Quote Originally Posted by Sated View Post
I know I'd be very disappointed as a new player if I started fishing and learned I was getting a significantly different experience for the sake of ease, as has happened with other activities in other games.
I agree up to a point, but consider it this way: if you go into, say, T5 at level as a new player, with barely the minimum gear and only moderate experience with the game, you expect it to be a challenge, especially if everyone goes in blind and has to learn as they go. If you unsync it as an established 80 with even halfway decent gear, you expect to roflstomp Twintania with little to no effort. If, as a lv.80 crafter with current-era gear, you go back and try to craft any of those challenging recipes 2.x threw at you for the sake of lucis tools or zodiac weapons or whatever, you'd actually have to try harder to FAIL the craft than to succeed. And repeating my example from earlier, if you go to the darksteel node as a lv.80 MIN with current-era gear, it would be infuriating if the game somehow caused you to miss even ONE strike. Why should fishing be different?

Don't get me wrong: if I was only a lv.50 FSH trying to catch Matriarch (or any other older legendary), then yes, I'd expect it to take longer. Just as I wouldn't advocate the lv.80 legendaries being easier for a lv.80 FSH regardless of how frustrating they are to catch, or how unfair I might consider the requirements for them. But as a lv.80 FSH, ARR and HW legendaries SHOULD be easier, if not automatic catches, once you have them hooked. Your level and stats SHOULD give you some kind of advantage in the catch attempt, just as they do anywhere else. You wanna keep the time/weather/Intuition-based aspects as is, fine; nerfing those would be like nerfing the spawn conditions for old S ranks. But even if those old S ranks rightfully remain a challenge to SPAWN, they can be killed by 1 or 2 lv.80 players (assuming nobody else shows up to kill it in seconds) once they're on the map. Likewise, if a legendary fish has any factors involved in making it available, leave those in place, but the ACTUAL CATCH should be influenced by level and gear. The challenge in every other area of the game is in the CURRENT content, with older content being little more than barely-challenging catch-up work if you do it later. IMHO, the fishing log--even legendaries--should be no different.