Does gear help fishing?Follow

Gear seems to help a bit as I upgraded my gears on the way to 50, less fish escaped, lost a few less lures, and caught a few extra high quality fish, no where near as big a change as you see while levelling botany or mining.

Sadly as a level 50 fisher, I can tell you there isn't that much money to be made , do it for fun rather than gil.
Why you ask, its because almost all of the fish over level 30 or so have no use other than handing in for leves , or selling for 10-20 gil at a vendor.
the very few that are useful tend towards being HQ fish required for leve hands in, lazy fishers will buy these. red coral is useful but its likely a saturated market on most servers (if it isn't already botted to hell and back), a few of the fish required for crafting+ meals can sell, but unless your server is selling masses of these types of food, 1 fisher could probably supply the entire needs of the server.

Silver sharks sell for 1k+ gil on my server, however they are a mooched fish and therefore a pain to catch in any number, they are used to make shark oil for alchemy I believe.

Quite why none of the higher level fish were given a use I don't know, its sad spending hours trying to catch a rare legendary fish only to discover it can only go for 22 gil to a vendor, wish they would revisit this.

Quite sad to see that fishing was nerfed to discourage botting, yet the botters are still making money farming shards with miner and botanist. Shards are waaay too epensive anyhow. Imo, shards should be enemy drops in addition to regular items, like it was in FFXI. This will saturate the market and drive down costs. Why on earth does 70%-90% of most crafting costs come from the shards? I recommend that everyone take the time to level all crafting jobs to 10, the shard rewards are staggering. Easy 100k if you do all the level 5 (and sometimes 10) craft quests. Why should the rewards of a level 5 crafting quest net you 200 crystals, which is nearly 10k profit, but some of the level 49 quests and leves don't net a total of 1k in reward? It is seriously unbalanced in that aspect and it is primarily due to the low supply of shards vs the high demand.

In FFXI I loved fishing. Farming Nebimonites on the ferry was my primary source of income. Fishing for fun is great I guess, but what makes it any different from mining or botany, both of which are botted heavily? Should you mine for fun? Should those gathering classes be nerfed as well because they are botted for profit? I hate botters, scum of the earth. I report when I see them. But botting is occurring whether or not you nerf fishing. Focus on the botters, dont squash the economy for the rest of us...

Hopefully future patches will have fish play a more prominent role in new crafting recipes, so there are more outlets for money making.

I'm only level 27 atm but I have been able to market some HQ fish for as high 400 gil a piece. Some NQ fish as high as 200+ gil. Like some are saying here, not a good way to earn reliable income. Do it for enjoyment and consider something caught with any monetary value a bonus.

As for gear, I try to keep my gear as close to level as I can without investing too much. Whether it's helping or not I haven't a clue.

Gathering skill is also important when fishing. If your gathering skill is too low you will fail to catch some fish. If you have not upgraded your gear in a while, you may notice that you will get some bites that are apparently very heavy on the line, bending the rod significantly and you will lose the catch. If you upgrade your Gear and get some higher gathering, you can return to the same places and notice a lot less of those lost catches.

So much like mining/botany, Gathering is used for actually catching, and Perception is used for HQ. But unlike the other two, GP is worthless. I don't wear any accessories while fishing because they only give GP. No need to spend gil repairing rings/amulet/etc if you don't get any bonus for wearing them.

I've actually made a lot of gil just by fishing alone. Their are plenty of fish to sell. Some for crafting. Some for repeatables leves. I can make about 50 to 60k in a hour or two and not have even watch the tv the whole time. Just look up certain fish. Trust me the gil is there

I took fishing to 50 on a whim. You can make some money on HQ coral/whitelip/blacklip/silvershark/misc. On my server the they all stop selling if you try to stuff a 3-hour haul on the market board. No -real- money there right now but your clan will love you for giving them otherwise obnoxious-to-obtain items.

The very low level elementals drop shards, e,g the level 5 water elementals just outside gridania in central shroud drop water shards, I farmed a few while levelling lowbie jobs.

Damn... I wish I had time like that. I'm stuck buying ><. Anyway, heres a recent post on the official forum by Camate, one of the developers...
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/116211-shard-yeilding?p=1556555#post1556555

Greetings,

There has been a lot of discussions and feedback regarding shards and I’d like to respond to what I can.

•Shard yield
The development team understands the shard yield amount to be an extremely delicate issue. They are very carefully looking into whether they increase the amount of shards yielded and how much they would increase it as they give consideration to the economic effects.

•Methods of obtaining shards
Looking at the current shard yield and the amount of shards used in recipes, we are currently looking into new methods of obtaining shards; however, we will not be making it so they simply drop from monsters.

•Crystal and cluster breaking
There have been some comments about the feature in 1.0 where you could break down crystals and clusters, but we do not have plans at the moment to implement this. The concern is that it will become difficult to control the prices of individual shards if they can be produced from crystals and such.

For example, in the future if there are requests to increase the cluster yield, being able to break these down into shards would overflow the market, and as a result it becomes much easier to use clusters, but the prices of shards would drop.

•RMT issue
We understand that there are RMT issues surrounding shards and the STF is after them every day.

We’ve mentioned this many times already, but if you notice any suspicious activity it helps us a lot if you could make a report by going to [System Menu] -> [Support Desk] -> [Contact Us] -> [Report Cheating].

I don't understand why 50 for shards is a bad idea? I can't farm shards as fast as I can buy shards and craft items to make more profit with. That being the case, I feel like shards should be selling higher. I don't understand who is taking the time to farm them when you could just craft instead? There is no XP to be had from farming them, as they are lvl 1.

Shards are often a bulk of the cost of my mats, but I don't see why that's inherently bad.