The Old Man And The Sea ... And The Gold Fish

   Before i start this post, i would like to thank an unnamed person on my server that reminded me that even at this time of WoW's life, there are still people that are just starting out and are finding the WoW universe to be just that, WOW. Ok now that i got that out of the way, lets see how we can make some gold off from those people or even people that started in Late WOTLK, or hell even earlier.

   Unlike my usual stance on "farming" where i'm all about not doing it to make profit, i find fishing to be relaxing sometimes ( i'm going to put the accent on SOMETIMES, because at other times it can piss you off ). The best thing about fishing is that everyone can do it, but not everyone does it. Back in Vanilla, TBC and especially WOTLK fish were a very sought after commodity, but in Cataclysm that demand went down the drain except for a few types for fish that were needed for the feasts.

   But here i am again going deep into a subject that i didn't really mean to write about. So even though this post is about making gold from fishing, i am not going to tell you to go out and fish for those feast fishes, no, i am going to direct you to the oldest and most profitable fish since WoW was released. Yes, ladies and gentle goblins i give you the Deviate Fish.

   What is so great about this fish is the ease with witch you can catch it, and it's availability. One drawback for catching this fish as an Alliance character is that, well you will need to go to the Barrens to catch these guys.

   On the image here you can see the best locations there are for catching the fish. As you can see there are three spawning zones for the fish, and when i say spawning zones i mean spots where schools of fish will appear that will guarantee you a catch every time you toss that fishing line. Another great thing about having three spots to farm these fish is that by the time you finish catching the fish at the first location, then are finishing the second location and thinking about going to the last one, the pools in the first one have already respawned. Except these spots there is another place that you can farm for these fish, and that is inside the Wailing Caverns instance. only difference is that there are no fishing pools in there but a rather 40-45% chance of catching the fish in open water. So we covered where to find the fish, now lets cover how to sell, cook and market the fish.

   The Deviate Fish when eaten on it's own has a few side effects. These side effects are five in total ranging from small heals, stamina buff as well as the ability to put you to sleep, but there are 2 other effects that are kind of cool and those are the Shrinking and the Party Time. The Shrinking is an effect that is pretty much like the Noggenfogger Elixer and can shrink you. ( Don't worry guys the effects are temporary, it WILL grow back up ... so where was i ), while the Party Time effect basically makes your character start doing random emotes and dance and laugh. This effect can be dispelled, but lets be honest if you dispel that effect you have no soul ... or you are a politician.

   But even with those two effects the Deviate Fish is not a big seller because of them but rather to the effects that it can have if you cook it. So if you have the Recipe then you can make it's cooked form which is Deviate Savory Delight. The best thing about this is that it can make you end up looking like a, and now get this, a Pirate or a Ninja!

   When we say ninja, the first thing we end up thinking is something like the guy on the left ( Scorpion for those who have never heard of Mortal Combat ), while when we hear about Pirate we think of ... ahh .. what do we think of, uhh i know, Polly wants a cracker talking parrot. But that's beside the point, whatever we think is not important, what's important is that they sell a lot if you do it right and can net in some great profits.

   So, after covering the where and what, lets get down to the last part in which we discuss the marketing and selling strategy.

   Best way to sell these is in stacks of 5's and 20's. One of the things you want to check out first is the competition on the server, usually it's low to none but still check it out, and check out the prices. On my server i was in a bit of luck and managed to find a seller selling 40 stacks of raw Deviate Fish for 20g/stack. Bought them all out, posted 1 stack of 20's for 200g and 4 stacks of 5's for 50g/stack, while the rest i cooked and posted on the AH for 250g/stack. I managed to sell about 30 stacks in 1 day. I'm not saying you will always find deals like that but if you see their prices being low at under 100g buy them out then repost them at 250 or even higher if you think you can fence them, and watch your profits soar.

   And last but not least, this item is an item that people generally don't know about unless they've tried it out in the past, so you want to make a macro that you can post in trade channel that will advertise it a bit. Making a ad macro for this is easy, simply put Ninja and Pirate and anything in between those two and it's a formula for success.

   So we covered the what, the where and the how, and now the only thing you have left to do is go find some chillout music if you decide to do some fishing, or go and dominate that part of the market and watch your profits.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.