What an Hour of Fishing Returns
Fishing sits outside the 2 main profession slots, which is why it gets left out of most earning plans. It has its own buyers, its own event and its own time bill, and all three work differently from a gathering route.
The catch sells into somebody else's recipe
Almost nothing pulled out of the water is sold to the player who eventually uses it. Fish go to cooks, and oils pressed from certain catches go to alchemists, so the buyer list for a fishing character is mostly other crafters restocking inputs. That makes fishing a supply trade with no gathering node behind it: nobody can be beaten to a pool the way a herb patch gets beaten, but nobody is short of water either. Forever has published nothing that changes how fish are acquired, so the Classic arrangement is the working assumption until a note says otherwise.
Underneath that sits a floor nobody talks about. Common catches have a fixed vendor value, and what a vendor pays per stack is the price a listing has to beat before posting it makes sense at all. For the cheapest fish it often does not, which is why an evening on the shore can end with half the bags emptied at a merchant and only the useful stacks carried further.
The rest goes to the auction house, where fish behave like every other bulk material. They are bought in quantity by people who do not want to spend the hours, and how bulk stock is posted decides whether a stack clears in a day or sits through the deposit. Quality catches used in raid food are the part of the shelf worth watching, because their demand is tied to a raid calendar rather than to levelling.
A fishing contest is a race, not an income
Classic ran a recurring fishing contest with a single winner per occurrence and a short list of rewards attached to it. Forever has not published whether that event is in, what it hands out, or when it runs, so treat anything circulating about the prize table as a prediction. If it does return, the economics are worth being blunt about: a race with one winner is not income. Most people who enter spend the hour and finish with the fish they caught, which is the same thing they would have had without the event.
The second effect is on everyone else. While a contest is running, a stretch of coastline fills with competitors, and whatever route normally works there is worse for that hour. A character with no interest in the prize is usually better off fishing somewhere nobody is racing, or doing something else entirely. The gold in an event like this is concentrated in one pair of hands, and concentrated rewards do not move a realm's prices.
That is a different animal from money arriving from outside the game. When an outside prize pool gives a group of players a cash reason to buy, demand enters the economy that was never farmed. An in-game contest creates no coin at all; it only decides who gets the item.
What the hours actually cost
Fishing is cheap in attention and expensive in clock time. Each cast returns roughly the same thing as the last one, so the output is a steady trickle rather than a run of good and bad pulls, and there is no way to speed it up by playing better. That makes it easy to do badly for a long time without noticing, because nothing about the activity signals that the hour was weak. The honest comparison is against whatever else that evening could have held.
Travel is part of the bill as well. The catches worth selling live in specific water, often on the far side of a continent from a bank, and hours lost getting there come out of the same evening the fishing does. A loop that ends back at a fire helps here, since stations set up at a camp let the catch be cooked on the spot instead of hauled home raw.
Supply is the other pressure. Common fish are the easiest thing on the shelf to produce in volume, and automated fishing accounts compete directly with players for the same listings. The stacks worth carrying are the ones a volume supplier is least interested in: specific quality catches with a raid-food buyer behind them, not whatever the nearest lake hands over.
Where it fits against the 2 real slots
The reason fishing survives in a plan at all is that it costs no profession slot. A character with 2 main trades already chosen can still fish, which puts it in a different category from the choices covered in the main profession comparison. It is additive rather than competing, and the only thing it takes is time. For a crafter who already needs fish as an input, that time replaces a purchase instead of creating a sale, which is the version where it pays best.
It does compete somewhere else. Legacy points come out of one pool, and the fishing perk sits at the same 10 points as the combat perk Talented, so taking one means not taking the other on that character. What 10 Legacy points buy is a working decision per character rather than an account-wide one, and a character built to gather and sell can reasonably spend them differently from one levelling through contested ground.
What has not been published
We have not seen Forever confirm whether the fishing contest exists in this version, what it rewards, or how often it runs. We have no figures for catch rates, no list of which fish feed which recipes in Forever specifically, and no confirmation that daily cooking or fishing quests are in. None of those are stated above as facts, and we are not going to estimate gold per hour for an activity whose output table we have not seen.
Questions
Does fishing use one of my 2 profession slots?
No. Fishing is a secondary profession, so a character can keep both main trades and still fish. The cost is time rather than a slot, which is why it shows up as an addition to an earning plan instead of a replacement for one.
Is the fishing contest worth entering for gold?
Only if you intend to win it. A contest with a single winner per occurrence is a race, not income, and most entrants finish with the fish they caught and nothing else. Forever has not published whether the event is in at all, so treat prize lists as predictions.
What part of the catch is actually worth listing?
The specific catches that feed raid food and alchemy recipes, because those have crafters behind them. Common fish are produced in volume by everyone, and for a lot of them the vendor price is the realistic floor rather than a starting bid.
Should I take the fishing Legacy perk?
That depends on what the character is for. The fishing perk and the combat perk Talented both cost 10 points out of the same pool, so a gathering and selling character and a levelling character will reasonably answer this differently. Points carry over between characters; the allocation does not.
Sources
- Official World of Warcraft site, where Forever announcements and patch notes are published — World of Warcraft official site.
- Reference material on how fishing worked in Classic, used here as the baseline assumption — Wowhead Classic fishing guide.