Fishing: the mini-game that plays nothing like the rest of the game

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 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.

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.