I definitely love how ninja plays, the more buttons the merrier. Helps the old senile me keep my hand to eye coordination high, even if my mind is otherwise slipping. (I'm not really that old, just a joke.)

I've been away for a long time, and for some reason decided to play Ninja. I do love the way the class plays, but there are a few things that boggle my mind:

Lots of buttons, low dmg. Naturally this will be fixed by removing half of the Ninja's skills in the near future. You know it will happen.

Why ninjutsu fails if you use your basic attacks combos? That basically destroys ninjutsu. Add to that the very low potency of ninjutsu in general, when you consider it can fail and interrupts your basic attacks. To hyberbolize a bit: I have Blasting Zone macroed into my basic attack combo on my Gunbreaker, that macro alone does more damage than the entirety of ninjutsu on my Ninja, with zero effort. 1760 potency of damage per minute, that's what Blasting Zone does when used on every CD. Is this a fair comparison? Dunno, but it sure does give one something to think about.

Shukuchi is super clunky to use. Dancer's En Avant is simply said the super Shukuchi, better in every way possible. The reason why Shukuchi is bad is because you have a delay once you cast it, you have to target it. If there was a macro to make it instantly Shukuchi you onto your mouse pointer location or towards it, it would be awesome. It isn't at the moment. Macroing it with <t>, helps, but makes it even clunkier to use.

Assassinate is a pointless skill. Completely and utterly pointless. And what's funnier, it's probably the only melee attack in the entire game that roots you into place, so if you use it at a wrong time, you're dead, for a lousy ~300 potency attack. Remove it and increase DwaD potency per hit by 100.

I'm not a pro, but I don't understand Meisui. Why does it exist? Why does it have a cd, if it has to exist?

Why does every Ninki spender cost 80?

Ten Chi Jin is... poop. Why does it root you? For AoE it's good, dishing out some nice potency, but the fact that there is no valid 3 Mudra single target finisher for Ten Chi Jin makes it poop. And when you use it for aoe, the tank moves the enemies while you're there sitting, casting your Mudra combos and your double potency Doton is completely wasted. Sure, you can skip and go straight to Doton, but that kinda defeats the entire point of Ten Chi Jin.

Why is Bunshin so bad?

Clunky seems to be my favourite word when it comes to criticising the Ninja. Though that seems to be part of the FFXIV charm, I guess. Though I'd recommend for Naoki Yoshida to contact the people who programmed the engine for Wildstar or WoW, I'm sure some of them are unemployed at the moment. The responsiviness of controls in those is simply amazing so having them to take a look at how FFXIV runs things under the hood wouldn't hurt.