Legendary Fish Stethacanthus

[Catori-Mapiya]

Ok here i am having 201/204 Big Fish in this game cought but this fish is a joke.

You need 2 Sculptors to trigger Fisher's Intuition. Sculptor is allready a super rare fish. I have been sitting at Loch Seld for over 30 windows now and was only able to doublehook ONCE to get the intuition. And even if you get your 5min. Intuition Steth is a rare bite and has a high escape rate - so pls pls pls nerf this.

I know legendary fish should be hard to catch but this one is definetly over the TOP.

Please reconsider the Intution Buff triggered by a single Sculptor to give us at least a chance to hunt him down.

Yours sincerly very annoyed
Catori

[Elmont]

Same. Spending GP to double hook a thing on a quite random timer makes this doubly annoying...

I know people have gotten lucky enough to catch Stethacantus, even I have gotten that buff once although it escaped, but having one last chance at a window and not enough GP to double hook that very last catch is terribly disheartening. Plus, the fact you need Fish Eyes is already enough, I feel... Even Opabinia wasn't this bad since the hropkens were long windows.

[Starflake]

I fully support this post. I have spent around 40 windows in total and have seen three Sculptors. I wouldn't mind Sculptors being rare, but the fact that they share random timers with Pearl Eyes is absolutely ridiculous. Combine that with the fact that the window is sometimes over 15 hours apart, and that for me during the last 2 weeks a lot of windows have simply been at night, it's a bit ridiculous. Give us a more accurate timer for Sculptor so we can at least determine if we have it hooked or not.

[sQed]

This does not need a nerf. It's only been out for a couple of weeks, these fish are meant to keep us busy until the new expansion. I know plenty of fisher mains who are happy and excited to try this one, especially with how easy SB fish have been in general.

[EremesGuile]

I'm on the same boat as these fellow fishers. The reason this fish is so unfairly difficult is because we are unable to tell whether we are hooking a pearl eye or a sculptor, thus almost always wasting 400 GP to Double Hook pearl eyes while already being under tight GP management due to having to maintain Fish Eyes. And this leads us to spend a good portion of the (already semi-rare and short) windows waiting to recover GP to Double Hook again.

The most reasonable way you can help us while still maintaining the challenge factor, is by changing the legendary tug on pearl eyes to a medium one. This way we don't have to throw away our GP and be unable to proceed. This is quite sensible considering pearl eye isn't even a particularly large fish.

[Espritduo]

I was almost going to make just this very thread myself! Stethacanthus ( I call it Stethacantcatch) has just one too many strict variables working against it to be reasonable, even by legendary fish standards. I've caught all the legends so far except this one and the Ruby Dragon, and the Ruby Dragon is just because I've literally only had one window for it since the patch. I've been to dozens of thunder windows and gotten the intuition buff twice, but never had the fish actually bite. And by far the most annoying thing is the big fish tug on Pearl-eyes, as well as the WILDLY variable bite-time of the Pearl-eye making it impossible to predict.

I put up with all the fish previous to and alongside this one and have had no complaints, but this one is just one step too much. Remove just one of the following limits and it would be a perfectly reasonable, and still perfectly challenging, fish:

1. Change Pearl-eye to medium tug. Probably the best solution. The thing isn't even a big fish by any standard.
2. Make the Pearl-eye have a reliable bite time so it is easy to count and know you have one instead of Sculptor. Right now the thing can bite anywhere from 18s-31s, which overlaps with the Sculptor's 25s-31s making it impossible to tell what you have.
3. Chance Sculptor requirement to 1 instead of 2. While this would be nice, I actually like having a real use for Double Hook for once this expansion, and would really just prefer being able to get the thing more reliably.
4. Make Sculptor bite more often, or widen the weather/time window so we have better odds of actually getting the intuition buff at all.
5. Keep all that the same, but make Stethy basically a 100% mooch off the Rock Saltfish when its buff is up and 100% catch-rate when it bites. Or just anything above 80% even.

If any one of those things were changed, I would have had this fish already, and I suspect many other hardcore fishers who have been banging away at it would too. As it stands now, Shadowbringers will be here before most of us ever even get a bite, and the other 5 legends will be ancient history.

[nuuskamuikkunen]

I can't help but wonder if the people in this thread were around for or remember ARR.
I sometimes feel Patience gives fishers an illusion of autonomy, perpetuating delusions that fish should be easy to catch.
Fishing has always been a niche, RNG-laden class that really fit a relaxed and patient playstyle.

Makes me wonder if you guys just picked the wrong class and realised it far too late. SB fish will probably be nerfed eventually, anyway.

[Starflake]

I have earned the Master Caster title in ARR before Patience was introduced and I'd never call fishing difficult. I see quite some misrepresentation of what fishers most likely want.
I do not think anyone in this thread has the grand delusion that fishing should be an easy catch. What is brought forward is a slight alteration to a fish that just has too much RNG going on. Not that it should be made easy.

There are a multitude of factors leading for this fish to be unfair.

- The time windows. Very rarely is this fish up in quick succession. In fact, I'd say on average there are 5 hours between fishing windows.
- When these fishing windows do arrive, half of the time they only last 2 eorzean hours. Which is 6 minutes.
-As if logically follows, this forced people into double hooking the fish in order to trigger the intuition. Which proposed the following problems:

Since the cast timer of Pearl Eyes seems to range from 17-34 seconds, there is no indicator at all what Sculptor is. All we know so far is that the minimum hook time for Sculptor is 24 seconds. They are both legendary tugs and thus we are forced into double hooking into the blind.
Now this would be okay if the other factors such as very small and little occurring windows would not be a thing.

On top of that, even though the Intuition is 5 minutes, a lot of people report they just get Pearl Eyes anyway, which is fine in itself. But there seems to be no balance at all to this fish.
Normally there is always some factor. For example the fish in the Fringes with the low hook rate is available every hour. The Unconditional, even though a very small window and very rarerly occurs have a pretty common bite rate during that window and is a straight catch. Ruby Dragon, there is also a decent shot.

In other words, all the fish so far have requirements that always make you feel like you have a shot because there is always some factor in there that is redeeming. Be it common windows, common bite during that window, easy to camp out the fish you need to mooch (prism lake) to trigger intuition ...

Stethacanthus has:

- Long intervals between windows
- Usually fairly short windows 6-12 min
- Mooches off of very rare fish
- Mooch has no real indicator of what is what
- Very long mooch rates and a 12 - 18 second cast for Salt Rockfish, also possible to get the legendary turtle tug or white sea horse!
- Needs fish eyes

The only redeeming factor is has currently is a 5 min intuition. Which to me seems barely enough. I would prefer at least some more common windows to catch Sculptor. But that's just me. I do not wish to make fishing "easier" I wish to imo streamline it more with other legendary fish. Because in my opinion, this fish really isn't at the moment. I would also be in favour of reducing the Intutition Window for a less obscured Sculptor catch.

[Espritduo]

I've been fishing since 2.0, and I have gone through all the pains of fishing for all the various fish out there, as they were released. I have many "fond" memories of trying to get an HQ Olgoi-Khorkoi, or doing the infamous triple mooch (without Patience or Mooch II!) for Frilled Shark, or watching as The Matriarch (we called her The Bitch back then) got away for the thousandth time in ARR. I remember the huge amount of time it took me to finally nab the Sea Butterfly in HW. The difference here is that all those things were reliant on basically one RNG factor, and I felt like as long as I kept plugging away, I'd get it. It took me about a month to get Sea Butterfly, but that is only because it bites so rarely. I knew I'd have a very common weather and time window that would roll around nearly every hour and an intuition requirement that I could reliably hit every time it came around, so I just kept showing up, kept getting the buff, and kept casting, each time knowing I had a perfectly real shot at that cast being "the cast".

With this fish I don't feel that way. I will continue to show up and do my duty to the fishing RNG god each window, multiple times per day, but I feel like I'm playing the Jumbo Cactpot here, with no real chance in sight. And I've actually won the Jumbo Cactpot before!

I think anyone defending the layered unfairness of this fish A). have not actually sat down and made a real attempt at it to see what we are talking about, B). have rosy-tinted glasses about how "hard" the good old days were, when they actually weren't, or C). are one of the what, five lucky souls who hit the lottery on it and think it was easy because they got crazy luck.

[nuuskamuikkunen]

You guys (the complaining ones) are right about this: Improbability is not difficulty.

But also, there's that illusion of autonomy I was talking about. Fishing has never been difficult, nor has it ever been remotely fair.
And I'm honestly with you in some regards. For one, I'm not against the fish being made more common (nor am I for it). I'm also not an enormous fan of the way fishing is balanced around abilities like Patience, Fish Eyes, and now Double Hook.
That's what makes it feel like you should be in control in the first place, when you clearly aren't. If they were going to address anything, I'd like it to be this.
The game's doing a worse job of making itself feel fair than it was a month or so ago, the odds are more tangibly stacked against you, and I feel for you. It stands in direct opposition to a clear desperation to wrap up the fish log quickly. A desperation that I, admittedly, don't have.

All that said, it's been a couple weeks, Buds. The fish aren't going anywhere. Keep at it. I believe in you.
Try not to get too worked up over fish, of all things.