I took up engineering on my hunter and eventually made an ornate spyglass. As a hunter, I don't need an ornate spyglass since eye's of the eagle is more useful, so I sent it over to my lowbie warrior. I found it to be a novelty item really. Not overly useful.
It makes for nice screenshots, but that's about all the use I found for it.
Well, I was bored so thought I would work on my fishing and cooking skills, so I went to the shore of Ru'Theran Village and started to fish. I don't know if anybody else feels this way, but fishing in this game is tedious. I play in 1280x1024 resolution and that little fishing bobber takes up a tiny portion of the screen. Being required to stare at that bobber for long periods of time is harder to do than anything else in this game. :P
Anyways, while I was fishing it occured to me to try using the ornate spyglass before I fished to maybe get a larger than life view of the bobber. Hopefully, this would let me pay attention to other things (reading, watching anime, tv, etc...) while still be able to notice the bobber off the corner of my eye on my monitor.
It worked!
Normally, the bobber would be about 1.5x the size of my mouse cursor (holding the cursor over the bobber would often impede my view). Looking at the bobber through the ornate spyglass makes it about 10x the size of the mouse cursor (not including the blue&red feathers and the ring on the top).
There is a problem with this method, tho.
It's difficult to spot the bobber as the field of view is so much smaller looking through the spyglass. A way around this is to position yourself in a way to narrow down the window where your bobber can land.
The way fishing works in this game is you have about a 90º field of view infront of you from which you can fish. If you're facing the water straight on, then the bobber can land in the water anywhere from 45º left of center or 45º right of center. Now, if you face the water, then turn 90º to the right you've narrowed down the window where the bobber can land to only the left side of your screen.
If you play around with the direction your body is facing compared to the water and other obstructions you can narrow down the spot where the bobber can land to a small area. As you try to fish you'll now sometimes get the message "Your cast didn't land in fishable water." Just keep hitting the fishing icon until you get the fishing meter to pop up.
Now, I can watch anime (read manga) on my other computer and see off the corner of my eye if the bobber gets a tug. Hopefully, this is useful for some others out there. (^^)b
Happy fishing.