Armaddon wrote:
There are other options for sure, but it's often hard to beat sole for the whole 'easy consistent money with zero competition/market shenanigans'. Fish that AH well today might fall away later as the group of crafters currently powering through levels with them end up moving on to other synths, etc. Certain fish that you pull up during the path to 100 AH pretty well (just look at
http://www.great-blue.jp/?lng=en and start checking the AH for the fish you can effectively target in low-risk areas, you'll see a few) but once you're lv76 there are few if any that consistently (and rapidly) sell for more than what you get for vendoring a stack of sole plus the occasional sword. There was a bunch of awesome fishing-related content added during the WotG era, but I wouldn't expect to ever see that stuff here.
Not to sound too discouraging - fishing sole is still decent money (with almost zero effort, very little running around, zero competition and zero waiting for the AH, unless you wanna earn a bit more per stack and sell 'em there for all the Sole Sushi crafters), and there's still decent money to be made outside of that if you have the willingness to gamble a bit
Now, excuse me while I go mine some fish and see if I get lucky!
edit/P.S.: thanks a ton Minimus for putting this together and being awesome - I've referred many folks in WindurstWins to your guide to help them get going! The only thing I might add is a snippet at the end for anyone that wants to push to 100 without worrying about a Lu/Ebisu: It's nowhere near windurst, but go take your handy Composite rod and a few stacks of meatballs and head to Oldton Movalpolis. There's some water down there that you can consistently (albeit sloooooowly) fish up Armored Pisces in. They cap at over 100, but don't seem to ever break a composite rod. You can NPC them for just under 1k each, but they don't stack, so odds are that sadly you'll probably just end up having to toss most of them if you're powering yourself up to 100. Getting to the cap without having a lu/ebisu doesn't really get you anything (since many of the legendaries typically require a lu/ebisu to even bite), but that nice round number sure looks cool
Firstly, yes, thank you very much Minimusdecimus for this guide, I especially appreciate the guide to fishing in general with timer information, tips on not losing lures, and rod/bait usage. Most guides just break down the leveling, but you provided a true guide to fishing and everything it encompasses.
@Armaddon I agree once you hit 76 it's hard to beat sole/swords especially if your fishermen is just a semi-afk dualbox you alt tab to a couple times a minute. I mostly meant between lvl13-76 which is the bulk of the journey for most. I personally prefer to sell a fish for 675 each even if it takes a 1-2 days, rather than NPCing all my fish for 100 each. I understand that new players need that quick injection early on, but I don't think NPC fishing should be the solution to that for any longer than a few days. There are so many quests that can provide that initial injection, i.e. Teleport and Ninjutsu quests, among others that simply require some walking. Teleport quests only require lvl10 even! That's 500k if you sell everything, 1 mil if you dualbox it. I don't want to get into a discussion about asset growth and management, but I initially thought that NPC fishing was so popular because a private server may lack demand in the AH, but I quickly found out that's not the case since there are some items missing that inflate demand for certain items: i.e. silent oils with the exclusion of Monomi on this server.
These guides are definitely amazing to get people started, and I'm not trying to be negative in any way, I'm just appreciating there not being unnecessarily too much information. I think for every craft or activity, there should be some exploration left to be done by the player himself. great-blue.jp is a wonderful source.
Especially with this huge influx of players exponentially increasing the population size, I'm sure a lot of these players may have never played FFXI before, or if they did, it could have been easily 10-14 years ago and they don't remember anything hahaha Such as was my case when I started a month ago and read every forum post and dozens of Wiki pages on WikiNas and ffxiclopedia.