I have decided to build a fisherman character, but have had trouble finding information on the forums about what other skills to build around this. I have zero experience with fishing on the open water, facing a sea serpent, etc. This character's only purpose would be to secure fishing rares. I have 4 possible templates to choose from and would love input on this, and any macro setting advice for speeding up the training process. Fishing/Archery/Tactics/Healing/Anatomy/Resist/Magery Fishing/Archery/Tactics/Healing/Anatomy/Resist/Tracking Fishing/Archery/Tactics/Healing/Anatomy/Magery/Tracking (I don't have an archer, so I've accumulated a ton of arrows.) the other template would be a 5x mage with tracking and fishing.
My first question would be do you have a snake slayer bow? If you do I think a fisher archer would be amazing as I've gotten some good hits on serpents with a normal old vanq. I'm betting you have a slayer Redding just want to make sure haha! If you have a slayer I'd go with template 3, Normal serpents have crappy magery and eval so I doubt you will need resist (the loch lake monster can hurt but I think still you'd be fine.) Also krakens don't cast so that makes resist worthless. Magery would let you get around easier with recall and some utility spells and I have found people that lost their serpents and krakens at sea once in a while so tracking could be a useful skill. If you don't have a slayer bow just go magery/med/eval/wrestle/resist/fish/tracking template as ebolts hit sealife hard.
I like having peace making on my fisherman (or at least one char on the boat) to prevent kraken a from running away when they get below 20%. It's a pain to chase them. I hope I am not derailing your thread but I am unfamiliar with how useful tracking is for fishing and was wondering if anyone can say whether it helps with pulling rares?
As you said sometimes krakens run away or bad people afk fish and miss their serpents! In tracking on this shard Chris made a tracking category for just sea monsters so you can just track serpents and the like using that. I forgot all about peace myself if you wanted that and tracking I'd do a mage with magery/med/eval/music/peace/fish/tracking I think macroing most of the skills would be simple. For fishing find a nice dock and have a macro that loops fishing multiple spots from that dock (at least 3) then just let it loop you can hit gm fishing from shore and you won't get afk checks until GM fish.
Thank you Athena and Halbinder. That is the kind of thing I needed perspective on. I figured there would be a wrinkle or two to the PvM aspect of fishing I wouldn't know about until I got to GM. Keep it coming people!
Thanks for the info. So if tracking doesn't help actually pull anything and you will be paying attention to what you're pulling, then maybe Music/Peace/Mage/Eval/Med/Resist/Fishing. Or swap 4 magery skills for archery/tactics/anat/healing if u have slayers. Chasing things on water is my biggest pet peeve so I prefer the bard build. Best of luck.
From my experience: Archery is very safe. However, arrows are very costly and it's pretty slow at killing, even with vanqs. Many people swear by it, but I didn't like it at all. Melee skills are pretty good. You will want healing, but you can down serpents a bit quicker and without throwing 7g into the water every few seconds. You can ram your boat into monsters and they will become stuck on it, unable to move away (but not impeding your boat's movement). Practice this a bit, its really useful. As with most things, it's tough to beat taming. Most of the time I'm off doing something on my tamer, so I just recall in when I pull up a serp. The mare mows them down pretty quick. A tamer/fisher hybrid would probably even be easier. It pays to have multiple accounts fishing. More serpents for one, but they can also perform support tasks. You can have them peacemake the nearest gray as part of their fishing macro.
My fisher has: GM Anat GM Archery (use heavy xbow - best you can get) GM Fishing GM Healing 30 Hiding (nice for logging out, etc) 70 Magery (for cure and heal/Gheal just in case healing skill doesn't come through and low on HPs) GM Resist (this is KEY against serps, especially deeps) GM Tactics The 70magery/30hiding can be adjusted and Im currently playing with them. Im going to try 65 for mage recall/35 hiding. I might go 50/50 as well. For throwing nets (2+ at a time).... I bring my provo mage onboard to run and let fisher shoot bolts in background. Ive been meaning to make a fishing guide of all things fishing I can share however hope this gets you going.
GM Magery GM Meditation GM Evaluating Intelligence GM Resisting Spells GM Poisoning GM Wrestling GM Fishing Result: Soloing a Loch Ness (2 spells, Greater Heal for yourself, Nox for the abomination)
