WoWGrrl's World

Fishing is part of my weekly gaming experience on World of Warcraft.

Sometimes it's to re-stock my own supplies for my two raiding toons, sometimes it's to gather up supplies so I can donate to the success of our raid group by putting down a Fish Feast before a boss fight, and sometimes it's just because I've got some time to kill and don't want to spend it flying or running across landscape, or toon-hopping.

With the release of the 3.0.9 patch, there was a big change in my fishing that I noticed right away, and all of my fishermen friends noticed and commented, too: The lakes are overrun with Pygmy Suckerfish!

It's like nine out of every ten fish I pull in, I pull in a Pygmy Suckerfish along with them.

Why More Pygmy Suckerfish?

My guess is that with all of us running around in Northrend for the last however many months has polluted the place, and the Suckerfish are an answer to cleaning it up, and this is just the beginning of the signs that we'll see of this polution.

They do say, after all, that it's the fish and the dolphins and stuff like that who are first affected by these types of changes in our environment, and the nasty spewing of crap all those Engineering flying machines make have to add up somewhere!

I'm kidding, of course ;)

I think the real reason was that the drop rate of Pygmy Suckerfish was too low according to Blizzard, and since they're a base component of MP5 flasks which already have other expensive components (and are used for other Elixirs as well), Blizzard decided to cut us a break.

Only now, there are TOO many Pygmy Suckerfish in my opinion. Whenever I go fishing for raid food, I'll easily pull in 60-100 fish, and I'm getting some 90% catches of Suckerfish too. While this is great for the # of fish I'm catching for Achievements, it's almost like I'm catching a whole lot of garbage with my raid fish now too.

Finding Ways To Use Pygmy Suckerfish

Since there's this huge abundance of Pygmy Suckerfish now, and I've got a couple of hundred vials of the stuff after a small fishing trip to gather mats for a raiding Fish Feast or 20, I decided I'd take a peek around and see what else I could do with the stuff which would make it more valuable in some way to me.

The first thing I did was satisfy a curiosity that has been in place ever since I first saw the vial of Pygmy Oil and its informational message of "Use: Drink it". Since I had about 60 vials on me at the time, I decided to see what exactly WOULD happen if I drank it.

Drink It

The first Pygmy Oil you drink, you gain a 10 minute buff which lets you know if you hover over it that "you feel smaller".

Each additional Pygmy Oil you drink stacks upon the first, and you shrink a little smaller each time.

It takes 11 Pygmy Oil to gain the final "Pygmified" effect which in itself is a buff that lasts for 10 minutes and does nothing but modify your appearance for a while.

Make Potions and Elixirs

When Pygmy Suckerfish were tough to come by, I didn't even bother to look at what other recipes I could make with it besides the Flask of Pure Mojo that I needed for raid nights on my Holy Priest.

Now that I've got an overabundance, I'm happy to see that there are useful things I can turn my Pygmy Oil into.

For those battles where you want to accomplish more and you don't need to take either a Health or Mana potion in order to do so, consider bringing along a Potion of Speed. It is a potion that requires level 70 to use, and its effect is that it increases your haste rating by 500 for 15 seconds. But like all other potions, only one can be used per battle, so make sure you're ready to capitalize on it.

There's also the Potion of Wild Magic which uses Pygmy Oil in combination with Lichbloom to create a potion which increases both your critical strike rating and general spellpower by 200 each - a great little potion for casters!

For general leveling of your characters through Northrend, or for turning cheap Pygmy Suckerfish into an Elixir that can likely be sold easily for profit on most realms, consider making a bunch of Guru's Elixir, which is a Battle Elixir that increases all of your stats by 20 for an hour, but requires level 70 to consume.

Even if you're not an Alchemist yourself - if you can find a guildmate or friend, or even someone on the Trade line who can take your materials and produce the potions and elixirs - you can benefit HUGE from this overabundance of Suckerfish in our Northrend waters.

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Related posts:

1. Northrend Alchemy Discoveries
2. Northrend Daily Cooking Quests: Quick and Cheap
3. The Occasional Fisherman on the World of Warcraft