turtle mount world of warcraft

Killing Several Birds With One Stone

Monday is normally achievement day, and Tuesdays we spend on a profession.  You’ll have to pardon us this week as we combine them together in one uber simple meta tip.  But it certainly will give you the ability to Dominate a couple of very time consuming achievements.

The achievements in question are from Fishing: The One That Didn’t Get Away, and Turtles All the Way Down.  Both of these involve fishing up a rare item, and we’ve read the threads where it’s taken some folks thousands and thousands and THOUSANDS of casts to get either one.

So we thought we would give you the tip that just goes by the numbers and the facts and might just save you oodles of time on both of these.  Someone has said that the magic number for The One That Didn’t Get Away is 10,000 casts.  In that number of casts there is an almost a 100% chance that you will have caught ONE of the rare fish in the list.

But 10,000 casts is over 30 hours of fishing if you average 12 seconds per cast.  That’s a silly amount of time to spend on getting an achievement when you could probably nab 50 others in the same time if you worked on the smart and easy ones. (This is assuming you care about achievements at all of course).

But no matter what the magic number is, there is a little secret to both of these that we will give you in short form and not bore you to death with the details.  It turns out that one type of fishing node in outlands holds the secret you’ve been looking for.

You can only fish up the turtle mount from a Northrend fishing pool.  So if you’re going for the mount (as one of our readers is) you need to make sure every single cast is in a pool and not open water.  Also, the least rare of the rare fish in the list for the One That Didn’t Get Away is the Dark Herring – and here’s why that is important.

Just North of Skorn in Howling Fjord is Winter’s Breath Lake.  If you’ve been doing the Argent Tournament Dailies it’s the lake where you go let the chick loose from the ice tomb during the quest The Edge of Winter.  The approximate center of this lake lies at (42.2,19.8).  You can see the lake highlighted below:

winter's breath lake world of warcraft

The reason you want to fish here and here only until you get these two achievements done has to do with loot tables.  First, since you can only get the turtle mount from a pool, you have 0% chance to get one if you’re not fishing in a Northrend pool.  Second, the lower the number of things you can possibly receive from a cast, the higher the actual chance is that you will get a certain thing from the cast.

Winter’s Breath lake only contains one kind of pool – the Fangtooth Herring School.  There are about 15 potential spawn points around the lake and it is very hard to out-fish it by yourself.  In other words, you can go at this one for as long as it takes and never once have to wait for a school to spawn.  And since no one really farms Herring for cooking, you should have almost zero competition for pools.

You will probably get the turtle before you get the Dark Herring, but by far the highest chance you have at getting any of the rare fish in the list is the Dark Herring.  This is because the loot table for a school of Herring contains only 6 potential drops, and both the turtle mount and Dark Herring are among those half dozen.

Compare that to the (potentially) next best place, The Bay of Storms in Azshara.  BoS has 30+ items in the loot table and you can see why, regardless of the stated 1% drop rate for a rare fish in any water, the absolute drop rate is far lower in reality anywhere but Winter’s Breath lake.  With a chance to catch both of your achievement items from a single type of pool, it’s an exponentially better choice.

My own experience bears this out.  I just ran circles around the lake fishing from the herring pools only and ended up getting the turtle mount on the 112th cast.  The Dark Herring has not dropped yet, but I’m still under 200 casts in the pools, so it’s not terribad.

Most people seem to get the Herring somewhere between the 100th and 400th cast, a mere fraction of the majority of reports that have folks slinging lures into Stonebull lake in Thunder Bluff an average of 1,500-2,500 times for a rare.  Many have gotten the Herring in under 100 casts as well.

So, you see, you can not only kill two birds with one stone as far as the achievements go, you can do so with the absolute highest chance compared to the loot table available.  Getting the two achievements done while still getting other fish worth having?  Dominating.