What's the point of fishing?

[TheMax1087]

And since they introduced desynthing Water Shards and Crystals are the cheapest ones on the MBs.

Care to speculate why?

Water crystals have always been cheapest because they are a byproduct of spirit bonding in urth's, no idea why shards are cheapest though.

[DarkDedede]

catching a fish takes around 30 sec + desynth = 40 sec work for 1 or 2 shards/crystals
I'm pretty sure mining them is faster

If you're going to be fishing anyways, might as well consider turning them into shards. I highly doubt anyone would fish just for the shards.
I was just mentioning it as an alternative to dropping them or selling to an NPC. Shards do sell a bit more frequently than most fish.

[Shadygrove]

Water crystals have always been cheapest because they are a byproduct of spirit bonding in urth's, no idea why shards are cheapest though.

Desynthing most fish gets you water shards.

[ServerCollaps]

If you're going to be fishing anyways, might as well consider turning them into shards. I highly doubt anyone would fish just for the shards.
I was just mentioning it as an alternative to dropping them or selling to an NPC. Shards do sell a bit more frequently than most fish.

for me the point in fishing = big fishing and gotta catch em all
I never hook "small bites" because its too time consuming for big fishing, except I need a mooch
if you only have a 1 hour ingame-time-window to catch a specific big fish you arent allowed to hook the trash (f.e. fingers or vip viper).
Same for all the other many 2 or 3 hour window big fish

if you accumulate all your small bites you could have caught several big fish instead and made way more money as with desynthing 100 small fish

and mining/botany is still a faster way if you only want shards