They're apparently really good for catching gavial fish, which cap at 81 fishing and can catch in gustaberg at drachenfalls. (They're big fish so they appear with "!!!" when fishing one up)
HQ3 on a T3 HQ rate is still terrible.
Out of 144 (stack of clusters) attempts. w/o HQ+ you're looking at 4.5 in a batch. That's over 1hr of time synthing + mat losses since NQ~HQ2 are worthless.
with shield HQ+10, it's 9 in a 30min batch. not terrible anymore but still more annoying that it's worth with the low sales rate.
with 100 Alchemy and 60 smithing would these not be 'relatively' easy to make? I mean it's just pot luck but eventually it'll come round, i don't understand why it's so rare, people are making Thalassocrat +1's which are WAYYY harder to make requiring several level 60 subcrafts; while this is a subcraft of 9.