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About Fishing
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So I'm at 26/30 for the Cod achievement and I gotta say, going for it is 90% relaxing and chill, and 10% utter frustration.

First off, some good things about fishing:

  • It's a decent source of gold considering it's 100% a solo activity

  • It's pretty chill most of the time.

  • When you're not going for specific fish, it's 100% chill.

  • The skiff is a decent, unique, addition to the mount family.

  • I love the Angler hat and vest skins

  • Going through the masteries felt like they were worthwhile and made a real difference.

However. It's clear that fishing is still a little bit unpolished. Rough around the edges. And could use a few more quality of life improvements.

Skiff Speed

Even at Speed 3 and boosting, the skiff still cannot outrun a Skimmer. This means the most efficient way to fish is to mount your Skimmer, go to the next fishing hole, and resummon your skiff.

I think the Skiff should see a more significant speed boost when using the boost, so as to make short hops more efficient in the skiff than in the Skimmer. While mounting the skimmer will still be faster when dealing with shortcuts over shallow water, or even over land.

Skiff Damage

Getting kicked off your skiff is very annoying, but an understandable feature. However, you have almost zero indication - while fishing - that your skiff is under attack. No hit reaction, no combat flag, no damage numbers, no texture changes.

There needs to be some change that lets the player know that their skiff is under attack.

I'd suggest rocking the boat a bit, maybe make it flash slightly. Just something to give us some kind of obvious warning that the skiff is about to disappear from under us.

Protecting your Skiff from mobs

The amount of time it takes to lose Skiff connection is woefully short, especially considering how underdeveloped underwater combat is. Even when you prepare, with a build designed for burst damage, you still find yourself dunking into the water, getting a few hits, then boarding the skiff again. Repeating until the mobs are dead.

Give us a bit longer to kill problem enemies

Skiff Combat Bug

There's the bug I've noticed quite a few times: Once I've dealt with the problem enemy I've remained in combat until I move away from the area. Even if there are no other enemies anywhere near me.

Skiffs and auto-dismount zones

Skiffs count as mounts and will see you dismounted instantly if you stray too close to a Jumping Puzzle dismount zone, zones that have fishing holes in them. (Straits of Devastation and Gendarran Fields, to name two I came across)

I do not think there is a single jumping puzzle that might somehow be cheesed using a Skiff. It would be nice if skiffs did not count as a mount to these dismount zones.

Bait RNG

Getting a specific type of bait from the Bag of Creepy Crawlies is a lottery. I can spend 5G on bait and get 50 of one type and two stacks of another. There are 10 items on the bags loot table, of which you get two at a time. I think splitting the bag into two items - one that gives 'worms' (like Leeches, Glow Worms etc) and one that gives 'bugs' (like Scorpions, Lightning bugs, Snails etc) would reduce the frustration in the RNG.

Bait Vendors

Not all bait is available from a single vendor, and I get that this encourages players to go elsewhere, but it'd be nice for at least one vendor to be a 'master' supplier. They could be in an out-of-the-way place, or hidden behind the end fishing mastery.

It's pointless busywork when I can just waypoint to New Kaineng and Portal to Arborstone to get what I need most of the time.

Kicked off the Fishing Party

I love the idea of the fishing party buff. It encourages some community sharing, and encourages players to commit to long periods of fishing.

However, anyone who's fished for long enough knows there's issues with Fishing Party.

Getting kicked out of a map because it's closing and losing your stacks is the worst. Especially if you've been doing it for long enough and are about to hit max stacks.

Losing your stacks still shows you at Rank X on your fishing UI until you make your way back to that rank again - even though you don't keep the fishing power.

Whether this is a bug or not is debatable (ie, are you supposed to keep your rank and it's not working?) but if it's a visual bug, then I think there are a couple of compromises that might work here:

1) When you lose your stacks you do not lose your fishing power. Instead, you go back to zero stacks but keep your previous rank buff for, say, 30 minutes, or until you get back up to the rank naturally.

2) You lose your stacks, and your fishing power, but gain a double bonus to regaining stacks until you get back to your previous rank.

These could work whenever you lose stacks, such as changing maps or getting disconnected. Either one would take some of the frustration when something out of your control happens.

Number 2, especially, would mean fishers aren't discouraged from taking a break from fishing to, say, participate in the map meta, because they know they can get back up to where they were in half the time.

Dawn/Dusk

I get it. I think it's an interesting mechanic. But I've found myself on more than one occasion sitting in a map, doing nothing, waiting for Dawn or Dusk to come around just to catch that last fish - not getting it - and having to wait again. All because I get around 4 fishing holes done in those 5 minutes a piece. It's a frantic rush that feels like it goes against the entire ethos of fishing in the game.

But what can be done about it? What QoL improvements could be had that wouldn't make the mechanic completely irrelevant?

Well, I have a couple of ideas:

1) Extend Dawn and Dusk by 2 minutes, 1 minute either side. Instead of having 10 minutes every 2 hours, you have 14. That's almost 50% more time in the dawn/dusk phase to catch the fish you need.

2) Special Lure that allows you to catch Dawn/Dusk fish, but either doesn't give extra Fishing Power, or actually reduces it. (I don't like this one, personally, because it removes Dawn/Dusk as a mechanic)

3) Do nothing, and implement one of the Fishing Party changes mentioned above. These will allow achievement chasers to swap to another map (where they have day or night fish to catch) without being punished too hard and feeling like they have to idle in the maps.

Drop Rate

The drop rate on certain collections - Saltwater in particular - seems brutally low. I only just finished the first Saltwater collection, 25 collections in.

This turned into a post and a half, so if anyone's got anything else to add, or thoughts on my thoughts, I'd like to hear them.

Anyway, that's taken me long enough and It's getting to dusk... so back to fishing.

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2 years ago