Can we talk a bit about the spearfishing minigame?
First of all I'd like to say I've spent quite some time interacting with the game to farm Cod for recipes. I'd like to give my thoughts on it, and see what others' thoughts are as well.
Positives:
- It's a lot more fun than clicking a node and waiting
- It's more skill-based, which I view as a good thing personally
- The interface looks nice, and is typically very responsive
- Keeps the bots at bay
Negatives:
- Sometimes when I gather fish, they don't show up in the list at the top as acquired. Maybe a bug?
- Gathering from these nodes now takes significantly longer, making farming a particular fish very tedious (This is the big one for me)
I feel like the novelty of the new game wears off VERY fast after a few hours of using it. In the old system, if you wanted a particular fish you'd select the appropriate gig head, Veteran's Trade the other fish you usually catch at that size in the node, and just cross your fingers. Even if you got unlucky and got 0-1 of your target fish, you didn't spend too long sitting at the node. In the new system, you have to wait out the entire timer, hoping you get a fish. This becomes TEDIOUS. Since there are no gig heads anymore, you can't "filter out" fish that are outside of the size range you wish to catch. This weakens Veteran's Trade, since you can only filter out one particular fish. Just sitting around staring at the interface waiting for that medium, slow fish to come up is flat-out not fun. It's tedious.
I'm not one to complain without adding suggestions on how to fix it. I've thought of a couple of possible ideas to float, but I'd be lying if I said I felt very confident either would work. There's a lot to consider here, and I trust the dev team to weigh options much more than myself. Nevertheless, here they are:
- Bring gig heads back. If you put on a medium gig head, it would make large and small fish less likely to appear. Same with other sizes. This would increase your efficiency, and make it a more fun and more active minigame to play while targeting specific fish.
- Include a skill that makes the last fish you speared more likely to appear. Call it "Schooling Fish" or something. The downside to this is that you could still get unlucky and just not see the fish you want until you've already waited around doing nothing at the node for over half of it's duration. Perhaps that's better for balance though?
- Include a skill that allows you to gather more than one of a specific fish per spearing attempt, even if you only hit a single fish. This feels like the weakest fix to me. It does nothing to make the game more active or fun when targeting a specific fish, it just makes it more productive. This also feels like it could be troublesome if you spear multiple fish at once by lining them up. Perhaps it only gives you extra of the closest fish?
An additional point: GP feels almost useless on the new system. Veteran's Trade is weaker than ever, so it's hardly worth using. Bated Breath just rewards you by letting you wait longer at the same node, hoping the fish you want swims across. Large size fish don't matter much outside of GP generation from Thaliak's Favor, and since it takes 3 large fish to give 150gp, and Nature's Bounty costs 100gp and you would need to use it 3 times, it's a net loss of GP usually. The only method I've found any success with for targeting fish and using GP was to...
-Use Nature's Bounty and hope your fish shows up, spear it to start stacking Angler's Art. Do this until you have a full stack of Angler's Art.
- Pop Cordials or wait for GP regen while you're still stacked on AA.
- Dump all this GP on a single node. Veteran's Trade whatever fish feels best for weeding out things you don't want to catch, then pop Bated Breath to continue waiting at the node as long as possible.
This doesn't make the fish you want much more likely to appear, it just lets you get the most use out of a single Veteran's Trade. It still doesn't feel very good at all, and it doesn't fix the main problem, which is how anti-fun waiting around for the fish you want to show up is. The more common the fish the better it is, of course. Unfortunately most very common fish are completely useless, so you won't be consistently fishing for them.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the new minigame!