Quote Originally Posted by Squand View Post
Is it possible, with the Ninja anecdote that due to gear, one's gathering was maxed out regardless of food? If you have min gathering to hit gold ore, you start at about 70% chance to hit it. As you raise gathering your percent goes up till you reach a wall at 95%. If you're gear get's you to 95% gathering food has no further effect. Could that be a plausible explanation for the results of the Ninja test?
Fishing is extremely hard to test due to the opaqueness of its nature. In order for a valid test of catch changes, one would have to keep track of their gathering and perception stats for each fish that gets away and each fish they catch, across multiple types of fish. With BTN/MIN, all items of the same tier have the same gathering requirement and the same chance with a given level of gathering, and the same max cap. With FSH, each fish has a different requirement with no clean "tiers" that can be compared. A few fish do have the same requirements, but there are plenty whose requirements are not shared by other fish. Olgoi-Khorkoi and Gigant Clams have the same gathering requirement (348), but are they caught at the same rate? Maybe.

To do a valid test of this, a large sample size is required. By large, I don't mean a hundred, I mean more like ten thousand. This is not something a single person can do, and using a 3rd party app to have people gather the data (like Cat Became Hungry uses) is against the ToS. Cat Became Hungry's app doesn't seem to pay attention to the fish getting away / line snapping chance.

And that brings up another question - are the chances for a fish getting a way, and for a line snapping, the same, or separate? Are two checks done each time?

I'm fairly certain that, for Big Fish of a certain size, you can't hit 100% catch rate, just like BTN/MIN gathering nodes (as you stated). What that chance is, I have no idea. I know that with maxed out gathering, I have a heck of a time catching HQ Gigant Clams (max melded foragers, i70 right side, supra rod, HQ spinach quiche). About a quarter get away, and most of the rest are NQ. I've been averaging 0.3 HQ clams every 3 hour window.


As a note, I'm aware that this is an outlier, but for Olgoi-Khorkoi, I had minimum stats (well, 351 gathering) and caught all three of mine in three heatwaves (two in one, then zero, then one) back when the fish was first introduced. And then the fish sat on a retainer for several weeks before I managed to get an MCD and 10x FC3s.