Ninja, The problem job and some ideas to change it.

[wereotter]

While Ninja surely is on the lower end of damage (lowest of the melee) Red Mage IS actually the lowest dps in the game and bring utility hardly worth mentioning outside of progression.

FFLogs has updated now where you can see the rankings of DPS by job, and see which jobs do the most and which do the least based on various fights. This claim is provably wrong as RDM does more personal DPS than both NIN and BRD. It's not until you get to below the 30th percentile of players that RDM has the lowest DPS. (At least in Sigma Savage) Their utility is largely not DPS utility, though, which is where they get a bad rep.

Ninja does have the lowest personal DPS of the melee jobs, which then creates the question of does the damage boost from trick attack, and the added time tanks can spend in DPS stance thanks to enmity skills offset that reduced damage? It's hard to attribute how much added DPS the ninja brings, a tank might go to DPS stance regardless, but how much extra time does he get to spend there thanks to the ninja? You can't really track that through logs.

One suggestion I've had to help ninja DPS, maybe, is to change the way skill speed works. Rather than have skill speed increase auto attack damage, make it increase the rate at which the job performs auto attacks. Since Ninki is built off when you auto attack, getting a bit of skill speed might allow you to spend ninki more often, which would be a DPS increase even if it's just an extra fire frog.