Update to fishing

[Olyn]

Players may now go fishing without carrying around a rod and bait. To fish from an acceptable place, simply 'cast' and you'll work with the materials around you. Your chances of catching more exotic varieties may be increased by using proper fishing rods and bait.

[Dispater]

Fish should give temporary "food buffs" also make butcher available for everyone who is carrying a butchering knife!

[Erlwith]

was carrying around a fishing rod too inconvenient?

[Olyn]

Yes. Fishing wasn't getting used, despite being an easy food source and source of surprise items.

[Ergorion]

[Erlwith]

To my recollection fishing was before Devorast. Anyway Ergorion is correct in his observation. Priorities come first, and for anyone pre 50 who is going to go fishing they'll be ranking or training skills instead. I've done the fishing and the "rewards" don't hold a candle to afk training in your guild hall.

You should integrate fishing more into gameplay. Let fishing do more, make potions when you bring them to the potion shop. Or have fishing be an alternative form of ranking. Small amounts of exp per successful catch, more exp. for rarer fish. You can try loading up rare items, so similar to killing an NPC if the rare is available there'll be a small chance of fishing for it in the right lake. Or better yet, if you fish in the right place there's a chance for a rare mob catch that you kill and then can loot for its rare items. Integrate fishing into quests. Allow rogues to use fish to create various poisons, include fish in more imbue recipes, create more recipes!

Taking the need for a rod away doesn't make any sense to me.

Since I touched on quests tho, no exp past lvl 30 is just silly imo. Reduced makes sense, no exp at all is silly. Granted 48-50 on an hour worth of quests was overdoing it, but this new change is too imo. That is just my two cents on that. Sorry to threadjack just was meaning to comment on that.

[Erlwith]

Switch that first sentence

[Olyn]

I wouldn't expect the rewards of fishing to increase drastically, but I can say that nobody has found everything there is to find with it yet. Also, fishing will be more fully integrated into an upcoming area. So far, all I did was remove one of the reasons not to fish.

[Davairus]

I apologise for making fishing inaccessible and tiring to use. It was my bad - I won't make a mistake like that again. Fishing should be very casual and easy to use during downtime. We will endeveor to put fishing near your levelling rest spots so you can do it while your groupmates are kipping.

[Frostburns]

I have some comments on fishing:

You can occasionally get chests of coins (3000 coins each). I believe Narcana listed a recipe on invokation at one point about an elixir of seeking from Devorast. Presumably, this recipe requires a fish and is different than the other recipes. It sounds like it would provide a good bonus to hitroll (after all, there are dragonwing items of seeking).

You can get the crystalline seeds from Winter as well. These aren't totally useless, since I ended up getting some sort of book from one I dropped. 2 wis, 2 int, adds detect_magic affect, held item, meltdrop rotdeath and some other undesirable property for an item I think. Not great unless you really need wisdom and intelligence for some reason, but it's unique and certainly an interesting item (though why would someone below level 15 be able to get it?)

You can also get some other neat items. Items from holidays in past years, the red balloon shaped like Burzuk, one of Niusan's cigars, and others. I remember seeing a certain Noble wearing a soft, fluffy white towel one time and when I asked about it she said she had caught it while fishing.

All you need to know to become proficient at fishing is when to reel it in after the line tugs. I typically wait 27 seconds, then reel it in. (Time between ticks is between 25 and 35 seconds, and 27 has worked for me most of the time. So long as you do it some time BEFORE the tick, and the tick occurs before you've totally reeled it in, you'll catch something.)

Making it give experience is a bad idea in my opinion. While I am a fan of having alternatives to hack-and-slash for gaining levels and experience, I don't like making it that easy. I suppose every time you catch a new type of fish, you could get a very small amount of experience. This can't really be abused too heavily. If you manage to complete the Catch of the Day, perhaps you could gain a small amount of experience in addition to the coins. I've not seen anybody, myself included, actually complete that task, and if it's not too high it's not worth scripting.

I'd say more on the alternative forms of experience, but that's not on-topic.

[Eloret]

Giving you exp for fishing isn't a terrible idea, even if you made it useful only to lower levels. Say it offered experience until rank 20 or 25 or something. Doesn't even need to be all that much experience. My thought would be to gage what a typical group of two could get for exp per tick and make it some percentage of the typical average exp for a tick. This would help those mage classes that have trouble before monster potions. Plus if you just make it a possibility and not a sure thing to get exp everytime you catch something it would be such a slow way to rank it likely wouldn't be used for it in most cases.

[Davairus]

[Arishel]

What happens when you task at boat dealer in Seringale. He gives you a task and you have to catch a certain type of fish. You get like 1300 hours or something to do it.

[Tiqa]

I was waiting, hoping to post to say I caught the big one, but sadly no bites yet. Rod or no rod doesn't make a difference to my fishing.

Thanks Frostburns for you 27 sec theory. Gives me hope, might just catch one yet.

[Tiqa]

Finally I caught my first fish the other day. It was thrilling! Thanks Beljia.

I know fish are a low fat protein but they do not provide much lasting nourishment in the game. I ate about 4 or 5 of them and I was hardly full. Would it be possible to bump up the fullness factor on fish to make it more worthwhile, especially considering the effort and risk to catch one versus buying from a shop.

This is a different topic, but the food from town to town has different fullness. So it would be nice if the fish could be like Darkhaven cakes or Seringale food.

[Davairus]

Yes, we can bump up the fullness. I think its ok to have it possible to get effective food this way, since there is already a time investment.

[Olyn]

I added more information to Undulav's Catch of the Day task. The gold reward is also scaled by level.