Quote Originally Posted by Zagen View Post
If I'm more DD than "tank" I use /WAR.
How does that work out? Do you take extreme damage from AOE phys attacks? Can you keep up with other DDs at all? When fighting Ultima I found that my Resolutions were doing ~50% of the damage that I would do as DRG/SAM. Gear for both gives similar att/STR boosts, and aside from a little STR from hasso, some acc, and acc2 and att2 traits the WS are pretty similar. Damage on my polearm is only 5 higher than the GS I was using. Other than that it's just the difference in base stats for run/nin compared with drg/sam, and the att penalty of resolution. Unless there's something I missed, like maybe we had a brd when I went drg, idk.

Quote Originally Posted by Zagen View Post
I've played around with /NIN a bit and it's helpful with the shadows but that's only true against targets that don't have aoe type melee attacks. I found dealing with those /NIN is more of a handicap than a boost due to focusing on spamming Usu over other things.
I found it handy as a backup tank for the AOE phys spells, as that was the main time that shadows were consumed, and it meant I took very little damage the whole fight. Also reducing the CE lost from being hit, of course.

Quote Originally Posted by Zagen View Post
Just pointing out to prevent confusion, as I'm sure it was just poor wording, /NIN only provides Utsusemi in the context of evasion, while that prevents from taking hits similar to how evasion works it's actually only consumed when evasion fails. So it doesn't directly boost RUN's evasion, only /THF, /PUP, or /DNC's Evasion Bonus traits actually does that.
And a bit more agi from /nin rather than /war or /sam, but yeah basically shadows to prolong your eva. Remember too that the agi helps with the all important parrying for RUN.