Fisher: Stats mean absolutely nothing

[Squand]

snip

You are right about how fish are wary works.

I think lowering gathering to catch the fish you want has been debunked. Outside of knowing some fish bite only once a min. has been hit, and so if you can't get those fish, naturally you won't end up wasting casts on them.

In my scenario, it would loot table first. So say there are 3 fish you catch in the area. After the cast it rolls to see which one you've attempted to catch. Your stats would then be vs that fish. That loot table is separate and does not consult your stats, accept to see if you meet the min requirement to catch all the fish on the table.

Like unspoiled nodes vs regular nodes, it seems you can get 100% gathering rate on regular fish, but you can't always catch big fish. So it might cap out at 95%? Though maybe there is just a slippery rating.

This is just guesswork.

[Than]

In-game Active help topic "Fishing":

Your chances of successfully reeling in a fish after hooking it are directly affected by the fish type and your gathering rating.

In-game Active help topic "Fish Size":

The higher your perception rating, the better chance you have of landing larger fish. Fish over a certain length are deemed high-quality (HQ) and, depending on the variety, may be usable for mooching.

Thing not said in-game:
Fish of a greater length require a higher gathering rating than their smaller brethren. Switch your food from high-perception to one that is instead high-gathering and your luck should turn around. I had to take my shoes off just to land my Olgoi after hooking and losing 7 in a row.

[TheMt]

Been having the same type problem trying to catch my last big fish the Shonisaurus besides that fact that I haven't even seen the right weather come up in almost a week now but with 340 perception (HQ Haddock Dip) I can hardly get a HQ Cloud Cutter to mooch, last time I tried I got maybe 5 HQ and 27 NQ besides all the other trash fish you catch....

[Highwilds]

After getting the 3,000 HQ fish achievement, I had caught 15,736 fish, (someone do the math!!! D: ) so I'm pretty sure there's a cap on the HQ rate no matter how high perception one has.