NIN Opener / Rotation

[Aiurily]

it's more of a server issue than player connection issue unfortunately. jp players living in japan playing on jp datacenters still have varying speeds of mudra activation, and the same with players near the montreal datacenters as well

the laggier you are on average (i've personally found that ramuh ex/fcob are the laggiest) the less value skillspeed has because you clip into your gcd more and more. hopefully they fix the delay, or at least make it standard across all zones/instances

[Ooshima]

The laggier you are, I think the more skillspd helps. Your normal GCD skill activation shouldn't be affected by lag - as such the faster you complete them, the more amount of time you have to complete your mudra, activate it, and continue to reapply your debuffs and DoTs without dropping or clipping them.

The default GCD without skillspd under Huton is 2.15s, so with 2.0s, each GCD skill you will save 0.15s.

If you quickly refer to the 3:28 parse I've shown earlier, I have used 98 GCD skills. A quick math would tell you that I have saved 14.7s in this 3:28 parse. 14.7s is enough for 7 GCD skills. You can try a parse where after your opener, stay still and just auto attack for 14.7s and continue your usual parse and see how much DPS you have dropped.

Also, for 98 GCD skills with each 2.0s, it should take me a total of 3:18 to pull them off. However, the parser shows you that the total time of my run was 3:28 (I manually ended it, so no extra seconds counted). This means that the Ninjitsus I've used in this run ate up 10s outside the GCD cooldown.

In the list of skills used, you can see that I have used 5 Raitons and 3 Suitons. Also, what is not shown is 2 recast of Huton. So 10 Ninjutsus here. 10 Ninjutsus, 10s extra. Each Ninjutsu took 1s extra, which means my cast time of the 3 signs + activation is a 3.0s itself.

With my extra skill speed, I have bought myself 14.7s to cover up for the 10s I've used outside the GCD timer to use my Ninjutsus. I'm still in surplus of 4.7s over the default skillspd to cover up for any potential spikes and crap. If you did not had bought time for yourself and your Ninjutsu lags, you might find yourself that your DoTs and debuffs will start to drop, or you have to reapply them too early to prevent from dropping. These are all the things that wastes your DPS.


Sadly speaking, these are the little little things you have to watch. It is how Bards doesn't even have a rotation to begin with but there are so many bards out there that does crap DPS.

[Tsuya]

The laggier you are, I think the more skillspd helps. Your normal GCD skill activation shouldn't be affected by lag - as such the faster you complete them, the more amount of time you have to complete your mudra, activate it, and continue to reapply your debuffs and DoTs without dropping or clipping them.

I want to discuss with that statement, actually when u think of it, its opposite? laggy mudra with 2.0 cooldown only means you will be clipping your GCD skills more becouse u have less time to cast mudras.

With lets say 2.15 GCD it only means u hit slower but harder (lets put aside dot/buff timers for now) becouse it only means that u have your poins in other stat than SkS, you have that extra .15 when u cast mudras so you have a lil more time for it, thus clipping less of your GCD skills.

Hoever, things get more complicated when u think not about 3 min parse but about whole 11 min fight (most new coils hard enrage is around 11 mins), what is more worth it? having hitting harder to save your GCD clipping and having lil longer cooldown, or putting out (60/2 compared to 60/2.15) 2 skills more every 1 min for totall of 22 skills more during whole fight.

ALSO, slower SkS helps you when u have to switch target, or avoid AoE becouse u have that extra lil time to get back to your target due to longer GCD. No coil is as static as dummy fight so we have to take that into consideration.
486 SkS is a LARGE investment in SkS consuming more than of your extra stats (whats left after caping acc)

Biggest question for me now is is it worth it putting our 486 SkS, right now i have 2.1 and i feel like cooldowns are putting out great for me almost no clipping, and i have no gear to get down to 2.15~ and see how harder i hit to compare parses.

Coz for now i only could test it half naked equipping off all my SkS equip to see if i would clip off dots/buffs but nothing of sort appeared, need longer parses maybe.

Idealy would be to test exact same rotations with same ilvl but one guy with high SkS and other one with high det.

[Tsuya]

I figured i'd post this video here of Firana Magnus' rotation/opener (520 3min). He has a channel on twitch called Wabakabi Snatcher.

I'm not sure if it differs from any of the other rotations posted here so hopefully you guys can pick it apart. Firana has since obtained the i130 Magitek Daggers so his dummy parse will be substantially higher but this was with HA weapon, party buff and no potion apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5lTcltM_Uo

My previous opening looked quite similar, its quite cool coz it leaves space for mistakes, runoffs etc, but it had 1 big disadventage.
First TA goes off after 30 sec of a fight when most of you party members are out of buffs (BfB, IR etc), iv been talking with DPSses from my FC and i decided to muve first TA to 16-20 second of the fight when most of our DPS are on buffs and during heavy burst damage. Ofcorst this varies from diffirent play styles / rotations of your party DPSses but it works for mine, we parsed bouth of my rotations with standard rotations of my DPS buddies, muving TA to first 20 sec showed increse in everyones DPS becouse of the reason i said above.

Lately i also started to practice my rotation without DE, becouse in 99% cases u will have WAR in your team and rotation comes out quite diffirent (expecially start of it) when u take into consideration that u dont have to put up DE.
We all know we cannot trust random WARs in keeping up debuff on boss, but i think most of us practice not for doing some stuff with randoms, but end game with your team where u can agree with your team WAR to keep up buff or not and then come from of that.

[Ooshima]

I want to discuss with that statement, actually when u think of it, its opposite? laggy mudra with 2.0 cooldown only means you will be clipping your GCD skills more becouse u have less time to cast mudras.

With lets say 2.15 GCD it only means u hit slower but harder (lets put aside dot/buff timers for now) becouse it only means that u have your poins in other stat than SkS, you have that extra .15 when u cast mudras so you have a lil more time for it, thus clipping less of your GCD skills.

Hoever, things get more complicated when u think not about 3 min parse but about whole 11 min fight (most new coils hard enrage is around 11 mins), what is more worth it? having hitting harder to save your GCD clipping and having lil longer cooldown, or putting out (60/2 compared to 60/2.15) 2 skills more every 1 min for totall of 22 skills more during whole fight.

ALSO, slower SkS helps you when u have to switch target, or avoid AoE becouse u have that extra lil time to get back to your target due to longer GCD. No coil is as static as dummy fight so we have to take that into consideration.
486 SkS is a LARGE investment in SkS consuming more than of your extra stats (whats left after caping acc)

Biggest question for me now is is it worth it putting our 486 SkS, right now i have 2.1 and i feel like cooldowns are putting out great for me almost no clipping, and i have no gear to get down to 2.15~ and see how harder i hit to compare parses.

Coz for now i only could test it half naked equipping off all my SkS equip to see if i would clip off dots/buffs but nothing of sort appeared, need longer parses maybe.

Idealy would be to test exact same rotations with same ilvl but one guy with high SkS and other one with high det.

No, laggy mudra means you spend time wasting on GCD and your DoTs and DE debuff ticking off without you either on the Shadow Fang/Dancing Edge chain to keep it running.

I know this first hand because I started off with NIL skill speed and I have to EITHER clip it badly, such as more than 4s or more of Mutilate left, or only refresh it after it has dropped for about 1-2s

I have already provided you the math behind my parse. Higher skillspd means you can rack up time in surplus to spend it on mudras, which you will never complete the signs and activation within a GCD cool down. Every mudra you activate you are going to waste your GCD time. The only way to make up for it is to lower your GCD time so that you can do more weaponskills per min.

What you have said make sense for MNK but not for NIN. MNK doesn't have Mudras, they don't waste time not doing any GCD skills other than the exact same movements in dealing with mechanics which applies to NIN as well.

On the other hand, you can try doing some 20-30runs of 3:30mins parse (which is 3 Huton cycles including your initial activation of Huton), no food no pot no party buff, IL110 weapon with @ IL110 and see if you can break past 480 reliably on dummy without skillspeed.

I can only tell you that when I started playing NIN, I was struggling at 430-440 on dummy without skillspd. At the very night I was in a discussion with a fellow NIN and decided to try out skillspd, I was able to rack it up to 470 on dummy. And with time past and getting used to things and refining the opening, the numbers goes up slightly higher.

Anyways you mentioned about lower skillspd helps in coil, it is not because slower GCD helps in moving around. If you need 3s to move around to targets or dodging you still take that 3s to move around. Ideally you shouldn't spend too much time idling. Higher GCD or lower GCD doesn't affect the downtime you have to face if you have to. What it helps is probably conserve your TP in long fights.

I'm not a full time NIN so I can't comment about FCoB, but I am well aware that one in-game friend of mine, he cleared T13 as a NIN, he doesn't have high skillspeed, and he cleared without a BRD in his team.

[Casper]

I am sorry, Ooshima, you seem to be a very competent bard and ninja, but you have no clue about math.


I do not mean to insult you there, it is just that the the logic you try to apply is, well, illogic.

As others have pointed out, you are going to waste more off your GCD if you lag for mudras and lower your GCD. Take extreme exemples to convince yourself: let's assume that you take 3 second to complete a mudra, would you rather have a 1 sec GCD or a 3 sec one ? Well the second case let you do your full mudra during the Off GCD time, while in the second case you waste 2 GCD waiting for the mudra to finish.

The issue is you assume more actions is better, but you fail to take into account that if you do less actions you have more det / crit so each actions count more. If i have on one hand a GCD of 1 sec and on the other 3 sec, the 3 second GCD person must be assumed to deal 3 times more damage per action, as the loss in time is compensated by more crit chance and higher det.

You also mention that you have to let your dots fall sometime for 1-2 sec on time when using no skill speed. I agree. It is not an issue. If you use as much skill speed as you say you do, you are going to clip them sometime for 1-2 second instead, which is about the same loss. It will not be all the time, but you will not let them fall everytime in the previous case either. Trading one evil for another. I provided the math for this on the previous page, check it out again if you are unconvinced.

As far as i can tell, from my testing, for nins, and due to their lack of TP issues, det, crit and SS are all close to one another in term of dps increase. I would advise anyone to aim for just the accuracy they need above any other considerations. Then, from my testing, det seems the most efficient of the 3 stats, but only by a tiny margin (10-20% i would say), and thus i would rather take SS or crit over det if it means being where i want to be acc wise instead of 15-20 lower or higher. In any case, i have yet to see a compelling argument for stacking out SS until any kind of treshold -- 2.15 GCD works just fine, and so does 2.0, and so does anything in between ; i would not want to go much higher than 2.15 or much lower than 2.0, but since you can't anyway, it's a moot point.

[Tsuya]

Anyways you mentioned about lower skillspd helps in coil, it is not because slower GCD helps in moving around. If you need 3s to move around to targets or dodging you still take that 3s to move around. Ideally you shouldn't spend too much time idling. Higher GCD or lower GCD doesn't affect the downtime you have to face if you have to. What it helps is probably conserve your TP in long fights.

I'm not a full time NIN so I can't comment about FCoB, but I am well aware that one in-game friend of mine, he cleared T13 as a NIN, he doesn't have high skillspeed, and he cleared without a BRD in his team

I never said it helps with coil, i merely stated that it could help with some eng dame content like coil.
Yes 3 sec break will always be 3 second break BUT, when u have longer GCD u kidna have more time to get from place to place, lets say adds pop and u drop last hit on boss then quickly muve to add, when ur GCD is 2.0 u have 2 sec to get there without loosing any dps, with 2.5 GCD u have 2.5 sec to get to add withous loosking gcd.

Anyhow diffirence between 2 and 2.15 is slight so i dont think we should get that argument into consideration anyway.

2.0 GCD seem to fit NIN becouse of TA 10 sec buff, REAL question im asking myself is:
Will these 19 extra skills during whole fight (11min) where every disengage from monster only make this number go smaller, will 1 extra skill put inside 10% incresed dmg every 60 sec(TA) (so ussually 11 times for whole fight), will it compensate huge Determination/Crit los due to going almost full of your secondary stats to acc/SS while leaving leftovers to Det/Crit?

.... Higher skillspd means you can rack up time in surplus to spend it on mudras, which you will never complete the signs and activation within a GCD cool down. Every mudra you activate you are going to waste your GCD time. The only way to make up for it is to lower your GCD time so that you can do more weaponskills per min.

Yes, and no how to say it, you kidna look at it from opposite perspective? Idk how to explain
Technicly u right, but u forget that with lower SS you will be clipping your GCD less (due to it bein longer) and ALSO hitting harder, becouse u did put out 50% of your secondary stats to SS but to Det/Crit

So its kidna like bouth ways seems effective, you are right saying that additional SS will help you put out more skills per min but they will hit less, while less SS will make you mudras clip a lil less of GCD (but only a little, diffirence is not that big) but u will hit harder.
So its like fast but lighter or slower but harder. I cant really say wich one is a winner becouse theres just too many options to take into account, lag, boss disengage, switching targets, avoiding aoe and more.

Its not that im neglating your way, im just thinking out loud here becouse so far noone would provide parses from bouth sets, im talking about same person doing same rotations with 2 diffirent sets same ilvl.
SO bouth ways seems good in theory, but my question is wich one is better, unfortunetly i dont have gear to check that, one with SS and anotherone full det/crit.

Once i find some time to farm soldiery (propably this weekend) i try to collect 2 sets of equip and do some runs on dummy to see results.

[treuhavik]

So, in a nut-shell, unless you're wearing crafted, penta-melded gear, you'll be making a trade of DET/Crit for SkSp, resulting in extremely minimal DPS gains, if any. Movement in fights is irrelevant, since it applies to both cases.

[Casper]

So, in a nut-shell, unless you're wearing crafted, penta-melded gear, you'll be making a trade of DET/Crit for SkSp, resulting in extremely minimal DPS gains, if any. Movement in fights is irrelevant, since it applies to both cases.

Pretty much this.

[Alistaire]

So, in a nut-shell, unless you're wearing crafted, penta-melded gear, you'll be making a trade of DET/Crit for SkSp, resulting in extremely minimal DPS gains, if any. Movement in fights is irrelevant, since it applies to both cases.

And even then best to max crit and det first.