minhnia you talk about the value of the lu shang. remember your not just paying for the rod. your paying for the time spent trading 10000 moats. which to some is worth a lot of money in itself. (i personally have been working on lu shang for around 3 years. 3000 more to go!)
i can't believe people complain about the price of this... If you use 2 accounts so you can fish 400 fish a day (about 8 hours) it would take your 25 days (or 5 work weeks) worth of fishing... now figure you will go through about 875 stacks of bait at 500 gil a stack, your talking 437,500 gil worth of bait so they make 2.76 million gil in 5 weeks of 8 hour days of fishing... figure RMT's get about $37 a million gil so in that case they are making less than a hundred dollars in over a month.... and if you take the time to buy all the carp (which will take several months)you only profit less than 700k gil in a couple months time.... quit complaining about the price and either buy it or do the quest....
Lu Shangs rod is a near necessity to catch the fish for Ebisu, Liquidz. The quest requirements may not need it, but I'm sure fishers will agree that you'll want it in hand.
Xyous... A little more than 2 years after you posted your comment about the ease of the Lu Shang's quest, I can't help noticing you don't have the "Carp Diem" title, and apparently quit at 29 fishing.
Delete
To give you an idea of what it takes to get one of these w/o money:
Going through 12 stacks of Insect Paste per day (about 2-2.5 hours of fishing) will yield about 10 or 11 stacks of moat carp if you fish in Windurst. 10,000 carp is equal to just over 833 stacks which translates to 2.5 to 3 months of steady fishing. Of course if you're RMT or a Fishbot it won't take anywhere near that long.
I am actually going through the quest to obtain this rod and honestly I think all of you who complain about such a daunting task are either extremely lazy or just plain stupid.
I've only been working on this for about a week now and I'm also fishing for skill-ups while doing the quest. After NPCing all of the Crayfish, Tricolored Carp, and Gold Carp I've reeled in to get to Fishing 27 I've made enough profit to not only cover the cost of crafting my own bait, but also buy spare Moat Carps from people with cheap bazaars.
After one week of skill-up fishing and while typing this I'm almost breaking the 1000 mark for the quest. Get real people...it isn't that damned hard.