Patch 2.45 December 9th

[zar]

ITT: Sky is falling, NIN is dead. Rest in peace, Kirito Uchiha.

[Azper]

Stoneskin II ...I'm so happy I could cry. ;_;

[Megaius]

NINJA NERF?!? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Please, say it ain't so...! Have mercy...!

No! No! Gosh, please, no! No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[whoopeeragon]

What I'm most interested in is the Stoneskin II. I wonder if it means SE is finally breaking away from the overly rigid "Every class must have exactly X skills and each skill must only be learned at level Y" regardless of if the class would be more fun/interesting with an additional skill or two.

They broke away from that with Arcanist and Rogue, which have more abilities than the other classes.

[hallena]

A nerf on NIN? That class required people to actually play good to pull out DPS?

You what? Ninja is the bard of melee dps

[Alukah]

(If you think Huton and venom is the only thing NIN needs to max their DPS, you're delusional.)

I'm comparing similar abilities between NIN and MNK, so likewise twin snakes and GL3 (the equivalent of huton + venom + high combo potency) aren't the whole part of the story for MNK, but they do play a major role and you cannot deny MNK has a much harder time keeping GL3 and twin snakes up while dealing with mechs, compared to NIN being able to keep huton up pretty much always.

We could go further comparing blunt/slashing debuffs, other debuffs, dots and actions out of cooldown, but my main focus was damage and skill speed buff. Ninja has a lower skill cap than Monk and their theoretical max damage should represent this.

Also, (bold part) food for thought

F: First off, about the Job balance. How do you plan to adjust the job balance moving forward? Especially regarding dragoon.
Y: For a lot of the jobs, there is a high skill ceiling and that’s rewarded with high DPS. There are two main ways we can change the dragoon to make it more balanced with the other jobs. One way is to increase its DPS output. You’ll often see dragons die, sometimes even twice in tough content from magic damage where other jobs are ok. (Crowd laughs) That’s not so funny to me. I’m not laughing about it. There are fights where it’s harder on a black mage, for example, than other classes, but there’s nothing really where you can’t take a black mage in it. For dragoon it seems there are fights where they are not included so we need to adjust to make sure that doesn’t happen.
F: Next is about ninja.
Y: Wait. To be more concrete about it… Before we added ninja, monk was clearly the better DPS but had a way higher skill ceiling so this difference was less of a problem. You’ll have to wait to see the particulars of how we’ll be buffing dragoon, but we’re going to try to make sure they can compete in endgame content. We will definitely be changing it so that dragoon is more in line with other jobs. To put it simply we will increasing its damage output and its pace. We’re also going to try to adjust it so that it doesn’t experience big dips in its dps. Specifically, “Heavy Thrust” buff will no longer need positional to be applied, recast timers and animation locks will be reduced further. These changes are coming in 2.45.

[RyuDragnier]

You what? Ninja is the bard of melee dps

I would not compare a class where there are only 5 attacks ever really used for single target compared to a class with a 10 move rotation, especially considering messing up on NIN can completely drop your DPS hard, compared to using a wrong attack on BRD.

[hallena]

I would not compare a class where there are only 5 attacks ever really used for single target compared to a class with a 10 move rotation, especially considering messing up on NIN can completely drop your DPS hard, compared to using a wrong attack on BRD.

By that i meant ninja is the easiest melee dps, just like bard is the easiest ranged dps

[Hollowed]

Ohohohohooooooooooooooo. This update sounds better than 2.4! (other than final coil of course)

[Pibz]

Ohohohohooooooooooooooo. This update sounds better than 2.4! (other than final coil of course)

Yes, marriage and class buffs and zodiac are better than shiva, coil, hildebrand, new gear, story, class adjustments,etc.
I guess less is more