The Mug change, predictably, feels like garbage.

[Jaquan]

You say 'relegated' here like being a buffing class is a bad thing. And yes, one ability can be that impactful. Old Trick's short cooldown and power (5% is the second-highest DMG buff iirc? might be wrong) means it is up 25% of the time - Mug's uptime is only 16.67%, and it's one of the better buffs out there at the moment.

Again, you say weird connections -- I'd call that synergy, personally -- but I don't think I'm understanding you when you say that it limits Ninja's personal growth. We've been growing just fine -- Raijus are a fun addition to the job, even if they took a bit of tweaking. There's plenty of room to add different mudras, add more Ninki spenders, add more oGCDs; hell, maybe we even get another gauge to manage so we have something to do during our downtime. We could bring DOT management back, have some different combo paths, there's really infinite possibilites.

You say Dancer and Bard have more room to grow, but I'm not quite understanding where you're coming from. Why do you need to weaken synergy between classes in order for them to experience 'growth'? That just sounds like we'd be headed towards a future where there's no party buffs at all - and at that point, we might as well be playing a single player game.

I do want what I do to impact other classes, y'know? I like buffing, and I want to keep doing it. As it stands, Ninja has gone from one of three (buffer-types) to one of twelve (classes with a two-minute buff). It's definitely gotten less unique.

I'm afraid we're not reaching an agreement here (which is fine). For me the fact that the supposed "buff oriented party player" Ninja for entirety of their kit holds only one skill from that area feels more like an accident. An accident that held Ninja's personal damage hostage since any adjustment that would increase it would skew the meta in their favor. No matter how many mechanics Ninja would have their damage potential would be held back cementing its opinion of "Too much work for too little gains" which was something I could rather easily find when looking up info about pre 6.1 Ninja. All the synergies feel more like an accident considering that not a single skill in Ninja Kit after learning Suiton ever expands on it instead trying to pretend they focus on Ninja's own damage.

[butchersblock]

I'm afraid we're not reaching an agreement here (which is fine). For me the fact that the supposed "buff oriented party player" Ninja for entirety of their kit holds only one skill from that area feels more like an accident. An accident that held Ninja's personal damage hostage since any adjustment that would increase it would skew the meta in their favor. No matter how many mechanics Ninja would have their damage potential would be held back cementing its opinion of "Too much work for too little gains" which was something I could rather easily find when looking up info about pre 6.1 Ninja. All the synergies feel more like an accident considering that not a single skill in Ninja Kit after learning Suiton ever expands on it instead trying to pretend they focus on Ninja's own damage.

what is wrong with Ninja not having the highest aDPS? It never stopped the job from being meta.