Project Gorgon -- Something Smells Fishy Here . . .

I did it! I hit level 70 in Knife Fighting yesterday and then stared down that long long tunnel hoping to find a way to gain 360,000 councils to buy access to levels 71-80.

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It's not all hopeless though . . . I mean I did this before for Animal Handling. It can be done again! It just takes a lot of self-control to not buy anything for a couple weeks and as long as you play steadily and do your daily missions every day . . . I got this.

In the meantime, I turned my attention to something else: Knife Fighting Synergy levels. What are those? Lemme explain that.

Each combat skill has a certain number of levels that can be earned by hitting milestones in other skills -- both combat skills and other skills alike. It's how I was able to obtain level 83 in Animal Handling when level 80 is the cap. That's nothing though, if I was to get all the synergy levels for Knife Fighting, then my cap would be level 89 instead of 80 because there are the following 9 possible synergy levels for Knife Fighting:

1. Cooking level 10
2. Cooking level 60
3. Fishing level 35
4. Fishing level 65
5. Orcish language level 25
6. Sword level 25
7. Sword level 55
8. Unarmed combat level 33
9. Unarmed combat level 55

This morning I took a quick look at what I could get done as soon as possible.  I already had Cooking skill way past 10, but my Fishing skill was close as well as Sword and Unarmed Combat.

So I got a basic sword and headed to the Goblin Keep dungeon in Eltibule for some level farming with my high level Animal Handling pets by my side. They make this kind of stuff a lot easier. After an hour, I had level 25 in Sword and that made me level 72 in Knife Fighting

Next I unequipped my weapons and started punching zombies in Kur Tower. I should have brought along some poison resistance by the way, because being poisoned by zombies is the worst part of this experience. After an hour or so of punching zombies, I was level 33 in unarmed combat and level 73 in Knife Fighting.

I guess punching things is the same motion as stabbing things? shrug. SYNERGY!

The next synergy level on my list . . . fishing.

Thanks Shallow Eltibule lakes . . . you helped.

So here's the deal with fishing lately in Project Gorgon.  It sucks.  Why?  Well, they made a change recently that improves swimming.  Unfortunately at the same time, this change kind of ruined the ease of catching fish pre-change.

You used be able to simply click on a fish and tap the "Catch Fish" button. At that point Auto-swim would take over and you'd be guided right to your fish.  Easy stuff.

Now you stay on the surface when you swim unless you press the "F" key to dive down into the water. If you press "Catch Fish" now, it gives you an error message in the middle of your screen that says, "Can't auto-move while underwater. You must swim closer!"

SPAM CLICK, SPAM CLICK, SPAM CLICK, GOTCHA FISH!

Now it's all about how great your depth perception is as you manually swim toward the fish's direction. (Shallow lakes in Eltibule help as well, jus' sayin'.)

The two other options for raising your fishing skill are filleting fish for experience (although it's in the Cooking crafting skill, it gives Fishing experience not Cooking experience) or Ice Fishing.

"Collect Fish" is a little misleading here . . . 

Over in the Kur Mountains a guy named Ukorga will teach you the arts of ice fishing, and even will sell you a saw and string to help lay your traps.  The higher the level of trap, the more time it takes and the better the yield (I would assume . . . I only have the 5 minute traps currently, but they go all the way up to 8 hour traps).

Basically you lay a trap down on some ice, go away and do something else for a while, then come back and see what your trap caught. Super easy and no grabbing of fish.

Also, super boring. I don't know how fun fishing is in any MMO. Free Realms and Wizard101 were about as fun as I've seen fishing get.

Now, the thing that's interesting to me in Project Gorgon is that the Swimming changes that were put in the game were "in preparation" of something else. It said so right in the patch notes.  My initial reaction was . . . OH MAN WE'RE GETTING AN UNDERWATER ZONE!  But, I don't know. It would kind of make more sense if fishing got a little bit of an overhaul.

There is a lot of room for improvement here, and especially considering that fishing isn't even really fishing. It's more like catching fish with your bare hands or setting a trap. I'd love to see fishing boats and nets make an arrival into the world! I'd love to see an actual fishing rod that you cast out into a lake!  There's so much that could be done here.

Not to mention the horrible dead zone that is currently Fishing Skill levels 20-45.  You're supposed to be catching eels and sharks in Sun Vale at this level, but the spawn rates and availability of these fish is abysmal . . . and that's probably because Sun Vale isn't a finished zone. The large rivers that run through the zone aren't even operational at the moment.

Hopefully that changes soon though (like in two days) since we had this cool announcement:

YES! Fun in the sun and sand is exactly what I need.

An overhaul to fishing would certainly make that skill grind up to level 65 more appealing from my point of view.  What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Happy Dueling!