Just went through this on my paladin, and will pass along my tips. Note you will get to keep your artifact fishing pole in BFA…it does not go away like the other artifact weapons
2 useful references
Wowhead Underlight Angler
Wowhead Bigger Fish to Fry
First off- why? Well you get to keep that artifact. It gives you walk on water, underwater breathing, reduced agro radius while fishing, can port to a pool, and you make extra money fishing up vendor trash boots. At least one toon should have this, but really any toon that may eventually want to walk on water, breathe underwater, or have reduced agro radius this might be a nice thing to do.
Steps
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Get to 110. Don’t bother with this until 110.
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Buy/make elixirs of water walking. Around 10 should be good enough. More on this later. Get a fishing pole from the vendor in Dal, and buy some basic +skill lures.
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Join the fishing raid. Under group finder, select custom, find a group, and enter ‘drowned mana’ into the search box to filter results. Join that raid. If there is no raid, make the raid.
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Use a fishing addon like Fishing Buddy. You can play around in its settings with /fb while you are fishing to get it to work. Each option has a tooltip hover over it. Fishing buddy has a lot of really nice features that speed up fishing, such as double right click to cast, auto lure, or auto toss in trophy fish for the bonus xp.
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Go to Conjurer Margoss. To get there, you can see an island in New Dalaran just east of Violet Citadel around where the pet guy is. You can fly north to the floating island, or use a glider to glide down there.
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Fish up drowned mana in the pool near Margoss in the fishing raid. Every time the water sparkles, you have a high chance of getting drowned mana. You need 20-40 to buy 20+ arcane lures. Arcane lures double your chance of getting special bait. The way the water sparkles is people toss in an item which summons a water elemental, which is then killed, and upon death makes the water sparkle for a while. Because you are in the fishing raid, lots of people kill it fast, and lots of people have these items so you can nonstop fish the sparkling water. This speeds up the process a lot.
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Follow the table under rare fish in the Legion fishing guide by zone. There are tabs in that table by zone which tell you what the lure is, and what the special fish are per the zone. Track the achievement Bigger Fish To Fry (achievement tab/professions/fishing, enable tracking of that achievement). For instance Azsuna has 3 fish you need to catch, the Leyshimmer Blenny, the Nar’thalas Hermit, and the Ghostly Queenfish. You will never catch these ever unless you use the special lure. To get the special lure, your best bet is to fish schools (track fish on map), and use an arcane lure. Conch gives you the Hermit, brooch gives you ghostlys. The lure for the Blenny is weird- you get a toenail, which after a couple minutes spawns a creature that attacks you, and when it dies it gives you the slime which is the lure. You only need to catch 1 of these special fish each, so that is why you track the achievement.
Special advice by sections from my experience
Do not attempt to level to 800 before you go for special fish. You will get to 800 by going for the special fish, and you can always catch fish regardless of fishing level in schools.
Azsuna Fly the rivers inland looking for schools. You can get a loop going. The brooch you should use in the lake north of Narthalas Academy. This is where the elixir of water walking is nice, you can stand on the lake in a place where there are no passing giants. Note if you get multiple lures, do the brooch first for ghostlies because that pool lasts a long time, and you can get many attempts at finding the other lures from that pool. Also you generate a lot of ghostlys which turn in (left click them) in the water for fishing xp, which will help elsewhere.
Val’Sharah There is a big lake NE of Andutalah near the border of Highmountain that is a good agro free zone with a lot of fish pools. The only problem here is you can fish them out fast. I will make one clockwise trip around the center of the island, then fish in open water until the pools respawn. It is faster than trying to find fish on the rivers in the rest of the zone. Another option here is to hit this pool, then fly up the hill to the Highmountain area and fish those schools, alternating between zones.
Highmountain the best spot is the lake west of Riverbend, and the river running south. There you will find plenty of schools. Leapfrog past existing fishermen to the next pool. If it is heavily camped, the river that goes counter clockwise around Trueshot lodge from Riverbend is pretty decent.
Stormheim The river north of Dreadwake landing, that runs SE of Skold Ashil is very productive. The Vyrkul ring lure which lets you catch Oodelfjisk is the thing you want to do first. You can only see those pools with the lure on, and those pools persist like the ghostly pools in Azsuna, but you can bank fish those in a safe spot SE from Dreadwake with zero agro and rapidly get the fist you need. This is my go-to fishing spot for grinding artifact power on the pole at low skill levels.
Suramar North of the road and SW of Moon Guard Bastian is a series of rivers, and right near their confluence are a number of aggro free schools that you can easily fish and which quickly respawn. Took me a while to find this fishing spot, but it is one of the best places in the game and few people know about it.
Ocean The best spot to fish ocean fish is in the harbor area near Suramar city. If you can disguise as an elf and you have water walking elixirs, you can find quickly respawning schools in this harbor area which will rapidly get this skill feat done. Equip your weapon before using the Stunned Angry Shark lure. Note his corpse will sink to the bottom, and the squid are in its corpse, and if you are really low level he may be a hard fight.
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Once you have the Bigger Fish to Fry achievement, exit the game. Shut it completely down. Even Blizzard launcher. Then restart. The game is slow to recognize you have that achievement, and closing it down will speed up the next part. Go to any area with schools and fish until you get the Luminous Pearl quest item. I can say that until I shut down the game, it refused to drop for me.
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Go back to Dalaran, turn in the quest item. Move north towards Violet Citadel until Nat Pagle spawns and gives you a quest. Follow the guide on how to do that in the references. You now get your artifact pole.
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Now it is time to level up that pole. Go back to Highmountain, to that Oodlefjisk school and fish that. Keep track of how many times you level up that pole, and use this planner. You are going to want to have at least 6 level ups on the pole before you go back to Dalaran to upgrade the pole, and ultimately you want at least 12 points in the pole before you call it quits, as your minimum aim is to unlock Underlight Blessing and Way of the Flounder before you quit. I normally like to get 6 points from fishing, then go train the pole (click the giant statue above the pool near the fishing trainer in Dalaran to apply points to your artifact pole). The reason why I go back is the more points you have in the pole, the longer lures last, and with 6 points in, the Oodlefjisk lure lasts long enough for you to get another before the pool expires, letting you infinitely fish there. Note around 13 points in the pole and the artifact power per level up goes way up. So I would have one main fisher (preferably a druid with flight form, super fast fishing), and any alt after that who has the pole just for the abilities quits at 12.
Which fish should you enhance with artifact points? Well there are 3 main ways of doing this.
a. Find the fish that leads to a buff food you like. You can spend time on Wowhead while you are fishing looking up the fish and what recipes use that fish, and decide to go for that fish.
b. Find the fish that sells for the most on the AH, and enhance those
c. Go for the fish that has the easiest schools to hit. Salmon in Highmountain can be easy; Koi in Suramar near my hotspot are easy; Barracuda near Suramar harbor are easy. The rest are harder to get.
Of these, I think a. and b. are of lesser importance as in the BFA expansion likely the money yield on these fish will go down, and odds are you will be using some other food recipe then.
- The long ride to max pole. I would only do this on one toon, preferably a druid with a flight form, but otherwise the main you like to play the most. It is going to take a while to do this. Basically you want to fish that Oodlefjisk hole until you unlock say salmon and something else easier, like Koi/Ocean. Then you want to go fish those schools.
Once you are 3/3 for that fish type, you will get more profit faster by fishing those school types. The reason is when you cast there is a high chance for the school to ‘barrel’ in which the bobber disappears and there is a lootable barrel on the water. The entire school disappears, and in that barrel you wil find lures, your special fish, and your fish, and maybe even trash vendor boots. In one cast then you get maybe 4-5 casts worth of loot, and if you can rapidly hit school after school (best done with a druid in flight form), then you can really bomb your fish yield and advance your pole skill.
Note for druid that you can go in ground travel form and walk on water to rapidly move between schools, or fly with zero delay between schools.
Notes on making money doing this-
The special fish you get from the lures for that zone will vendor for 10g each. You can barrel a bunch of schools quickly and vendor them on say the mammoth mount for quick cash, but you give up that AP you get from them doing so. THe school fish themselves have AH value, and if they do not sell, you can vendor them along with the vendor trash boots you get along the way.
The big way to make money is lures though. Those lures are unique, so you can only have 1 in your inventory at a time. But if you mail it to an alt, who then puts them up on the AH, they are no longer in your inventory. If you have a bunch of alts, you can load them all up with lures as you fish, and still have a lure running the entire time you are hitting those schools. I just sold one lure for 3K gold yesterday, so they do add up to cash. Many people who have gold and just want that pole will shortcut the fishing process and shell out 50K or so on a full set of fishing lures to get Bigger Fish to Fry as fast as possible. As this pole will be in the game for a while, you can likely count on those lures retaining value long after the fish they are used for are no longer valuable. Or you can just fish on your main until you have a full set of lures for the next alt, then run that alt.
I would like to point out that fishing is a good thing to do while you are waiting in queue for LFR. For instance, I was trying to get my weekly LFRs on Dokily, my dwarf paladin, and was queueing as dps or heals. Most of the queues come up fast for heals, and if you switch spec from dps, your mana starts at zero, and you are in this mess of joining a raid with zero mana as the tank pulls. So I needed something to do in heal spec. Hence fish.
I use equip sets to define the gear for the spec, then drag the artifact fishing pole to a bar next to that equip set icon. So click for pole, click for the set. Simple. Speeds stuff up when you get jumped. Also the fastest way to get your LFR done is to simultaneously queue for all LFR raids you want to do, so that when one ends, the other insta pops as it counts the time you spent in the first instance as time in queue for your 2nd.
UPDATE 20Feb2019
I have been running a number of alts through their artifact poles and can pass on tips if you want to do that well.
First getting drowned mana is harder now. Raid groups are not there. So you just grind it out. I go until I have one sparkling water’s worth of drowned mana (when you summon boss he buffs pool). Typically this is around 20 lures, and enough to knock out the achievement.
Next I start wtih Suramar to rapidly fish pools to get the journal that you need to train fish tracking. You can do this right in legion, without any other zones. Hit lots of pools, and Suramar is good for that.
Once I have my find fish skill, I will go to the zone where I have the most hand me down lures. Arcane lure + the rare fish lure and fish that until the rare fish lure expires, with a focus upon hitting fish circles during buff. This generates a lot of quick skill ups which helps open water fishing. I open water fish if pools are camped or hard to find/widely spaced.
For choices on fish on the artifact pole, I will pick the skill that will barrel up the lure type I have a harder time getting. Good choices here are val’sharah which has widely separated pools. you can fly, barrel, fly, barrel and cover a lot of ground to generate lures.
Once I get capped on fish skill, I will just catch one special fish, fish out the pool, find another pool, and lure with a different type of special fish I have yet to catch. The aim here is to quickly complete bigger fish to fry and get the pole before I restock lures.
When I first get the pole, I will go hit Stormheim/oodlefjsk. Go about 2 lures of that to get water walking and 3/3 on a barrel fish of your choice.
Then go barrel the one you just trained. Mail off any lures you get as you find them. Katy Stampwhistle (the pet which summons a mailbox is helpful here). In this way you rack up lures for the next alt. Get enough skill ups so that you can train another school to barrel, then go to town and train that pole again. Then barrel that new school and mail lures. If you do this right you can get 2-3 sets of zone lures on stuff you barrel, which will set up the next 2 alts or so. When the pole is trained to the point where you have the main goodies in the tree, hop to another alt.
