Spearfishing Conundrum

There seems to be something I am missing. I want to farm some Megapiranha. Spent a ton of time researching it, sounded like one of my class quests where one has to catch 10 or so of some kind of fish to spawn a “swimming” node where you might get what you are looking for. And those appear to be Treescales. So I am in the area, I have speared well over 100 fish but only got 2 Treescales. One fly in the ointment is the page in the ffxivangler website seems to indicate these are found in a swimming node. Huh?

Oh, Truth of Oceans is always running, I am getting zip from it. And indications are they are found in 80 nodes, the area has tons of 70s and very, very few 80s and at times I have to aimlessly swim around waiting for an 80 to spawn.

So im... not sure what youre looking at. I also pulled up the angler site, and a search for megapiranha showed 2 spawn points. One was a concealed spot, the other was an open one. And while yeah, it looks like the odds are better at the concealed spot(50/50 vs 1/4) i cant imagine why i would want to spawn a spot to get a few 50/50 shots then have to spawn it again when i could just unlimited-farm the open spot and likely be done in much less time. So try spearing at the "Covered Halls of Dwatl"(approx 9.5, 29.9), normal gig, and if youre going to veteran trade then the hermit hood is the most common catch(and therefore what you want to get rid of) by a small amount.

Someone in my FC recently chided me for overthinking stuff... he's not incorrect as I have this dumb need to look from every angle, and understand the why and why not. I had originally approached this from the wiki, they only lead me to the "concealed" spot. Even so, why does it seems next to impossible to get those Treescales? And why does the angler site seem to say THEY are in a concealers spot?

Can you explain this:

https://i.ibb.co/9gFH3QP/Screen-Shot...0-46-48-AM.jpg

"...and if youre going to veteran trade then the hermit hood is the most common catch(and therefore what you want to get rid of) by a small amount."

This confuses me a bit... especially the "going to veteran trade" part. My ultimate goal was to craft the food based on those piranha, which is why I also leveled a CUL. OTOH, the more common stat food for magical casters looks to need me to fully pentameld my CUL gear... BUT I'm on a grest FC and if can gt the mats together and find a pentamelded CUL to make it for me!


AND thanks for the help.

To me that reads "In the 'North Lake Tusi Mek'ta' node-spawn location, gather 10 Treescales and this will spawn the 'Deep Lake Tusi Mek'ta' swimming shadows concealed node." Pulling up the NLTM location, we see that Treescales are only caught on the small gig head, and at a rate of around 27%. If using Veteran Trade, most likely target is ronkan pleco(41% bite rate).

As for my line, i can re-translate that too. Veteran Trade is an ability you should have gotten at level 63 and usable only while spearfishing(it doesnt look like its quest locked, so if it isnt on your bar check your actions menu). It prevents you from re-catching the fish you just caught as long as you have the current node active. So the most common usage is that you do the first spear, you catch the fish with the highest catch percentage, then you use trade to scare that fish away. With the highest percentage fish gone, all the less common fish become much more likely to be caught. Indeed, with some fish/locations it guarantees that you get what you want as they only have 2 to choose from on certain gig-heads. So what i was saying was "if/when you choose to use Veteran Trade to speed up your gathering, the hermit hood is the highest percentage fish(though in this case, only by a little bit - hoods bite approx 40% while everdark bass go at about 35%) so it is the best target to use the skill on."

Wow, everything is a lot clearer, great explanation. Yeah, I have VT, just didn't REALLY understand what it really meant!

One remaining fly is that I HAVE poured over both pages and can not find how you arrive at percentage bite rate... I only see what I think are such rates for time of day... but those do not refer to specific fish.

And here comes to real irony, I need to buy a mining item for the recipe (just getting started leveling a miner, a lot of buff food seems to want some item gathered by miners) so I was perusing the MB. OMG I see someone put up 99 megapiranha for around 9kish, so I immediately bought!

So the bite rate data(which probly isnt as accurate as they think, hence my typically adding an "approx" to it) is on the page for the spear node/fishing hole. It will show you a grid with the gig heads on the left and the fish along the top(for a fishing hole the grid is bait used vs fish caught - same principal). Look to the intersection of gig/bait and fish, and there should be one slice from a pie chart. That pie chart is how often each type of fish is caught using that gig/bait. You can then mouse-over the square and it should show the percentage in a highlight window. Or you can just estimate based on the size of the pie.

And good find on the market board. Sometimes the fish you want is reasonably priced, sometimes it isnt. Regardless of if you still need to get this fish right this minute, having a better understanding of how to use the info on the angler site can only help in the future.