Fishing: the mini-game that plays like nothing else

End of Dragons added a fishing system, and it lands where nobody expected: as the thing people open the game for when they do not feel like fighting anything.

Tyria holds over two hundred species, spread across every body of water in the world, and the mastery works everywhere rather than only on the new maps.

What you need

A fishing rod, which comes from the mastery and is drawn by activating the skill rather than equipped as a weapon.

Bait or a lure, and this part is mandatory. You cannot fish without one.

• Bait stacks in your inventory and one item is consumed per use. Adds 75 to 150 fishing power.
• Lures carry limited charges, do not stack, and spend one charge per catch. Add 50 to 100 fishing power.

How the minigame goes

1. Cast at a fishing hole or into open water
2. Watch for the red exclamation mark, or the splash
3. Set the hook when it bites
4. Keep the moving green marker inside the orange bracket, reeling left or right
5. Fill the yellow bar and the fish is yours

It reads as fiddly written down and takes about two catches to become automatic.

Fishing power, and why your hook is red

The hook icon next to a fishing hole tells you how the fight will go. Green is easy, yellow is work, red means you are about to lose.

That colour is a comparison between your fishing power and the water you are standing in. Raise the number and red water turns yellow.

• Bait gives +75 to +150
• Lures give +50 to +100
• Food and utility nourishment adds +100 once you have the right mastery
• Every mastery tier you finish adds +20 permanently

Stack those and you are looking at a few hundred points of difference between a character who prepared and one who walked up with a rod.

Nobody tells you this. You just stand there losing fish to a red hook, deciding that fishing is broken, when the fix costs a few silver at a vendor.

Fishing holes are the point.

Those circles of disturbed water are not decoration. They hold different results from open water and respawn after ten minutes, so a map with several holes supports a comfortable loop.

Different regions carry their own node types and their own species lists.

The two things people miss

Time of day matters. Some fish appear only at dawn, dusk, daytime or night. If a collection refuses to complete, the answer is usually the clock rather than your luck.

Fishing power decides what you can land. It is a stat, raised by bait, by food and by masteries. The hook indicator tells you where you stand: green easy, yellow moderate, red difficult. Red with low power means you will lose the fish.

Where the skiff comes in

The Fishing Party mastery hands out extra fishing power when several players fish together from an anchored skiff.

Which explains the small crowds of boats you sometimes see doing apparently nothing. They are not idling; they are boosting each other’s numbers.

The absurd price of catching fish.

The fishing mastery track runs 5,715,000 experience across five tiers and pays back 20 mastery points (how masteries work).

Sit with that number for a moment. It is the same total as the siege turtle track. The game charges you exactly as much to become good at fishing as it does to unlock a two-person artillery mount.

• Fishing Hole Master, 381,000 XP, 2 points. Faster catches and triple experience from them.
• Angler Sense, 635,000 XP, 3 points. Hotspots appear on your map.
• Fishing on a Full Tank, 1,016,000 XP, 4 points. The +100 from nourishment.
• Master Caster, 1,524,000 XP, 5 points. 50% more casting range.
• Local Legend, 2,159,000 XP, 6 points. Merchants who only talk to people who fish.

Take Fishing Hole Master first, because the tripled experience pays for the rest of the track while you are not looking.

The part that surprises people: fishing is the quietest thing in Guild Wars 2. No timer, no squad, no meta announcement in map chat. You park a skiff somewhere in Kryta at dusk, you catch things, and forty minutes disappear. Plenty of players who rolled their eyes at the whole feature now keep a rod in the first inventory slot and do not talk about it.

Is it worth doing

For gold, no. For achievements and collections, yes, and there is a full set of regional collections plus a meta on top.

The honest reason to fish is different. This game asks you to move constantly: dodge, reposition, watch the ground for red circles. Fishing asks you to stop moving and stare at water for twenty minutes.

After a couple of hours of metas, that turns out to be exactly what a lot of players want, and it is the only activity here that offers it. Nobody planned their evening around a fishing rod, and plenty of people end up there anyway.