It is a Misdirect. It transfers your enmity.
Also, it's been confirmed for a while that Duality includes the positional bonus.
Interestingly, Dancing Edge's debuff will apply to the second hit if you're doing it the first time.
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Thats because you are only thinking of "good tanks" and even with good tanks it IS useful, you know?
Lets take for example our buddies the WARs.
We start up with a 20% attack power boost from the get-go, because "Venoms are nothing like you've seen before" (sure).
This thing and the NIN opener means a LOT of a SH!T of a TON of thread generation. Specially when TA, DwD and Duality combine together. (Which could happen in the very first 15 seconds of the battle).
Not all Tanks will actually be able to keep up with you, really. But leaving aside bad tanks, with Shadewalker our buddies the WARs can comfortably open with Storm's Eye combo instead of Butcher's Block. And so we can be that one crazy NIN that can go John F*cking Madden with our BFF WAR pal.
It is also very useful in the open world, since you can dump all the blame on your chocobo (yes I was that kid).
Smoke Bomb could use some tweaks, tho.
(Or you could be that guy that pulls before the Tank but throw all the enmity on the Tank himself and wipe the raid)
I understand your reasoning, but coming to this game from WoW (where I was often MT), I expect all of those scenarios to be handled by the tank(s). If an add spawns, it should be immediately picked up by the tank. Fights in this game are so choreographed it's pretty predictable when they spawn.
That being said 40% of the content added for our class being something of a niche ability that's dubious as best, is a bit of a let down.
PS: the 1000 character limit on this forum is ridiculous.
Maybe i'm a bit salty cause my static doesn't have a warrior. But then so, with all these things we have discussed (starting with AC, to shadewalker, etc), it seems that not being able to synergize with a WAR, either makes your rotation wonky, or some of your abilities not used.
It transfers 80% of the enmity that you generate to the person that is targeted for the next 15 seconds, so if given value, your Spinning edge would generate 1 point of enmity, .2 of that actually goes to you instead of the full 1, and .8 goes to your target (tank)
It's almost exactly misdirect. The only thing I'm not sure is identical is the % transferred, but I know for a fact more than half of your enmity goes straight to the tank, because I can use it on a fresh mob the tank hasn't seen yet and have the mob go for the tank anyway while I continue stabbing the mob in the back of the head.
Edit: I am apparently slow typer today. >_>
Yes exactly.
Shadewalker proved its worth to me specialy on DPS checks when I can't exactly wait for the Tank to stabilize aggro and I have a quicker reaction time. Like in a DF Bismark :/
Smoke Bomb came in handy in situations where adds spawn in multiple directions and can't be taken by the tank in one fellswoop. Casting it on the Healer provided heal aggro to be nerfed down saving some work on the Tank and a dead healer. (also pretty useful to cover those ranged-burst-lovers).
There are situations in which they come in handy, just are a bit hard to notice at times :/
Ah, thanks for that, not that useless then (still a bit meh, besides for the opener). Though some redditers claim it doesn't work on tanks (that would be kind of weird, so no idea here).
I definitely see some uses, don't get me wrong, but it's not primarily my job to mitigate the failures of others and that can also only really be done (smoothly) by someone above average in skill (especially vs the tanks). Again it's okay to have, but those being 2/5 of my new abilities is bitter.