5.1 NIN slowed down and uninteresting

[Shurrikhan]

Always love the gaming community. Lots of people saying original version has problems, needs to be fixed. SE fixes it. Lots of people now saying the old version was better.

If there's something I've learned, no matter what developers do, they can never win.

If I ask you to fix my arm because it's in pain, and you replace it with a, albeit rather functional, pirate hook, should I be happy about it?

If they had fixed Ninja, I'd have been happy. But as one might normally expect, replacing it with something that shares its names and animations, but little of its playflow, isn't going to have that result.

It was faintly undertuned (performing just under DRG, which at the time performed barely at all under SAM) and excessively punished latency. Fix those and you fix NIN. Remove NIN combos, the majority of its oGCD usage, and a quarter of its APM, and you bring it back, sure, but lobotomized.

[Lastelli]

If I ask you to fix my arm because it's in pain, and you replace it with a, albeit rather functional, pirate hook, should I be happy about it?

If they had fixed Ninja, I'd have been happy. But as one might normally expect, replacing it with something that shares its names and animations, but little of its playflow, isn't going to have that result.

It was faintly undertuned (performing just under DRG, which at the time performed barely at all under SAM) and excessively punished latency. Fix those and you fix NIN. Remove NIN combos, the majority of its oGCD usage, and a quarter of its APM, and you bring it back, sure, but lobotomized.

People should really stop overreacting though.

It only takes a 10 seconds search on fflogs or a few minutes of testing to see that NIN'S APM barely changed after the rework. The current NIN is way better than before. At least it's a functional job. The problem is that 3/4 of its gameplay is a 1-2-3 combo and that's it.

Tbh I really miss HW NIN... I miss mutilate and the 2-step shadow fang combo. I miss the complexity we had before SB...but all jobs were butchered and dumbed down, so it's not a job specific thing.

[Shurrikhan]

It only takes a 10 seconds search on fflogs or a few minutes of testing to see that NIN'S APM barely changed after the rework. The current NIN is way better than before. At least it's a functional job. The problem is that 3/4 of its gameplay is a 1-2-3 combo and that's it.

Tbh I really miss HW NIN... I miss mutilate and the 2-step shadow fang combo. I miss the complexity we had before SB...but all jobs were butchered and dumbed down, so it's not a job specific thing.

As someone playing at sub-100 ms, the job was entirely "functional" for me prior to those changes, but also more enjoyable (aside from the TCJ change, which just feels great no matter which version one might prefer). That wasn't enough for me to be happy with it, as I realized (especially with every even minor lag spike) that it was a precarious situation at best, and as a result I've suggested changes to make it less ping-punishing since ARR, but it certainly didn't need the level of simplification it received.

Also, to be fair, perception of apm is going to matter a whole lot more to apm than the numbers alone. If your combos no longer require any mental processing, each bit of apm among them will most likely feel less exciting. And then there's the matter of variance. SB DRK had very nearly the apm of HW DRK, and yet it felt comparatively plodding and unexciting to many veterans just because there were fewer things to watch out for and its oGCD apm was all seemingly funneled to one skill.