NIN/MNK difficulty?

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Originally Posted by Allyrion

I don't agree, but maybe I wasn't clear. I said that this showed how punishing the Jobs are rather than difficult. Difficulty is fairly subjective in my opinion and the differences could easily just be gear level and the people who naturally better at X type of gameplay vs those who aren't.

But comparing the numbers themselves shows how much is at stake. A BLM making a mistake may cost the raid 300 dps while a NIN making one will be a fair amount less. For the most part, raid buffs naturally align and adjusting to boss mechanics to re-align some isn't a huge deal. So those Jobs with more focus on buffs have less at stake with doing their rotation perfectly (once they buff properly), compared to the higher personal dps Jobs.

The raid pays for every mistake you make as one of those Jobs a lot more and that's an important factor in my opinion. I'll call buffing easy cause it's fairly rudimentary (except i guess on Bard) with few wrenches/nuances to really debate on. But add a few more and you'll easily find people who will argue which are the wrenchiest.

I think how much dps you are prone to lose for messing up is a factor in considering the challenge of a Job. The rest I'd leave to the player cause something might objectively have more to manage but also flow better or make more sense than a different Job with less. That will usually be a bigger factor if how much you succeed with it than a relative variance.

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So a job being punishing is not the same as a job being difficult, then? The major issue here is that you imply that a 'mistake' costs a given job a certain amount of dps. What constitutes a mistake? Failing a mechanic and dying as a result is a mistake, as is missing a small opportunity for dps optimization while still maintaining a core rotation. Obviously, one means losing hundreds of dps while the other means missing out on maybe ten dps, though avoiding the latter really adds up over the course of a fight. Thus, avoiding mistakes, both big and small, leads to higher dps. And that takes skill; it's difficult. A player's ability to stick as closely as possible to a perfect dummy rotation is key to attaining the highest dps. At lower percentiles, you'll find those players who made various degrees of mistakes along the way.

And that leads me to say that your method is invalid. Because you cannot attribute the difference between 95th and 60th % to a single mistake in the 60th % parse, and in fact cannot calculate a precise number of mistakes in a given run at all, you cannot say (with this method) that one job is more punishing than another. A lower parse can be the result of lots of smaller mistakes, a few big ones, or anything in between. You can't tell the difference. On top of that, there's also gear differences.

Sorry, im very confused here, So much stuff about what is difficulty. And what is punishment for mistakes.

Surely class difficulty would be a case of how many moves (gcd'd & ogcd's) a class has. e.g. If 1 class has a 9move rotation and the other has a 12. the one with 12 is harder because thats three extra things to remember.

I main BLM and i totally disagree that its the most difficult class to play.. Our rotation is easy as hell.. However i do believe its the most punishing. All classes are punished for dropping there said buff & debuff. But no class is punished more for moving than blm (no dps class, before healers shoot me). Does that mean BLM is difficult to play? heavens no.

To my mind difficulty = quantity of skill set. E.G. "How many raid worthy actions does this class have verses another class"

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Originally Posted by Jkei

So a job being punishing is not the same as a job being difficult, then? The major issue here is that you imply that a 'mistake' costs a given job a certain amount of dps. What constitutes a mistake? Failing a mechanic and dying as a result is a mistake, as is missing a small opportunity for dps optimization while still maintaining a core rotation. Obviously, one means losing hundreds of dps while the other means missing out on maybe ten dps, though avoiding the latter really adds up over the course of a fight. Thus, avoiding mistakes, both big and small, leads to higher dps. And that takes skill; it's difficult. A player's ability to stick as closely as possible to a perfect dummy rotation is key to attaining the highest dps. At lower percentiles, you'll find those players who made various degrees of mistakes along the way.

And that leads me to say that your method is invalid. Because you cannot attribute the difference between 95th and 60th % to a single mistake in the 60th % parse, and in fact cannot calculate a precise number of mistakes in a given run at all, you cannot say (with this method) that one job is more punishing than another. A lower parse can be the result of lots of smaller mistakes, a few big ones, or anything in between. You can't tell the difference. On top of that, there's also gear differences.

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The statistic is large enough to say there's a spectrum of skill for players across all Jobs. However, there's more at stake when the range of that dps variance is the largest. Any mistakes made puts you further from that perfect dummy parse to a lower percentile. There are also gear discrepancies and RNG which I said myself in the post you quoted.

However as Job that has lower personal dps but more rdps buffs , you can even die but once you get back up and still press your buff at the right time and your contribution isn't as hindered. A bad run on a Job which relies on higher personal, you're much more personally responsible to put out your full dps.

This is all in response to saying that using raw numbers skews the difficulty in favor of higher personal dps Jobs. I'm saying it should. Not as much cause they're harder to optimize but because there's a lot more room for variance on the standard rotation. As a NIN, just doing TA at the right time can contribute around 3-400 dps with minimal effort (depending on your team's dps). Alternatively, it's easier on a Job that relies on personal dps to not make up for their lack of raid buffs.

The raw numbers skew 'difficulty' towards dps that rely on higher personal dps because it should be adjusted like that. Even just Brotherhood is roughly and easy 200 or so dps once you keep pressing it on time. Every portion of a dps's damage locked behind buffs means more guaranteed damage that's less reliant on doing your rotation well or not dying and having some ramp up again. SAM is one of the easier high dps Jobs but it's easy for a SAM to not carry its weight when you add the rdps gained by buffs to their respective Jobs (which is why it's fallen out of the meta now).

Once you understand the basics of playing a melee job, you can pretty much play all of them since they are all pretty similar. Keep a high uptime by correctly using gap closers or snapshot positioning, maintain optimum buff usage, weave oGCDs between GCDs, keep your GCD rolling, etc.

MNK rotation is pretty consistent. Stuff like always Dragon Kick into Twin Snakes, use Internal Release after Bootshine and before Howling Fist and Elixir Field, Riddle of Fire pairs with Brotherhood (90s CD), etc. The variation comes from correct usage of Shoulder Tackle in fights and random Chakra procs. Adjusting proper buff usage on MNK for various fights is not too bad at all compared to other melee jobs.

NIN has some complexity from correctly managing Ninki meter (with Mug) and using different Ten-Chi-Jin moves to be optimal. For example, some fights favor opening with Fuma -> Raiton -> Suiton where as something like Exdeath (O4S) favors opening with Fuma -> Doton -> Katon. There are basic stuff like using Armor Crush correctly to avoid using during burst windows like Trick Attack.

You should try out both jobs and see what you prefer. If you like something, you will more likely spend the time to get better at it.

I played like 5 different jobs in raids in HW because I got bored and for me none of the jobs were really any harder than the others. It takes time to learn and practice to become good at all of them, so honestly just play them a bit and go with the one you find fun to play.

If you get frustrated with build up jobs, however, probably samurai or ninja would be good. They have a lot less wind-up than monk or dragoon.

I find that the difficulty level, is basically the postional dps. It is more difficult to implement compared to NIN. So, MNK > NIN.

I went for NIN. It was a better fit for my new static and I like how NIN has more things to do overall besides the regular 1-2-3 combos. I do think MNK having more positionals per minute might be more difficult though.

Thanks for all the info and feedback.

No offense, but anyone telling you that Ninja is harder to play than DRG shouldn't be listened to.
They're on opposite ends of the spectrum in difficulty.

As for Ninja vs Monk, I'd say Ninja is harder to master. In terms of overall usability, they're really simple. A single dot tied to their slashing debuff, a speed buff that may as well be permanent and a dmg buff that IS permanent. A resource that's gathered simply by attacking normally, and never falls off and they're by far the melee effected the least by downtime.

Really the only difficulty, if you can call it that, is Trick Attack timing. The rest of Ninja as a whole basically is on auto pilot.

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Originally Posted by Jkei

So a job being punishing is not the same as a job being difficult, then?

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That's what all the arguing boils down to, Jkei. I'd argue that the two are not the same.

Let's take Black Mages. They are straightforward to play. However, get a Black Mage in a situation where they have to move a lot and the job becomes the most punishing.

Now, I don't have an iron in this fire. I don't have a max level Monk nor a max level Ninja in order to make a qualified statement about which is the more difficult.

I just popped in to say there are two ways at looking at the OP's question and until everyone agrees on what defines a job's difficulty, you all are going to continue to argue in circles. However, it really doesn't matter, Raiden Ki decided to play a Ninja.

Good for him (her?)! I hope he (she?) enjoys playing the job; and if they don't, well, Monk is still there to try out.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

No offense, but anyone telling you that Ninja is harder to play than DRG shouldn't be listened to.
They're on opposite ends of the spectrum in difficulty.

As for Ninja vs Monk, I'd say Ninja is harder to master. In terms of overall usability, they're really simple. A single dot tied to their slashing debuff, a speed buff that may as well be permanent and a dmg buff that IS permanent. A resource that's gathered simply by attacking normally, and never falls off and they're by far the melee effected the least by downtime.

Really the only difficulty, if you can call it that, is Trick Attack timing. The rest of Ninja as a whole basically is on auto pilot.

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Why should you not listen to this person? This person tells you his/her oppinion and if you would read properly, you would know that the difficulty of a class depends mostly on the player self and not what everyone else says.