The Fishing Achievements Nobody Warns You About

People underestimate how much of a grind the fishing achievements actually are because "go fish somewhere" sounds relaxing compared to raiding. It isn't, not for these specific ones. I tracked my own attempts across all of them, and I want to write down the real numbers because they're a lot more useful than "it's rare, keep trying."

1.Mr. Pinchy

Mr. Pinchy resets on a roughly four-hour cooldown once you've caught him, and the achievement itself needs the pet to actually drop from him, not just the catch. I went through several failed pulls before I got the pet — my fifth actual attempt at him, spaced out over multiple four-hour resets across more than one play session, before it finally hit. If you're farming this alongside something else in the same zone, that reset timer works in your favor: you're not sitting there waiting, you're doing something else and just checking back.

2.Old Ironjaw

This is the one that actually broke me a little. I sat down expecting maybe a few hundred casts based on how Mr. Pinchy went, and ended up well past 4,000 casts before he finally showed up. The drop chance is genuinely somewhere around 0.1–0.3% per cast, which statistically means you've got roughly an 80% chance of having him by 1,000 attempts — but that's an average, not a guarantee, and I blew way past that number without a single bite. I caught the Wandering (a different rare fish) twice while grinding for him, which tells you how much RNG was actively working against me specifically that day.

If you're multiple thousand casts in and still nothing, that's not bad luck breaking some rule — it's exactly what a sub-1% chance looks like when it goes long. It happens to some people at 100 casts and other people at 10,000.

3.Dark Herring — the lucky one

After Old Ironjaw, Dark Herring felt like it barely cost me anything: around 350 casts and it was done. I'm including this specifically so the Old Ironjaw numbers above don't scare you off the whole category — the exact same fishing skill, the exact same player, and one fish took twelve times longer than the other. That's the honest range you should expect across these.

4.Old Crafty — the one I actually messed up

This is the story I tell people when they ask why I stopped fishing mid-session and walked away from the keyboard. Old Crafty spawns around Orgrimmar and Stormwind, which means fishing for it as a recognizable name on a PvP-heavy server gets you noticed fast — I got killed by enemy players more than once just trying to sit still long enough to fish. The Valley of Honor turned out to be the best spot I found, with noticeably less traffic than the main gates, and an Elixir of Camouflage helps you go unnoticed for a while.

Here's the actual mistake: after around 600 attempts with no luck, I was frustrated enough that when Old Crafty finally did bite, I fumbled the loot window and lost him. Then it happened again a short while later, same result — caught him, didn't secure the achievement, lost him again, because I was too tilted to slow down and actually click properly. Three total catches of the same rare fish in one day and zero achievements to show for it. The lesson wasn't about technique at all, it was about knowing when to stop fishing for the day instead of pushing through frustration and making the same mistake twice.

5.Coin Master

Coin Master needs every coin type from the Dalaran fountains — copper, silver and gold — and the order you complete them in is entirely random. I actually got my silver coins achievement before my copper one, which surprised me since copper should logically come first if you're fishing evenly, but the fountain doesn't work that way. Chromie's gold coin was the very last one I needed out of the whole set, and I ended up finishing the entire achievement line in around 8,500 total casts across the whole coin-fishing session.

One moment I'll remember from this: another player next to me was grinding the same achievement and mentioned he only needed one more coin. I happened to have two spares of exactly the coin he needed and traded him one on the spot. Later I predicted, almost to the cast, how many more attempts he'd need before he'd get it — and I was right within a couple of casts. After thousands of casts yourself, you start to get a feel for how the RNG actually behaves, even if you can't control it.

6.The Booty Bay Fishing Extravaganza

I want to mention this one honestly even though it didn't work out: I tried to place in the weekly Booty Bay fishing contest and got repeatedly killed by other players hunting the same event pools. On a populated server, everyone doing the event at once turns the contest into as much a PvP survival test as a fishing one. I didn't place that week. Worth attempting again with a plan for where to fish rather than just showing up at the obvious spot with everyone else.

7.What I'd actually tell you before you start

Budget for variance, not a fixed number. Some of these took me hundreds of casts, one took thousands, and none of that tells you anything reliable about how long yours will take. Set a real stopping point for each session — Old Crafty taught me that pushing through frustration doesn't get you the achievement faster, it just gets you to make the same mistake twice in the same day.