First and foremost this suggestion has NOTHING to do with fighting styles.
Explanation: Right now fishing is in an odd place. Some people like it because its a nice way to take a break from the faster parts of the game, other people don’t like it because its too slow. Why not make a middle ground to satisfy both groups?
Fishing techniques are varying minigames with different complexity and difficulty, the more complex and difficult the minigame is, the better your loot chances are.
These minigames would have no specific stat requirements because that’d suck.
(Imagine if you needed 100 points in strength or magic to “learn” the fishing technique you actually want to enjoy)
You could learn these minigames at different places throughout the bronze sea.
Redwake: Basic Fishing.
What we have now, lowest rewards, easiest to complete.
Palo Town: Focused Fishing (from AFR)
This one is dependent on you using shiftlock to control it.
When you catch a fish, the half circle will apear, the white line represents where you’re aiming and the green (or red) line is where the fish is.
Moving the mouse controls the white line and the goal is to keep it near the red line, which will turn green when you’re within range.
When you’re in the target area, progress fills until you catch the fish.
When you’re not in the target area, progress depletes until you lose the fish.
Rarer fish would move more erratically and be harder to catch.
(if you’re noticing those 5 unfilled diamond shapes in the bottom, those are completely unrelated)
Sailor’s Lodge: Dredging (from Dredge)
The indicator moves around the red circle, when it crosses into green areas and you click, you fill up the progress bar showing how close the fish is on the left.
Missing the green areas would deplete the progress, unlike the game this minigame comes from, missing too many times would make you lose the fish.
Higher rarity fish and items would have the green areas be smaller.
There’s a few parts of the UI here that wouldn’t be relevant to AO’s setting, such as the fish being “costal” or the stock being “high”.
Each of these minigames would offer different challenges and different rewards.
Of course it would (and should) be possible to catch everything with basic fishing as it is now, using focused fishing or dredging would give you better chances.
There’s plenty of other fishing minigames out there that could also be implemented to add more variety into the system, everybody will have their own preferences.
I’m sure SOMEBODY can come up with better names for these lol.
