There are too many trash fish in the rare/legendary bracket. Many zones have no good fish at all.
Here is a list of all the rare fish:
Dragon Fish - these are t5 magic/soul reagents so on par with the random drop from a soulwyrm harvest node which takes 2 seconds to harvest and rewards 30+ gold of motes when you don’t get a soulwyrm.
Electric eel - these give you bait to catch more useless fish pure time waste
Frogfish - Tier 3 potion reagents cannot hold value
Madtom - Literally no use in the game due to lack of tags or special recipe
Oysters - The one good reward from fishing is pearls; however once fishers learn these are the only fish with value, supply will drive cost down.
Paddlefish - Tier 3 potion reagents cannot hold value
Piranha - T5 water/offensive competes with spinefish, once again these are much much easier to get from harvesting nodes (req lvl 0 harvesting btw)
Sculpin - Tier 3 potion reagents cannot hold value
Speartooth shark - craft mods have very low use rate these give guts that are less than a gold each on my server.
Stingray - T5 med/t5 death, nothing is going to compete with azoth water as a med reagent, and death reagent has deathmoths. same issue as other t5 reagents you just don’t get enough per hour to compare to the alternative.
Starfish - t4 reagent atleast it’s not tier 3
Swordfish - fish oil- fish oil is the second unique reward on this list after pearls. Fish oil is abundant but it just tags along as cooking oil to good cooking recipes and never is the element that makes you think oh now i can cook a high value high profit food.
Treasure Chests- using prices on my server the removal of raw gold from chests nerfed them by 60-80%.
Oysters are the only rare fish that give a valuable reward, treasure chests were good before but now are averaging 0-10 gold each which is dismal. People will realize this and drive price of pearls down because it’s not like they’re infinitely useful. It’s dissapointing that legendary fish cooking recipes are equally as hard to complete as hybrid recipes that use t5 rabbit flanks… The other legendary fish aren’t worth much either.
TLDR: Fishing is one of the slowest tradeskills in the game to level, with the most unique gameplay, and also has the worst potential value. it’s pretty annoying that the rare/legendary tier of fish is clogged with trash loot.