I Have a Meh/Tolerate Relationship with Fishing

This is the fun underwater breathing/swimming form you get with one of the Underlight Angler traits. I really don't know why, since you also get water walking, and generally if you're questing you would never have your fishing pole equipped. Also, if you have a M.O.L.L.E. or Katy they work great for mailing unique lures when you're out fishing (since you can only hold one in your bags at a time).

It's similar to my Blah/Irate relationship with pet battling or my Loathe/Hate relationship with PvP. It really depends on how bored I am with the current expansion and/or how much I want the rewards for a particular activity (you will be mine, Dutiful Gruntling-riding-a-Vicious-War-Wolf. And then I will never PvP again. Unless there's another artifact tint I want, I haven't looked that far into it yet.)

If you are looking at getting the Underlight Angler artifact, this guide has all the information you'll need.

But here are some highlights in case you skim it too quickly:

1. The achievement you need to unlock the artifact quest requires some rare fish that you need special bait to catch. You can catch these in pools in the same location as the fish you are trying to catch, but more importantly, you can buy them from the Auction House. Fishing up the last few fish I needed for the achievement was simple after a trip to the AH using the bait chart in the above-linked guide.

2. Pay attention to how to use these baits correctly. I wasted an AH-bought Swollen Murloc Egg because I cracked it open thinking it would have a bait item in it, and it actually hatched a murloc that danced away, leaving me with a 3-minute buff, and I was nowhere near water at the time (and particularly far from Highmountain water, where I needed to fish with the buff). There is also a Stunned Angry Shark and I found that it disappears from your bags after a minute when you fish it up, so you have to use it immediately. It places a shark beside you that flops around, you kill it, and you get several Seabottom Squid as loot.

3. Two things that confused me at first, people at the Fisherfriends that were throwing a fish in that summoned an npc that didn't drop loot (on most of them, with the exception of the one in Suramar). When they die there's a buff that makes you catch the particular item the Fisherfriend wants for rep/item, you really need to join a group to have a near constant buff or you will spend most of your time catching junk fish. (I'm looking at you, Silver Mackerel. Yes, I called you junk, and I don't feel the least bit bad about it.)
Also, I heard people throwing fish back into the water a lot when I was in one of these groups. Every now and then you'll catch a fish that you can toss in the water for a +5 fishing buff, up to a max of 800. This was pretty useless to me, since I was already at 800 fishing, and I often needed space in my bags so I would sometimes just throw them back in as well. DON'T. The people throwing them in had the Underlight Angler equipped, which means that they were getting 50 AP for every fish they threw in. Before you get the Underlight Angler, you just get the fishing buff fish (or if you accidentally forgot to equip your Underlight Angler) but they still have a vendor price of 10 gold apiece, which is a pretty good chunk of change.  So vendor, don't throw.

4. Getting XP to fill up the fishing pole gets annoying by the end. At first the 50 AP per fish seems like a lot, but it never increases and I'm now 16 traits in and I need somewhere around 14k AP (or 280 AP fish) for my next trait. Meh. I just realized after looking at the artifact calculator on Wowhead that the duration of lures goes up with the traits purchased. I was wondering why I was getting 11 minutes now on the Ancient Vrykul Ring when I was getting 10 minutes, so that's good to know. Anyway, that's enough time to fish up around 45 Oodlefjisk for 2,250 AP, which is how I wasted spent most of today. Next time Sha'leth is up (she's the Suramar Fisherfriend) I'm going to join a group to buy Sleeping Murlocs from her (the item she uses as currency is easy to get quickly in a big group where Magicus is summoned over and over again. He drops 25-50 of her currency each kill). When you slap the sleeping murloc (or rather, use the item) it runs around dropping Seerspine Puffers everywhere. I'm hoping I can gather at least 50 a pop and maybe get the rest of my artifact filling done without having to fish anymore.

5. I forgot to add, when you fish up a rare bait that you don't need (i.e. Any bait that doesn't give an AP fish for every cast is pretty much a waste of my time) be sure to sell it on the Auction House! The people who don't have the achievement yet need the special bait to get the rare fish, and that means that they sell really well, anywhere from a couple hundred gold to a few thousand gold depending on bait/market.

**UPDATE** 

The Sleeping Murlocs drop lots of regular fish, so the AP fish rate is much lower than I'd hoped. I'm making a chart to track how many I'm getting, but it looks like between 10-24 (26 was my highest but it seems to have been an outlier).