NIN/MNK difficulty?

[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?

[Xeinon]

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

[SpeckledBurd]

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.

[Shamox]

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

[SpeckledBurd]

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

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.

[Dzian]

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.

[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.)

[SpeckledBurd]

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.)

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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

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.

[Shamox]

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.

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.