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Originally Posted by
jomoru
Asside from the fact that Ninja have traidtionally not just in FF but in most media been you know.. sword users.
Ninja have actually had several weapons associated to them. Shinobigatana and kunai are only two of them. There's also Kama, Bo staves and a claw-hand weapon whose name I cannot remember. The devs will have to stick to one because of the armoury system. That said, the alternative to tying NIN to a rogue-type class would be making a class entirely built around one of the aforementioned weapons. The problem there is that you'd run into the same issue of not knowing what other job should sprout from this class because, as mentioned, NIN's aesthetic is very unique.
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Originally Posted by
Kitru
The entire point is that there *should* be some aspect of skill to playing a class properly. Half of the reason why the average person looks at a BRD as being the best DPS is because it's ridiculously hard to *not* play a BRD well given how ridiculously simple they are. If you look at what the devs have changed in 2.1, they actually want the flank/back aspect to matter *more*.
And I'll predict that we'll continue to see this alpha-omega split between DRGs and MNKs, unless people get fed up and simply roll BLM, SMN or BRD. It's not fun getting a MNK or a DRG in your groups and wondering if you got the awesome alpha or disappointing omega. Hell, for all the flack huntards used to get in WoW you could at least count on them to shoot at the mob and kill it in a decent amount of time (trapping, kiting and other things, not so much).
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Steal is the single most defining feature of the THF, no matter what game it's coming from. As a job, since jobs don't have to cover the same breadth of functionality as a class does, you can focus on that one attribute rather than spreading it thin. A more interesting variation on what you plan here might be a variation upon what I'm did with Pilfer/Ill-Gotten Gains, wherein the stolen items become a resource to fuel your other abilities.
This just feels inorganic. I'll admit that there's no easy way to implement Steal in a trinity MMO without feeling token, but making it part of a resource system strikes me as odd.
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I think it's less important to play to someone's nostalgia than it is to ensure functional performance. Enmity transference/utility *really* isn't all that useful and you're already providing Quelling Strikes as an enmity drop via ARC. It's redundant as a personal enmity tool and unneeded as an group enmity tool (and, once again, eminently trollable). You would only be including it as an artifactual ability from a single game within the series.
You forget that tank swaps will likely become more common in 8-man content (and, as 24-man content grows it may play a role there too), and with Provoke not keeping you at the top of the hate list for 6 seconds like in other MMOs, the enmity boost will have a purpose and be very helpful.
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If the devs add purging as a requisite mechanic, they're going to need to give it to a lot more classes. Even then, the ability to steal buffs is a pretty worthless gimmick, given how rare NPC buffs are.
I never said anything about THF being the only job that can remove enemy buffs. That's part of why my Astrologist => Time Mage/Green Mage also has Dispel.
Since you touched on player choice, the same thing could be said for interrupts, where BRD's entire selling point to many seems to be Blunt Arrow.
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The ability to steal buffs opens up a whole can of worms that has to be tackled (and even adds to the de/buff database size since you need to label every buff as to whether it can be stolen or not; there's already a purge attribute on them because some debuffs can be cleansed while others can't).
What made spellsteal great was that it gave players access to unique buffs that you could get nowhere else, in some cases stealing buffs was key to winning the fight and/or notably increased DPS.
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If the non-fire Jutsus don't deal damage, they'll be pretty much worthless, which means that NIN itself is going to be pretty much worthless since there isn't really anything else that you're giving NIN to increase its damage while giving THF some pretty impressive buffs.
I wouldn't risk giving NIN 4-5 abilities that do the same thing but with different particle effects. And I think people would be more miffed about that over having utility available to them.
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KB, weight, and Blind are all relatively mediocre as status effects so there's really not much that they're doing if they're not doing damage on top of it at the very least.
Even without damage, I can't help but see a NIN dominate Wolves' Den and The Frontlines just based on the insane amount of utility they could provide.
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They're even less useful given that you have to use 2+ abilities at a time in order to access the desired secondary effect.
This point I'll grant you. I was looking at Jutsu as follow ups do your DPS rotation rather than standalone abilities (the original charge system was also conceived around this idea).
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You didn't really describe them. No durations/potencies/distances at all.
I purposely left those open for discussion. For example, Fuuton's knockback is intended to give you room but also to peel, but I'm not sure if it should have a bind attached to it like Fluid Aura.
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Except that it's still the *exact* same ability. It does the same thing with a fancier animation, and you're *still* giving it to them at the exact same level as the ability you're cloning. Either give it to the class or give it to the job. Doubling up on an ability just because you want one job to have a fancier animation is just lazy design work.
Good point. I did think of this along the lines of how WoW warriors worked, since they also had two abilities that did the same thing (Charge and Intercept). I've thought of giving Bunshin Sappou a 10-yalm range, but I felt I'd have to lower its damage potential if that were to be the case (can you imagine a NIN landing a 300-potency attack from 10 yalms while teleporting behind you?).
I also did it to avoid the unquestionable pointlessness of Mijin Gakure.
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It works out even worse when you're trying to staple it to an existing class that's already entirely melee based, which is what you're doing here.
Aside from the fact that none of the potency numbers are set in stone (keep in mind my main is a tank, and don't have much of a frame of reference for what ability potencies should be for DPS classes), I may be inclined to agree here. I could focus NIN entirely on mobility and just scrap the attempt at giving them more ranged abilities.
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Which is only remotely useful in PvP. Since PvP gets its own bonus abilities, it would work out better to have the bouncy abilities that you seem to want NIN to specialize in be PvP abilities rather than actual class abilities that take the place of real functionality that they need.
Except said PvP abilities are riddled with lousy gimmicks with a few fundamental skills (Purify).
As far as actual class abilities, NIN doesn't have much to stand on based on how it was built in the FF series. FFIV's Edge didn't have much other than throwing skills and AoE black magic with poor scaling. FF1's NIN was a thief with black magic. FFT's NIN was basically all throwing. FFVI's Shadow was throwing and a dog. FFXI's NIN became a caster with dual wield and token throwing skill.
You have to reinvent NIN either way for it to work in an MMORPG. The major hurdle is the fact that the armoury system combined with the 5-ability rule severely limits how far you can go with it. You can't give it a massive list of standa-alone Jutsu because you can't really squeeze it into 5 abilities. You can't give them a monopoly on dual wielding either. You're limited to the type of weapons they can use.
At one time I was thinking of suggesting that almost every rogue skill change when equipping the NIN crystal, but I somehow don't see SE doing that when they do get around to giving ARC, THM and CNJ their second jobs.
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As I said before, this is exactly why I see THF leading into NIN. The only reason that anyone can ever come up with for THF to not be a class is because they just decide by emotional fiat that it shouldn't be. There isn't a single good reason from a *developmental* standpoint for THF to be its own class if NIN is also implemented. There are *loads* of reasons that they *should* be. It's just kind of arbitrary stubbornness (generally by people that played THF in XI and want THF to be just as important as every other FFXI class in ARR no matter what).
You're treating this as if it were unreasonable, when it is more than reasonable to want THF to be a job like it was in the past. With the discussions I've seen about THF, yes I can picture people being VERY pissed if they decide to make THF a class so that NIN can sprout from it.
THF is one of the original six jobs of the series, and I don't see why it should be doomed to obsolescence (which is what happens to GLA, MRD, CNJ, THM et al) and vanish off the map once you hit lv30. If it were one of the oddball one-appearance-in-15+-games jobs, I might incline to agree with you, but one of the original six jobs?
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And in pretty much all of the cases where people separate THF and NIN into separate jobs, the thing that gives is the quality of the developed class itself.
That only gives because the developers involved were obsessed with being different for the sake of being different. That's the reason THF in FFXI was reduced to Treasure Hunter whore while NIN went on to deal damage and shrug off hits that could tear a PLD to shreds. It makes sense to extremely separate classes in single-player games (FFT's Thief stealing everything not nailed to the ground while FFT's Ninja throwing and dual wielding), but MMORPG should not be afraid of design that overlap. We're going to see overlap when ARC's second job gets introduced anyway, so it's not as big a deal as some may think.