Trick Attack

[Theihe]

Right so let me be the one person to go against the grain here. The change to TA is a good change.
NIN scales incredibly hard as the tier progresses, quite frankly, it scales too hard. The tradeoff is that NIN, in the beginning of the tier, is incredibly undertuned. TA doesn't scale as hard, and NIN's personal DPS is a lot lower than it's other melee counterparts.
This is completely nonsensical- as the DPS check is only ever an issue at the beginning of the tier. As soon as you get gear any and all DPS checks become arbitrary. And having one job specifically be overly reliant on scaling harder isn't healthy. Everything is on a 2 min buff rotation (and fights are better designed to take the two minute windows into account than the one minute windows).

This will change nothing for NIN at all, other than keeping MUG on cooldown as opposed to drifting it to manipulate Ninki generation every 2 minutes. They could even buff Trick's length allowing you to actually squeeze your entire burst into it's duration, a welcomed change to improve game feel.

Any job being such a slave to it's raidbuff, and inherently a slave to it's team's performance, is arbitrarily punished by other people's poor performance. And NIN is the only job in the game currently punished twice as often for other people's mistakes. Someone dies and get's ressed? They'll have Death Debuff during one raidbuff window- unless you play with a NIN where their contribrution will get cucked twice.

Bringing NIN up to the same aDPS level as all the other melees will make it less group reliant, making the job more PF friendly, and even making it better to bring for the first weeks of prog. You shouldn't hit enrage week 1 and think to yourself "well damn, if I had played MNK/SAM this probably wouldn't have been an issue". And in a static environment you're also asking groups with a NIN to optimize twice as often, pool resources twice as often and do perfect burst windows twice as often (which during prog is a lot more punishing). For the groups who want to commit to such a thing they'll be rewarded (early tier) with contribrution slightly lower than any other melee- and (late tier) will get contribrution equal to the rest of the melee roster.

You must also consider that NIN's lower aDPS also affects how other job's buffs scale. This change will negate that and make this specific aspect less of a painpoint in balancing- without actually changing anything for the NIN themselves. The absolutely best possible outcome.



I broke this down in the beginning of this tier in regards to the 6.08 buffs- and it accurately reflects NIN's lower contribrutions in comparasion to the other DPS when gear doesn't scale as hard. One can check FFLOGS now to see how NIN is definitely up there on rDPS, while there's still quite a sifnificant discrepancy in aDPS (as it currently should be with the current TA- as if their aDPS was higher NIN would shoot through the roof on rDPS).

To add to this, to get the most out of a raidbuff it requires some level of optimization.
For any rDPS heavy job to actually contribrute it requires other people to actually press their buttons, not die, not eat dmg downs and not drift their burst out of buff windows. And that's 8 people.
"Selfish" DPS should have more personal DPS output, yes, but they should under no conditions outperform jobs that depend on group co-ordination.

Current standings in rDPS:

Current standings in rDPS sorted by DPS:

Current standings in rDPS sorted by MAX:



Current standings in aDPS:

Current standings in aDPS sorted by DPS:

Current standings in aDPS sorted by MAX:


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"But isn't the MAX entierly reliant on RNG? Good crit for the player themselves- their teammembers, and even what jobs they bring?"
Yes. And such RNG and uncertainty applies to all of the jobs- but least of all the "selfish" DPS as they have one factor (themselves)- as opposed to rDPS jobs' 8. The fact that it is RNG reliant isn't inherently fantastic though, I will admit.

"So how would we find an accurate estimate of each job?"
With the way FFLOGS currently work- we can't. However there would be good reason to atleast aknowledge the 100th percentile parses, especially when the rankings of the jobs ends up changing. So for these current statistics:

rDPS DPS:
MNK->RPR->BLM->SAM->DRG->NIN->RDM->SMN->BRD->DNC->MCH

rDPS MAX:
MNK->BLM->DRG->SAM->RPR->NIN->DNC->BRD->RDM->SMN->MCH

aDPS DPS:
SAM ->BLM ->MNK ->RPR ->DRG ->NIN ->MCH ->RDM ->SMN ->BRD ->DNC

aDPS MAX:
SAM ->BLM ->MNK ->RPR ->DRG ->NIN ->SMN ->RDM ->MCH ->BRD ->DNC

The (1 week) difference in rDPS DPS between MNK and NIN is 231.
The (1 week) difference in rDPS MAX between MNK and NIN is 267.
The (1 week) difference in aDPS DPS between MNK and NIN is 497.
The (1 week) difference in aDPS MAX between MNK and NIN is 516.


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Melees and Casters would lose nothing if their potencies got buffed and had their raidbuffs turned into a personal buffs, akin to Death's Design. If anything, it would finally allow players to say "which job do I actually enjoy playing?" as opposed to "man I fuckin wish I played SAM instead of NIN this expansion cause I feel like I'm actively griefing my team".
Not to mention that this would also give the devs a more streamlined approach.

The game would be better if the devs had fewer variables, because trying to balance 8 different raidbuffs scaling multiplicatively off of one another is an absolute nightmare, and as a player it feels absolutely garbage to play a low aDPS job, arbitrarily "taxed" because 5% of your DPS has been stripped away from you and thrown to the mercy of your; completely random and often incompetent; team.
Forget this stupid "mobility tax" here "difficulty tax" there, the only thing this thread has been taxing is my patience.
This game isn't hard.
No jobs are hard.
Your job shouldn't do more dmg because it's "hard".
Your job should do more damage because doing damage is fun.
Feeling like you're always capable of beating any other job in the game if you become good enough; is fun.

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I am honestly stumped by the negative feelings the community has towards this TA change, because I see nothing but positives. I feel it's an amazing change, and I literally couldn't be happier unless they also made Kassatsu guarantee a crit.

I don't care NIN scales hard late tier. If you beat the DPS check then that's it. You get more gear making the DPS check more and more arbitrary. The fact that TA scales hard is just a toss-up. If you could already beat the DPS check before you scale hard then what's the point of doing more DPS?

I am excited to have my job feel strong, always, independently of if my team decided to eat chalk during raid.