Please fix this part of fishing :{

[Fruity_Snacks]

(Continued because I ran out of post space)

You say "What's the point of gearing and grinding for the relic tool then, if it doesn't help you making fishing easier?" - the point is to give you access to as many of the tools as you possibly can to improve those RNG chances that you are concerned about. Leveling and getting gear means you can actually catch the fish (as all big fish have minimum gathering points you need to meet in order to have a chance to catch when they bite). Better gear gives you more GP to utilize the skills that have been added over time to make fishing easier and more accessible to casual players (as you call yourself).

It's as you requested: "again they can make the big fish of the current patch to be very hard & slippery to catch, but let the old ones get easier to catch as you get 'stronger', just the way how most of the thing in the game is, which is basically to give a sense of progression."

This is exactly what happens, however unclear as it may be. Fishing has, and remains, a progressive job that has the player slow down to soak up and enjoy the world. It is uniquely the ONLY feature of the game that does this. If you're in it just to check the boxes and then move on as quick as you can, you are in for a bad time.

[Cleretic]

That is why I came here - to see if it matched up with anyone else's experience. Trust me - there are things that can happen after this long a time and very old content.

Whether it has or not, is what I'm trying to determine. But when I am sitting in maxxed out gear and lvl 90 for hours - and I see sprouts land beside me and THEIR catch lands, it does make me wonder.

It's not that the bites are few and far between - which they are, it's that I can't seem to land them for the life of me in ARR content.

If you think a fish is bugged, the best angle is to bring it to other fishers. 'Sample size of one' is a killer in fishing experiences, especially when you're going through the journey solo; Sometimes you just roll a critical fail, and a random completely unimpressive fish becomes your nemesis. In fact, most people who are big into fishing can probably name one or two of them in their experience (mine are Golden Pipira and Cosmic Haze). Mostly fishing people hang out in dedicated discord servers, but they are public.

Of course, there's no way to increase your chance to catch a fish after a point; rare fish especially will always have a chance to get away. It doesn't matter how good your Gathering and Perception rating is, the chance for losing the easiest big fish to catch in the game is always the same once you meet the Gathering rating catch it in the first place.

All that said, while I very much doubt you're hitting a bug, Ignus Horn is exactly the sort of fish that could be bugged for a while; as it's been explained to me, the rarest fish in the game are often the ones with the most active people watching them. So despite the really low odds for catching, say, Cinder Surprise, the collective community would still notice if something about it broke, because there's enough people all going for the exact same fish that we'd notice a change in statistical odds. But something relatively 'quiet' like Ignus Horn wouldn't have that level of attention on it; if something somehow broke that fish, it would be much harder to notice.

So if you really, genuinely think that a fish is broken, the best choice is to get a crowd of fishers together and test it; create enough of a sample size so as to be statistically significant, and then prove that the average of what you get is lower than the average we all expect. Yeah, that's a bit of a pain, but it's the only way to prove that something isn't working as intended in a fundamentally luck-based part of the game.

"[Fishing] is a way for the player to communicate with the environment of Eorzea" is the quote from YoshiP around the launch of 2.0, I believe. You can even look at the fishing log to see how fishing and the world itself are intertwined.

I can't speak for any statements at launch, but a very similar quote came up in the lore and localization panel in the latest FanFest, so it's still a direction they hold to!

[Astrahime]

ealad skaan doesn't exist