Originally Posted by
Kincard
If you know how the mechanics of the game work, then you should know that stuff works completely differently at level 99 than they do at level 30, 50 or whatever, and you would know why when people use RNGs, they either almost exclusively use RNGs and when they don't, they are basically never taken over a good melee. Yes, Shuriken are great at those low levels, but that's only because you have close to 0 haste gear and very weak dual wield at that level. By that logic elemental ninjutsu should be amazing because they completely wreck everything when you first get them at level 40.
Let me just illustrate this for you: Shuriken typically have 192 delay. This means they have a base delay of about 1.81, add to that an extra 1 second because of the after-fire delay.
My usual katana setup is Kannagi/Shigi, so 106/98 damage with 400 total delay- let's just say 102 damage each hand to make this simple. In good gear right now, Ninjas can hit the 80% delay reduction cap with white magic haste alone- there are almost 0 situations where a NIN is going to be not capped on melee delay reduction somehow. This means I'm already down to 80 actual delay, which translates out to about 1.33 seconds.
Now consider that, in my hasted TP gear, I have +12% double attack, +5% triple attack, and +4% quadruple attack (I don't even have the best gear). Add +10% DA from the WAR subjob. This means each swing I make is actually about 1.4 swings (rounding it down to bias this in favor of shurikens). I swing twice a turn anyway, so I get 2.8 attacks a turn.
In order for the D value on the Shurikens to be effectively the same, it would need to be 102 x 2.8 x (2.81/1.33) = 603.41D. To put that in perspective, that's more than twice the D value of the highest D value you can find in the game right now.
What about snapshot, you say? It'd help out a little, but it's not worth very much on Shurikens because snapshot only reduces aiming delay and that bothersome +1s will always be there (Even if you somehow hit, say, 50% snapshot, I'd still need the Shurikens to have about 408D to be equal to my katanas). By the way, we're already assuming that you hit your RA macro 100% perfectly each time.
Now add onto that the fact that Ninjas have no accuracy traits and a poor selection of ranged gear. They'd need to add a bunch of new gear just for NINs that throw.
All that just to be equal to something we already have. I haven't even factored in things like my Kannagi's ODD.
Shurikens will always be useless unless they just completely revamp how ranged attacks work or actually decide to add something like a 1000D shuriken. I'd rather they not waste their time on something that will almost certainly be disappointing.