Fishing Pays Slowly and Attracts Bots
Fishing is the one gathering trade that does not need a route, a mount or a fight. That makes it a modest earner for a player and an excellent one for software, and both of those facts land in the same market for cooking and alchemy materials.
What the catch is actually for
Fish are not an end product. They go into 2 kitchens: cooking, where they become the food that carries stats and, in Forever, a small experience bonus on top of them, and alchemy, where several of the oils used in potions are rendered from fish rather than picked from the ground. Both buyers consume what they buy. A gear material is purchased once per character, while a stack of fish is burned through on a raid night and ordered again the following week.
That repeat purchase is what makes the trade worth describing at all. In a world with no Token, the only way a cook or an alchemist gets materials is from another player, and the fish side of that supply has no quest handing it out for free. The free manual covers 3 gathering trades, and fishing is not one of them, so the number of casual suppliers is smaller than for ore or herbs.
The catch itself reaches buyers the same way everything else does, in stacks on the listings, and what it fetches depends on how full the listings already are when the seller logs in. A fisherman who posts at the wrong hour is competing with the previous night's output rather than with other people fishing.
Why the cast cycle automates so well
Compare the work. A herb or ore route needs a path, a mount, decisions about which node to take when 2 are visible, and an answer for the mobs standing on top of them. A skinner needs something to kill the animals first. Fishing needs a shoreline and 4 repeated inputs: cast, wait, click the bobber when it moves, loot. Nothing about that loop changes between the first hour and the eighth, and nothing in it requires reading the world.
That is the whole reason the trade shows up in any conversation about automation. Software does not get bored, does not mind standing in one spot and does not need the loop to be interesting. The people who organise farming operations at scale pick the task with the fewest branches, and fishing is the shortest branch list in the game.
Our reading: the output suits that model as well as the input does. Fish stack, keep, never bind, and sell to a market that absorbs volume without caring who caught it. A route that produces rare drops needs judgement about what to do with each one. A route that produces 3 kinds of fish needs none.
What steady supply does to the price
Supply that arrives overnight and demand that arrives on raid nights do not line up. The common fish used in everyday cooking tend to sit soft for most of the week, because the stock posted while the server was quiet is still there when players wake up. Demand bunches at the end of the week, when groups restock, and that is the window where posting matters more than catching.
The exception is anything tied to a specific pool or a specific ingredient in a recipe people actually want. Narrow supply holds its price in a way that general-purpose fish does not, and the same pattern runs through the rest of what a raid night consumes. One stack of the right fish can be worth more than an evening of the wrong kind.
For a player deciding where to spend a profession slot, our reading is that fishing is a second activity rather than a first one. It costs nothing to keep, it sits alongside a crafting trade comfortably, and it does not compete with the time spent on the plan from 1 to 60. Treating it as a primary income is the part that disappoints people.
What we do not know yet
Most of the above is reasoning from how the trade is built, not from announced figures. Blizzard has published the broad profession changes for Forever - 600+ new recipes across every profession, camping objects from skill 20, the free gathering manual, the Legacy perk that increases scarce material yield - without saying how any of it applies to a fishing rod specifically.
- Whether the scarce-material Legacy perk counts fish at all
- How pools are distributed and how quickly they return in the new zones
- Which of the 600+ new recipes are cooking or alchemy recipes that need fish
- Whether camping interacts with fishing in any way beyond sitting near water
We also have no figure for how much of any market is automated output, and we are not going to invent one. Nobody publishes that number, estimates from players are guesses dressed as data, and the realms have not been live since 4 November long enough for anyone to measure it honestly. What can be said is structural: the cheaper a task is to run unattended, the more of it runs unattended, and fishing is the cheapest task on the list.
Questions
Is fishing worth a profession slot in Forever?
As a second trade, yes, because it costs nothing to keep and feeds cooking and alchemy, both of which buy again every week. As your main source of income it is slow, since the work is a fixed loop that pays roughly the same for every hour you put into it rather than improving as you learn the world.
Do you get fishing from the free gathering quest?
No. The quest in the low levels hands over a manual for Herbalism, Mining or Skinning. Fishing is learned separately, which is one reason the supply of fish is thinner than the supply of ore and herbs in the opening weeks.
Why do automated farms prefer fishing over herb routes?
Because the loop has no decisions in it. Casting, waiting, clicking a bobber and looting repeats identically for hours, with no pathing, no competition for a node that somebody else reached first, and no mobs to handle. A herb route needs all of those answered; a shoreline needs none of them.
When is the best time to sell a stack of fish?
Closer to when groups restock than to when you caught it. Overnight supply sits on the listings through the quiet part of the week, so the same stack usually meets more buyers and fewer competing posts in the run-up to raid nights.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news index, where the Forever profession announcements and patch notes are posted — World of Warcraft news.
- Wowhead's Classic fishing material, useful for the baseline mechanics the Forever version is built on — Wowhead Classic fishing.
What changed on this page
- 11 Oct 2026First version: who buys the catch, why the cast cycle automates, and the fishing figures we cannot confirm.