the AH. That's all.

You can fish out 3-4 fish every minute, about 200/hour. If you can sell them for 5-10G, that's 1000-2000 gold/hour.

It's THIS simple to make gold.

So if someone asks for gold, tell him to GO FISH!


PS: I may not be able to process comments for a few days.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cannot agree more with this post. I have made around 55,000 gold in the last month with fishing alone. This doesn't include all the volatile waters I got from doing this (which I'm now stockpiling for 4.2). This is the only farming profession I engage in after the first rush at the beginning of an expansion, only because it retains its value-per-hour so well throughout an expansion as compared to other farming professions. Never underestimate the profit that can come from doing something 90% of the WoW player base absolutely loathes, but is dependant on for raiding.

It may be too late for many players to do what I did, but one of my alts was "hired" by a guild to get their fish feast achievement. I negotiated to get paid 3g per pool catch, with 5K bonus at the 10,000 catch mark, and kept everything I caught. Highland guppy and fathom eel sells so well--I couldn't keep an inventory stocked because it was flying off the AH so fast.

Harrier said...

I made tons of gold with fishing, not only high demand high end fish but also low level fish that is used for leveling up cooking.

Cooking will come to a point where you will need fish when you start out from scratch, as cooking can be a pain before you get to the Outland stage. To know which fish to go for use the online free cooking guides and look at recipes that require fish, go and fish them, put them at ridiculously high price and I ensure you that they will sell as I have made tons of gold that way.

The customers for low level fish are mostly people who want to level cooking fast and are too lazy to go and fish for it.

WoWMidas said...

Quick check of TUJ shows mat costs of 43g. At 200 fish / hour that's about 30 feasts or 1,200 gph.

Problems I see with this (vs. croc leather farming which you mentioned a few weeks ago) are

1. there are non-goblins out there willing to dump mats out there for cheap - timing would be pretty important, you'd want to catch the market just as raids are getting ready to get started.

2. The other thing is volume - I'm skeptical you could do this for very long and be able to sell in a reasonable timeframe - anyone willing to do this for money is probably hard up for cash.

Anonymous said...

Its a little bit more complex than this. The most expensive fish are going to be the ones which don't drop from specific pools (deepsea sagefish, lavascale catfish). These are ~20-30% drops from open water fishing in appropriate zones. That (might) severely cut into your G/hr.

Bloodshrike said...

Volatile Fire is my choice for fishing. I park a level 60+ alt at Sulfuron Spire in Mt. Hyjal, and whenever I think about it, I log in for 3-4 minutes of fishing, which nets me about 20 volatile fire.

If you want to do more fishing, you can always head east to Gates of Sothan and Doom's Vigil, which have pools of Mountain Trout, and occasionally the pools will drop Volatile Water as well. The pools respawn quickly too.

sailing around australia said...

Fishing bought my first epic flyer in TBC. My net was broken and all I could do for a couple of weeks was fish and play the AH. No epics but lots of gold.

Tenko said...

Yeah... but fishing is incredibly boring and grindy. I'd rather use a method that'll give me less gold per hour but that doesn't involve watching a fishing bob. I can't even alt+tab while I fish.

Stubborn said...

Ah, but if you play in windowed mode, you can shrink the WoW screen to about 1/4 to 1/3rd size, bring up something else in the rest of the screen, and just click back in every 15 seconds or so. I got all my fishing achievements (still don't have the contest, gd it) by doing this. It allows you to read, watch tv shows online, or whatever.

Deepcut said...

Easy, but mind-numbing.

Perdissa said...

If you want to earn gold by fishing, it is more profitable to go after guppies and eels. While catfish may be worth more, the droprate from open waters is really not worth your time.

I do need catfish for feeding my raids. What I do sometimes is catch more guppies, sell them and buy the stupid catfish.

Yaggle said...

I hate fishing like most people. But I made a decision that has saved me a lot of time and made me hate Wow much less(hardly ever). I only level up fishing with one character and I do not fish with any others. Fish are not BOP so if you have any alts, why level fishing on them? I will have to try fishing for these fish because making profits from raiders is very satisfying. Maybe I do not have their awesome purple pixels but at least I can have their gold ones.

Jim said...

I think the numbers in this post are a tad optimistic. I do not think a person can average 3 - 4 fish per minute for a whole hour. When you take in to account travel time between fishing nodes and time spent constantly re-casting because the toon misses the node when he casts his line.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand what's goblinish about farming, and not profiteering from neglected resources like croc farming, but farming something that is accessible to everyone.

Anonymous said...

Some notes from my experience:

Farming/grinding is best during the night or early morning. You won't get into PvP combat, and all the other farmers are asleep. I found tons of pools of the mentioned fish. During the evening I didn't have much luck. As non-PvP player (seriously, when someone engages me I simply die as soon as possible; it usually wasn't a fair start, and I'm in my PvE gear to grind the dailies) this is how I've grinded TB dailies on my alts during the mentioned hours. Hardly anyone there, loldkarthas who is normally camping at the bridge near the horde guards is asleep or at school. The same ought to be true for fishing hours competition.

The ability to find fish (recipe) is useful, but so is gathermate2 (+ data). You don't need any fishing skill to loot from pools. You will get a guaranteed loot drop if you loot from a pool. The pool size is slightly higher than the graphics. After an unexpected server restart, there were tons of respawns. One pool in TH is bugged. Its near the bugged mining nodes.

Farming volatile air yields better profit (15g each on my realm) at say Uldum than fishing for volatile fire (slow respawn, 5g each). My fishing character happens to be a herbalist. Great combination, you simply herb whatever is on your path for extra profit.

Good music, having a laptop or 2nd monitor in other words something to do whilst grinding helps although be careful you don't lose your focus. As with mandatory things, you'll start enjoying the grind. Just don't overdo it!