Gathering, Perception, and Fishing

[geekgirl101]

How does Gathering and Perception affect fishing? I see nothing anywhere that says that gathering affects the success of catching fish or that perception affects the chance of fishing up HQ fish. I decided to overcap my stats to max them out on fishing gear and accessories and I don't seem to be catching any more HQ fish than I would naked, and the chances of catching HQ fish are really really low. Is it broken?

[Ryock]

Being a 50 fisher, I can answer this. Though this information may be slightly flawed, this is what I've been told, and from what I've seen, it appears to be accurate. Gathering affects the time you have to reel in a fish before it'll take your bait and swim away; so by having a higher gathering stat, you improve the amount of time you have to hit your reel in button. Perception seems to have a smaller effect on HQ items. What it does instead is increases the max size of a fish/sea thingy. HQ stuff is determined by how big the fish you reeled in, is. So by increasing the perception stat, thereby increasing the max size of a fish you can reel out, you indirectly increase the chances of getting a HQ fish, albeit not by much.

[geekgirl101]

Hmm, anything else that significantly increases the chance of catching a HQ fish then or is it only via perception? Some people reckon DEX helps.

[Shadygrove]

Sometimes a fish will get away. That's from gathering being too low.

But I don't begin to understand the details.

[Ryock]

Hmm, anything else that significantly increases the chance of catching a HQ fish then or is it only via perception? Some people reckon DEX helps.

As far as I know, unfortunately not. People tell me that things like STR and DEX used to help in FFXIV 1.0 and 1.23, but I wasn't around for that, so I couldn't answer that with confidence.

[LineageRazor]

One of the Fisher tooltips you get outright states that Perception increases the chances of you getting bigger (i.e. HQ) fish. Gathering, I'm less certain on, but I have noticed that instances of fish getting away without even allowing a chance to reel them in has reduced to practically zero since I started melding materia into my gear.

[geekgirl101]

I see, thank you for your time on this.

[tymora]

HQ appears capped at 25% like all other gathering jobs.