fishing skill also matters for achievements like Mr.Pinchy. I think.
 

Upping my fishing skill involves logging out next to the fishing daily quest giver in Orgrimmar. I get frustrated at the RNG gods when I grind out fishing at the top end...
 

Deepsea Sagefish for Int or Sprit, and Lavascale Catfish for Mastery are the two best foods for healers (and most casters) and tanks, respectively, and both require fishing skill. I'd argue fishing skill matters more now than it did in Wrath, when any important fish could be caught in pools.

Fish for Agility and Strength are available in pools however, so it's not universal.
 

Seems like schools are more plentiful and give up more fish than in Wrath, also. I'm a bit disappointed at the high supply/low cost the strength and agility foods are fetching.

I have the salty achievement and like fishing. I'm bored with it in Cata so far.
 

Basikx, there's no RNG on fishing skillups. You get a skill point every x number of fish -- I think it's currently every 10th fish for the 475-525 grind.

I think kliev is right about skill mattering more now, with the caveat that you still needed fishing skill until sometime mid-WotLK.

And the other annoying thing about fishing is the daily in SW/Org. Now that it's set up for lowbies, the rewards are pretty worthless, and it's not even giving enough gold to make it worthwhile.
 

Fish the lava pools south of Hyjal if you're going to skill up fishing. On top of volatile fires you also get melted axes that vendor for more than 5G each. Plus, I was getting skill ups every 8th-9th catch, instead of every 10 elsewhere =)
 

I don't have fishing past 100 on about 25 different characters.
 

Fishing for Int-food is actually quite a good income source. I managed to sell deepsea sagefishes for up to 20g a piece.

Not the greatest income but every once in a while when I want to listen to a audio book I fish. It's quite relaxing.
 

I'd forgotten that fishing from pools no longer relies on skill. What a senseless change that was.
 

It was a change that shows us why Blizzard is sitting on top of a mountain of money...

As they ramped up the difficulty of heroics and are forcing people to be on their toes in dungeons they are turning other parts of the game into social network games... Fishing is an activity that can keep a non-gamer (and I do mean a non-gamer, someone who doesn't usually plays any games but is on WoW due to family/friends playing it) paying a sub for months.
Right now I just wish that Blizzard would do WoW and Titan for Joe Casual but would use their resources to create a really challenging MMO aimed at the 400K plus players who really want some challenge. And by challenge i don't mean grind... Well, they have the resources for it and even though mass market is where all the money is, you can still have a quite profitable niche as EVE as shown us.