NIN/MNK difficulty?

Hi guys,

Some time ago I've had a topic discussing the faster/more engaging classes.

I'm asking your opinion whether NIN or MNK is more difficult to play?

In my estimation NIN is harder but only really in a raid environment when enmity control and burst windows for TA become relevant.
Monk has the same basic rotation(alternate between bootshine/dragon twinsnakes/true strike and demolish every 3rd courl GCD), and while the positionals may look confusing at first, it really isn't. That becomes muscle memory in no time. Other than that you just use oGCDs whenever they come up

If you examine the ratio of 95th percentile parses to 50th percentile of the Jobs in Stormblood to compare the degree of variability there is from the median, the difficulty curve goes like this Black Mage is the most difficult at 1.197, summoner at 1.191, Machinist was at 1.184, Dragoon Monk and bard were all about 1.173, and Red Mage, Ninja and Samurai were all the easiest at around 1.16.

If there was the same number of parses maybe it would be relevant.

Nin is very dependant on latency. It can be easy or hard based almost entirely on your latency.

I've pretty much dropped it entirely because the data centre move and other recent changes have crippled it. Even with an average 130 latency I just cannot seem to get mudras out without heavily clipping my gcd. Even a 1 step fuma shurikan is laggy as hell and ten chi jin is even worse. I know quite a few people have said the same thing and there's more than a handful of threads about it on the forums.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

If there was the same number of parses maybe it would be relevant.

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The sample size is only so massively different that it might be skewing it for Summoner and Machinist. Even then it probably won't matter, a sample size of 20-30 is sufficient for most any statistic evaluation, just because one sample is more massive than another doesn't make the methodology invalid. For Monk and Ninja, It's pretty clear that, no, contrary to popular belief, Ninja really isn't the massively difficult job that people want to make it out to be. Just by basic analysis of its overall performance, specifically it's performance trend at different percentiles where performs better compared to other jobs at lower levels and slowly drops through the rankings at higher levels that it has one of the higher skill floors and a not exceptionally high skill ceiling.

Probably because you can't tell if a NIN is good or bad by only looking at its personal dps.

Beside being pretty much hardware dependant there's actually way more than simply doing your rotation correctly and using everything on cooldown, you have to adapt and you can optimize your whole rotation (and ninki rotation) depending of each fight, you also have to map every trick attack correctly to get the most rDPS out of it, same goes for enmity management.

Monk gameplay overall feels empty, of course there's gonna be optimization just like any classes and you'll have to get mantras where it's needed yet it wont be as demanding.

Overall what these numbers shows is that optimization is less rewarding depending of each class.

Imo in terms of difficulty a melee classment would probably be NIN - DRG > SAM - MNK.

I wouldn't really take any of these FFlogs stats as facts since there's many factors that actually impacts on your dps and just as I said you don't judge a class difficulty nor a player's skill only by its dps.
(Aaand if I really were to check them I wouldn't go as down as the 50th % percentil tbh.)

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Originally Posted by Shamox

Probably because you can't tell if a NIN is good or bad by only looking at its personal dps.

Beside being pretty much hardware dependant there's actually way more than simply doing your rotation correctly and using everything on cooldown, you have to adapt and you can optimize your whole rotation (and ninki rotation) depending of each fight, you also have to map every trick attack correctly to get the most rDPS out of it, same goes for enmity management.

Monk gameplay overall feels empty, of course there's gonna be optimization just like any classes and you'll have to get mantras where it's needed yet it wont be as demanding.

Overall what these numbers shows is that optimization is less rewarding depending of each class.

Imo in terms of difficulty a melee classment would probably be NIN - DRG > SAM - MNK.

I wouldn't really take any of these FFlogs stats as facts since there's many factors that actually impacts on your dps and just as I said you don't judge a class difficulty nor a player's skill only by its dps.
(Aaand if I really were to check them I wouldn't go as down as the 50th % percentil tbh.)

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It's the degree of DPS deviation from the median to the top end with the extremely catered outliers found in the 99th and Max Percentile left out. It is literally a direct measurement of the degree of human error each job is prone to in a normal raid environment, including the "many factors that impact your DPS" that all jobs are subject too. Since Ninja is clearly less prone to having it's DPS and performance impacted by human error, then it's easier.

You can keep insisting you're right and that Ninja is the hardest melee, but the aggregated evidence disagrees with you. You say that Mudra's and lag severely impact Ninja's performance, the data says no, it doesn't particularly impact Ninja's performance to the degree that other factors impact Dragoon or Monk. You say Ninja has to map out Aggro Management and Trick Attack, well the same is true for Monk and Dragoon, they have to plan out their use of their own cool downs so as to best benefit the raid and not be impacted by the mechanics.

You're basically using numbers you don't understand to explain things you don't know.
I'll let someone much more patient than me explain you why you're wrong.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

You're basically using numbers you don't understand to explain things you don't know.
I'll let someone much more patient than me explain you why you're wrong.

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Please, explain why I'm wrong. You have yet to post a shred of evidence as to why Ninja is harder, you've just insisted that it is.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

Beside being pretty much hardware dependant there's actually way more than simply doing your rotation correctly and using everything on cooldown, you have to adapt and you can optimize your whole rotation (and ninki rotation) depending of each fight, you also have to map every trick attack correctly to get the most rDPS out of it, same goes for enmity management.

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Uh, how does this differ from literally every other job in the game? I have to adjust my opener on Samurai for better optimization on V3S based on Spellblade Holy, for example. Dragoon moves its buffs around to properly align with the raid for "burst phases." Mapping out Trick Attack isn't any different than maintaining Greased Lighting or BotD throughout phase skips. In fact, both of those can be far more cumbersome on specific fights. You seem to be creating this illusion only Ninja has to optimize their rotation based on a fight. Ask a good Black Mage or Summoner the sheer amount of micromanagement that goes into their opener and Ninja's isn't even close.

To answer the OP's question. I would rank Monk ahead of Ninja nowadays in terms of overall difficulty. For the melee in general: Dragoon >= Monk > Ninja > Samurai would be my rankings.

Ninja will always be the most overrated job in "which job is the hardest" arguments.

I'm not weighing in on which is harder of the two as imo it's pretty subjective. I mained a monk last tier and moved over to ninja this tier (our ninja stopped raiding and we couldn't find an equal one to replace him) and having come from monk, ninja was insanely easy and familiar to me, all I had to do was get use to the mudra combos and weaving them.

Give me a dragon however and I'm all "AHH! This is so slow, what the he'll am I doing! Dammit I'm animation locked in an AoE" I won't even get started on my feeble attempts to play casters in savage raids :p

Basically my point Is, are either difficult? No. Is any job. Not really. It's down to what your use to. Faster gcds and positional? You'll have np. Switching over from a whm main that's never played melee? Maybe it'll be a learning experience but you'll get there.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Uh, how does this differ from literally every other job in the game? I have to adjust my opener on Samurai for better optimization on V3S based on Spellblade Holy, for example. Dragoon moves its buffs around to properly align with the raid for "burst phases." Mapping out Trick Attack isn't any different than maintaining Greased Lighting or BotD throughout phase skips. In fact, both of those can be far more cumbersome on specific fights. You seem to be creating this illusion only Ninja has to optimize their rotation based on a fight. Ask a good Black Mage or Summoner the sheer amount of micromanagement that goes into their opener and Ninja's isn't even close.

To answer the OP's question. I would rank Monk ahead of Ninja nowadays in terms of overall difficulty. For the melee in general: Dragoon >= Monk > Ninja > Samurai would be my rankings.

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This was a NIN - MNK comparison.
While most melee rotations are rigid (DRG being the best exemple), NIN (and kinda SAM) offers you to switch combos order at will. Ninki mapping is also a very different thing than just "switching buffs" around.
Comparing TAs mapping to maintaining GL and BotD during phase skips/disengaging situations > ?

I only rejected the fact that monk would be harder than NIN, every melees are pretty easy to pick up and once you can play one decently you probably can play all 4 of them.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

If there was the same number of parses maybe it would be relevant.

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That was a very shallow way to try to discredit perhaps the best way to answer the question. Statistically, once you have a large enough sample size, it doesn't need to get bigger for nothing to change.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

Probably because you can't tell if a NIN is good or bad by only looking at its personal dps.

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So coordinate when you use TA with the rest of your team? I think you've been pretty hard owned by others here.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

This was a NIN - MNK comparison.
[...]
I only rejected the fact that monk would be harder than NIN, every melees are pretty easy to pick up and once you can play one decently you probably can play all 4 of them.

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Qualitatively, do you understand the statistical evidence that was put forth? Why the variance between the median DPS versus top 95th percentile DPS performance is a great answer to measure job difficulty?

As a person that has leveled both would say ninja is the easier to master but more prone to mistakes mob turn at last second, or lag spike and you bunny a mudra. This is alot more damaging then mnk missing pos or even GL dropping. However monk it much harder with fights where GL will run out and learning to keep GL up at all times is harder then huton for ninja. While i would give the crown to mnk being harder to master by a nose to say ninja is in same boat as sam or rdm is just not true. I also leveled rdm and starting on sam and they are far easier to play then ninja.

Think I'll accept the statistics presented here and general opinion that MNK seems to be more difficult because of GL uptime and positionals. I'm surprised because I thought NIN was a pretty busy job with gauge spenders and mudras.

I did a comparison of Alte Roite myself because all Jobs have higher numbers there and there's not as much RNG mechanics (i.e. Basically a target dummy). I also moved the base level up from 50 -> 60 percentile to reduce the amount of parses that are just because people died. Some Jobs are punished more heavily for death than others but that doesn't make their rotation much more difficult. The upper limit is 95%.

Either way the numbers are pretty similar but I think a test with less fight specific variables make for a better comparison of the Jobs and their rotations themselves. Also, it's easy it's also everyone's best fights and thus has the highest upper limit for optimization than the rest.

Here are the results -
SMN = 5,209.6 - 4288.1 = 921.5
BLM = 5,214.7 - 4,336.8 = 877.9
MNK = 5,220.2 - 4,417.7 = 802.5
DRG = 5,067.2 - 4,300.5 = 766.7
SAM = 5,412.5 - 4,647.2 = 765.3
MCH = 5,164.2 - 4,399.0 = 765.2
BRD = 4,924.9 - 4183.1 = 741.8
RDM = 4,882.2 - 4,186.0 = 696.2
NIN = 5,040.8 - 4,351.0 = 689.8

Wow NIN is actually at the bottom. Thanks for taking the time.

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Originally Posted by Raiden_Ki

Think I'll accept the statistics presented here and general opinion that MNK seems to be more difficult because of GL uptime and positionals. I'm surprised because I thought NIN was a pretty busy job with gauge spenders and mudras.

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Tbh the best way would be to try it out for yourself since "difficulty" is subjective. My static MNK mate for example finds that MNK is the easiest meele job out of the 4. He plays all 4 melee jobs and usually pulls orange numbers at fflogs with his MNK.

I don't get though why nearly every thread at the boards here have to end in a Job X VS Job Y war... when it's more a personal thing...
Everyone has a different opinion and feel about "what's more difficult"...

I hope you have time to review one more reply before you finalize your decision. I've played NIN since it came out, albeit i skipped HS but the remainder of ARR and now SB I've continued to main the job. I've always been under the impression that the only people who choose to play this class are the ones that were a bit of perfectionist. Perhaps it's only me I spend a lot of time in practice groups helping others clear content while learning to optimize my runs. Most other NINs I've run into seem to have the same thought process as well. I don't know if the general mechanics shy many players away, it is an aesthetically pleasing job so I don't know why people would stay away from it other then it's initial "difficulty level" people gave it from the start.

Now what the statistics do not show you, is the how landing or missing TA effects you and the group. Landing your TA increases the raids dps so there is no way to measure the highest dps - lowest dps for specifically ninjas in a fight. The only honest way to measure a classes' difficulty is perhaps fflogs cast per minute (CPM) measurement. You'll have to go through each fight and see the average CPM between NIN and other classes. I think you'll find the numbers you are looking for. I'll list one example I found:

One of the top end fights for Neo-Exdeath for one group shows:
SMN at 5k dps with 36.1 CPM
NIN at 4.5k dps with 44 CPM

Found similar numbers for NIN/MNK comparison.

So in conclusion that ninja is performing 8 more actions per minute then that summoner and is doing 500 less dps. The fact is our combos are more forgiving on direction because of all of the other things we do in fights typically. Our gap closer shukuchi itself is a skill shot, you can't just target a mob and teleport to it. Don't get me started on mudras, you fail it or accidentally press it twice you're done for the next 20 seconds, say bye bye to your dps. I play NIN and MNK both I find monk to be harder atm but that is because i'm still new to it and learning. They are both fun classes and I would recommend both. I hope this helps you to make an informed decision.

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Originally Posted by Sam26

Tbh the best way would be to try it out for yourself since "difficulty" is subjective. My static MNK mate for example finds that MNK is the easiest meele job out of the 4. He plays all 4 melee jobs and usually pulls orange numbers at fflogs with his MNK.

I don't get though why nearly every thread at the boards here have to end in a Job X VS Job Y war... when it's more a personal thing...
Everyone has a different opinion and feel about "what's more difficult"...

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I completely agree. Difficulty generally depends more on the player, playstyle and just how your brain works.

The differences in percentiles are mostly an example of how punishing the Jobs with mess ups or mechanics/movement. With MNK, there's less thinking involved than SAM or NIN, but if you miss positionals or lose GL3 then you're heavily punished. Even if you mess up on the 'easier' jobs, you still do well and thus the disparity is smaller with the top end despite there being more ways to optimize.

You should really try them out yourself to see how well it flows to you.

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Originally Posted by Raiden_Ki

Hi guys,

Some time ago I've had a topic discussing the faster/more engaging classes.

I'm asking your opinion whether NIN or MNK is more difficult to play?

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The difficulty of a class depends mostly on yourself. For some people MNK is way harder and for some NIN is way harder.

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Originally Posted by Raiden_Ki

Wow NIN is actually at the bottom. Thanks for taking the time.

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NIN may be at the bottom of this list but what does it matter if you like to play it?

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Originally Posted by EbonySeraphim

That was a very shallow way to try to discredit perhaps the best way to answer the question. Statistically, once you have a large enough sample size, it doesn't need to get bigger for nothing to change.


So coordinate when you use TA with the rest of your team? I think you've been pretty hard owned by others here.


Qualitatively, do you understand the statistical evidence that was put forth? Why the variance between the median DPS versus top 95th percentile DPS performance is a great answer to for job difficulty?

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It's pretty clear that either he doesn't understand it, or he does understand it but he dislikes the results enough that he just wants to discredit it without actually being able to address. It became evident that he couldn't actually refute it he said "You're basically using numbers you don't understand to explain things you don't know. I'll let someone much more patient than me explain you why you're wrong." That's not an argument. That's an ad hominem and a lack of an argument.

It's not worth engaging with him if he doesn't want to engage with other's arguments or even provide a modicum of evidence for arguments of his own.

When the biggest dps disparity probably comes from people unable to use true north correctly and doing something as simple as "positionnals" (because that's what monk is about).

> Taking into account that on the actual tier there's a lot of situations where true north is godlike resulting in a bigger disadvantage for monk players not using it than any other melees.

I'm gonna repeat myself, your numbers are based on personal DPS so I explained you that you can't judge a class difficulty only by its personal DPS.
Again, NIN optimization is mostly about rDPS, TA requires you to use a ninjutsu beforehand which depending of the player "skill" could create a huge delay inbetween every TAs thus probably resulting in one to two TA loss over the whole fight yet you wont feel it that much on its personal DPS.
Like someone said before NIN is up to a type of optimization that has clearly nothing to do with only "I do move buff in my opener too", getting that type of answer just feelsbadman.

On another note some classes are more punishing from something as simple as dying, yet it doesnt make them "harder".


So yeah, if you really want FFlogs to start getting relevant please at least start at the 70 - 75%, if you take the lowest % where players still can't do positionnals properly you're gonna end up with a bigger gap between classes with a lot of positionnals and classes with almost none. And you mostly want to look at people that understand how their class works to get an idea of their difficulty, knowing that while doing everything wrong you get more dps out of a class than another one doesn't mean anything in terms of overall difficulty.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

When the biggest dps disparity probably comes from people unable to use true north correctly and doing something as simple as "positionnals" (because that's what monk is about).

> Taking into account that on the actual tier there's a lot of situations where true north is godlike resulting in a bigger disadvantage for monk players not using it than any other melees.

I'm gonna repeat myself, your numbers are based on personal DPS so I explained you that you can't judge a class difficulty only by its personal DPS.
Again, NIN optimization is mostly about rDPS, TA requires you to use a ninjutsu beforehand which depending of the player "skill" could create a huge delay inbetween every TAs thus probably resulting in one to two TA loss over the whole fight yet you wont feel it that much on its personal DPS.
Like someone said before NIN is up to a type of optimization that has clearly nothing to do with only "I do move buff in my opener too", getting that type of answer just feelsbadman.

On another note some classes are more punishing from something as simple as dying, yet it doesnt make them "harder".

So yeah, if you really want FFlogs to start getting relevant please at least start at the 70 - 75%, if you take the lowest % where players still can't do positionnals properly you're gonna end up with a bigger gap between classes with a lot of positionnals and classes with almost none. And you mostly want to look at people that understand how their class works to get an idea of the difficulty, knowing that while doing everything wrong you get more dps out of a class than another one doesn't mean anything.

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Monk is literally 3.X Wildfire+Positionals+GL3 Upkeep now with the way Riddle of Fire is structured, so no it isn't entirely accurate to say that Monk is "Positionals the job".

You imply that Ninja's DPS isn't actually impacted by Raid DPS either, but a Ninja who flubs their Trick Attack is having their damage impacted just like everyone else's. Ninja's DPS isn't magically going to be independent of its ability to apply party buffs and align them with everyone else's. You can insist that Ninja has to optimize fight to fight more than everyone else does, but frankly until you actually provide evidence it doesn't make a difference. Every job has to plan its skill useage out over a fight for maximum effectiveness, ninja isn't an exception.

And if I actually do as you suggest and compare the Max/Upper Quartile (95th/75th percentile) ratio, Ninja is still subject to less variability (Monk 1.092> Ninja 1.082) which suggests that yes, it is easier.

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/...063126-wuh.gif

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Originally Posted by Allyrion

Here are the results -
SMN = 5,209.6 - 4288.1 = 921.5
BLM = 5,214.7 - 4,336.8 = 877.9
MNK = 5,220.2 - 4,417.7 = 802.5
DRG = 5,067.2 - 4,300.5 = 766.7
SAM = 5,412.5 - 4,647.2 = 765.3
MCH = 5,164.2 - 4,399.0 = 765.2
BRD = 4,924.9 - 4183.1 = 741.8
RDM = 4,882.2 - 4,186.0 = 696.2
NIN = 5,040.8 - 4,351.0 = 689.8

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This is incorrect. Calculating the difference between 95th and 60th% leaves the confounding factor that not all jobs have equal dps potential; this calculation is biased, making jobs with high personal dps appear more difficult when this is not necessarily true. You'll want to use ratios instead (95th% / 60th%) to remove the difference in dps potential from the equation, giving a relative difference rather than an absolute one.

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Originally Posted by Adam

Now what the statistics do not show you, is the how landing or missing TA effects you and the group. Landing your TA increases the raids dps so there is no way to measure the highest dps - lowest dps for specifically ninjas in a fight. The only honest way to measure a classes' difficulty is perhaps fflogs cast per minute (CPM) measurement. You'll have to go through each fight and see the average CPM between NIN and other classes.

One of the top end fights for Neo-Exdeath for one group shows:
SMN at 5k dps with 36.1 CPM
NIN at 4.5k dps with 44 CPM

Found similar numbers for NIN/MNK comparison.

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CPM is a terrible measure of job difficulty. It should be glaringly obvious that jobs with inherent haste buffs (GL, Huton, Shifu, etc) will always end up with greater CPM values than ones that do not, or even have extra-long GCDs in the case of BLM -- which, by the way, has the highest 95th - 50th difference ratio across all fights, suggesting it is the most difficult job to optimize, rather than the least difficult one as this CPM ranking would show it to be. Furthermore, an analysis with a sample size of 1 is never statistically significant.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

When the biggest dps disparity probably comes from people unable to use true north correctly and doing something as simple as "positionnals" (because that's what monk is about).

> Taking into account that on the actual tier there's a lot of situations where true north is godlike resulting in a bigger disadvantage for monk players not using it than any other melees.

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So, carefully planning cooldown usage results in great gains for monk? And that takes skill? It almost seems like good cooldown mapping is a universal part of all dps jobs' optimization.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

[...] your numbers are based on personal DPS so I explained you that you can't judge a class difficulty only by its personal DPS.
Again, NIN optimization is mostly about rDPS, [...] you wont feel it [lower TA uptime] that much on its personal DPS.

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First off, we're judging the difficulty not by personal dps, but the ratio of personal dps at different percentiles. As for TA and raid dps:
The dps gained from TA is 10% * uptime%. This is equally true for every party member's dps, including the NIN, as for the raid as a whole. Greater TA uptime is an equal relative gain for the NIN and the raid. You insist that NIN's ability to buff raid dps somehow does not correlate with increased personal dps. This is factually false. Learn to math.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

So yeah, if you really want FFlogs to start getting relevant please at least start at the 70 - 75%, if you take the lowest % where players still can't do positionnals properly you're gonna end up with a bigger gap between classes with a lot of positionnals and classes with almost none. And you mostly want to look at people that understand how their class works to get an idea of their difficulty, knowing that while doing everything wrong you get more dps out of a class than another one doesn't mean anything in terms of overall difficulty.

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I'm assuming you're referring to 50th % with "the lowest % where players still can't do positionnals properly". Whether or not this is true, or where the threshold lies where a player's % of succesful positionals is proper or not, is not something I'm going to address here because that is a subjective matter. What is a fact, however, is that the 50th % is the median player. 50th % performance is what a person with median knowledge and skill of a job can accomplish, good or bad. Their ability to get positionals right is the median, whether they're good or not. Comparing the average joe to the expert is a very valid method to quantify skill ceilings.

Of course, this post shouldn't be necessary at all. The burden of proof for your claim that NIN is more difficult than MNK lies with you.
Great job on the no-comment sassy .gif, though.

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Originally Posted by Shamox

This was a NIN - MNK comparison.
While most melee rotations are rigid (DRG being the best exemple), NIN (and kinda SAM) offers you to switch combos order at will. Ninki mapping is also a very different thing than just "switching buffs" around.
Comparing TAs mapping to maintaining GL and BotD during phase skips/disengaging situations > ?I only rejected the fact that monk would be harder than NIN, every melees are pretty easy to pick up and once you can play one decently you probably can play all 4 of them.

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And? I added what I openly acknowledged were my own subjective opinion on the melee job at the end of the post, following my answer to the OP.

You're making a false equivalent. Ninki betters compares with Greased Lightning or BotD management whereas moving your raid utilities to better compliment the group aligns with Trick Attack usage. Overall, none is particularly difficult nor is it more difficult on Ninja. Now you are, of course, welcome to believe otherwise but if you're going to insist Ninjas is harder objectively, you need something to back up that assertion. Posting silly gifs isn't an argument. ;)

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Originally Posted by Jkei

This is incorrect. Calculating the difference between 95th and 60th% leaves the confounding factor that not all jobs have equal dps potential; this calculation is biased, making jobs with high personal dps appear more difficult when this is not necessarily true. You'll want to use ratios instead (95th% / 60th%) to remove the difference in dps potential from the equation, giving a relative difference rather than an absolute one.

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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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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.