The Mug change, predictably, feels like garbage.

[AnotherPerson]

I feel you, I do, even if I don't agree with some of your personal takes. Ninja feels like it's being tugged in two distinct directions right now, and it just feels like a mess as a result.

I'd feel like the levelling argument would hold more weight if not for two things:

1. Levelling is temporary, endgame is forever. While it's important to make sure the levelling process isn't outright awful, I strongly disagree with making sacrifices on the part of Level 90 content for the sake of making a temporary situation better. You spend so much more time at level cap than you do at any other point during the game. Levelling is faster than it's ever been, too.
2. Other jobs suffer worse! Dancer and Bard are even more reliant than NIN on party members feeding into buffs to make the most of their kit, so should we gut them as well? What about healers, with their incredibly low personal DPS? Sure, they can heal themselves, but doing any kind of solo duty takes twice as long.

I do really agree that levelling Ninja doesn't feel super great, but I just can't agree with gimping Trick and giving more personal damage for the sake of levelling. Rather, we should tune solo content such that it can be completed by any job.

The thing is that Leveling is actually forever because level sync exists. This is especially true for any player still using the Duty Finder for roulettes. Players don't stop running the Duty Finder even if they finish leveling up because they run roulette for tomestone gear and rewards, which means level syncing down will always be prevalent even at endgame. Therefore, they can still queue up to their main job (ninja in this case) and be level synced down - thus reduced to the experience of "leveling".

Level syncing down will mean the leveling process will become more common than any - especially for any new player or veterans who haven't done old content and want to experience them as close as possible. I strongly disagree that this is a temporary situation. In content where your level sync is not at the endgame level cap, you will always be playing with a worse toolkit as a result (Palace of the Dead, Heaven on High, Bozja, old Extremes, old Ultimates, etc.). Endgame content is temporary, because the current endgame will always be old endgame by the time new endgame content comes out. However, old endgame content will always exist and in greater amounts - which means leveling will always be forever.

The problem of tuning solo content such that it can be completed by any job is that all jobs can already complete solo content. However, is it fun for healers with their single attack skill to take forever to beat up the enemies because incoming damage is so low that they can't use their healing toolkit fully at all? No. Not at all. This is a core problem of job fantasy when it doesn't align to the job & to the encounter. You wanted to play as a healer but you became relegated to gimped DPS pressing the same attack button over and over until the instance ends. If you can't get the flavor of your job fantasy, no amount of retuning will feel good. The same applies to ninjas with their assassin job fantasy here. It feels like utter garbage to play as an assassin role that is known for going solo, but not have the ability to properly assassinate the enemy because a large portion is just made up from having allies to do it for you.

The common opinion that Ninja is difficult stems from the fact that you have to learn three mudras in order to get functional with the job. I've never heard anyone who's spent a significant amount of time on the job call it difficult or complicated. I'd say Ninja is problem one of the easiest jobs to play at a high level -- it's very rote.

As butchersblock has pointed out, it's also been absurdly strong since....5.1? The only time between then and now where it's been anything close to weak was 6.0 release - 6.05. 6.05 left it in a very reasonable state of balance (the problem at the time, iirc, is that Monk and Reaper were absurdly strong), and 6.08 buffed it to all high hell, where it became the single job with the highest DPS output.

6.1 then made the changes, which pushed its DPS to absolutely ridiculous heights. It was already absurdly strong, it absolutely did not need more buffs. You can look at the statistics from 6.0; Ninja had the highest overall damage throughout it all. The argument that Ninja didn't deal enough damage or needed to be stronger just doesn't hold up. So I ask -- what about Ninja needs to be 'stronger'? It certainly isn't -- and wasn't -- damage.

That 'single skill' was kind of the identity of the job. Should we remove Dance Partner so that Dancers can deal some better personal DPS? Why is a buffing class less valid if it does one thing and does it well? I just don't understand your arguments. Trick Attack was supremely powerful, what more did it need to be?

As for why Ninja hasn't been popular until now -- let me break down the contributing factors. Looking back at Shadowbringers, at least for Eden's Promise, Ninja was about the second most popular melee to bring to a fight, behind Samurai. What's changed since then?

5.0 ninja was actually very weak. They got buffed heavily in 5.08 5.1 ninja was when it felt strong because Trick Attack overall rDPS got nerfed (10% to 5%) and the overall toolkit had been buffed to compensate. - Aka rebalancing Trick Attack to increase ninja's personal damage.

And that's the thing. Because of how prominent Trick Attack was to raiding, Ninja ended up developing a trick attack identity. People hated ninja when ninja wasn't a trick attack identity. However that's not the only identity that makes up a ninja. It's two core identities were always - support + fast paced high burst DPS via through melee or ranged (due to assassin job fantasy). If Trick Attack became too impactful, ninjas basically put in a ton of work on their core rotation for low DPS. That's why there were plenty of problems with balancing ninja to not just be a "trick attack" job for raiding and to make their own damage toolkit still impactful. I don't play ninja for trick attack only, I play it because I want that assassin job fantasy outside of raiding. I might want to support my teammates sometimes, but I also want to feel impactful when I'm doing solo stuff because this is a job that is supposed to be able to annihilate an enemy instantly when they use their entire burst. And honestly, sometimes it doesn't feel like that. Sometimes I use my entire burst and the enemy's still kicking, hale and hearty. It really puts ninja's job fantasy in a weird place for that reason because of how much Trick Attack makes up for ninja's damage. Raiding should not be the only thing that influences a job identity if the job fantasy doesn't align with the identity.

It's why I think PvP makes ninja exactly that good. You still get lots of support utility (Raiju stun, Doton heavy + Goka Mekkyaku synergy, Huton shield + movement speed buff, Meisui healing buff, damage up via mug) but your utility is all focused on enhancing yourself and becoming more impactful / flexible to adjust to the situation. It captures the essence of the job fantasy without losing any value as a support-based job. The problem is that this can't translate well into PvE due to how static and inflexible job design & encounter design has been.

Dancer and Bard are known for being a support ranged job that supports their allies' DPS in particular, which is why their personal DPS is generally much lower as a result. They have multiple skills designed to be support oriented for a team setting. However, ninja doesn't fall into this category of being a job that solely supports their team. Ninja is the only job that holds two unique identities that counteract each other. In the past, Ninjas focused on support - yes, but that support also aligned to their personal DPS. In the past, they had Slashing debuff and dripping blades. While some jobs can take advantage to their slashing debuff, their debuff solely exists to help them - with Fuma Shuriken being used often over Raiton for clipping as it benefitted from both slashing debuff and dripping blades. Their whole toolkit - from support to damage all amalgamated to give that quick and high burst DPS job fantasy, which is what made it fun to play in a party setting and in solo instances. No matter where, they always had a toolkit that fit their job fantasy.

If you asked me what changed from ARR to Shadowbringers, it's that ninja became more streamlined and removed a lot of personal support buffs to directly increase their overall DPS per skill. Trick Attack was the only support buff that still exist as a result. However, Shadowbringers still kept their core job fantasy of being a high damage assassin via Hyosho Ranryu. Even then, it took some work to adjust ninja to feel powerful. On its initial release, ninja was actually undertuned again when mudras moved over to a GCD-centric gameplay and went through multiple patches and buffs to make it feel good again for leveling - without just trick attack padding.

From Shadowbringers to Endwalker, we just lost flexibility to account for the big DPS gains other jobs have (raiju being lost upon using another weaponskill and Phantom Kamaitachi being an underwhelming skill on release). It honestly felt like they were trying to balance Ninja's rDPS because of how much stronger Trick Attack was, but our overall DPS didn't change much. It was after multiple adjustments on these skills that we got ninja's overall DPS back to where it was again - which is also due to its dual identity as an high burst DPS assassin. On Dragon Song Reprise release though, Trick Attack's damage got moved to mug - which I believe is exactly because of the issue of how impactful their RDPS was in relation to its personal DPS.

I would be fine if there was a job that was more support oriented than personal DPS oriented, but that's not what ninja's job fantasy is. It would be great if it can have both, but it becomes an issue later down the line, I am more willing to move the trick attack's raidwide debuff and have another job be what ninja couldn't if it becomes too much of an issue with its job fantasy.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't play ninja for trick attack only, I play it because I want that assassin job fantasy outside of raiding.

Let's be clear, though. Changing the buff to Mug didn't allow for any amount more "Assassin job fantasy". It literally just stripped many a job of having anything to align their odd-minute outputs to in parties that previously had NINs.

The effect on what percentage of its rDPS was dealt instead through bonuses to its party was miniscule; the effect on a NIN party's gameplay, by comparison, was pretty damn significant.

[butchersblock]

whole lotta good stuff

I mainly played NIN and SAM in Shadowbringers and was very happy about both jobs. When Endwalker dropped the state of Ninja turned me away from it for a while. Not just because of Raijus but it felt like unlike the other jobs Ninja got nothing new. Just an extra GCD after Raitons. Great. Wonderful. I played the job to death in Shadowbringers so it was really disappointing to not get anything new to play with, so I swapped to Samurai for the savage tier and while I had some complaints, it felt good to play. Then comes 6.1 and its Kaiten removal - Ninja was absolutely broken so it was a no-brainer for me to swap back to it for the Ultimate when Samurai is no longer an option.

[aloneatsea]

The thing is that Leveling is actually forever because level sync exists.

This is honestly a very good point! I don't make a habit of running sub-level content often beyond Ultimates, but it'd be remiss of me to dismiss the fact that roulettes exist, and of course old Ultimates will always be 'relevant' content synced to 70/80/90.

That said, I still think the focus of balancing should be towards level 90 content or 'relevant' content. I think it's fine if a fight that is no longer endgame becomes somewhat unbalanced. Like I said, obviously, don't ruin the experience, but I still don't think that making huge sacrifices on the part of current content is fair, when those who run older content (with the exception of, say, min-ilvl no echo runs of old savage/extremes) are not likely looking for tightly tuned content, which is what the purpose of balancing serves. When I go into levelling roulette, I want my tomestomes ASAP and then I want out.

To make it super clear, I'm not advocating for ignoring balancing during levelling, not at all. I just think that balancing for the current endgame should always be the priority.

If you can't get the flavor of your job fantasy, no amount of retuning will feel good. The same applies to ninjas with their assassin job fantasy here. It feels like utter garbage to play as an assassin role that is known for going solo, but not have the ability to properly assassinate the enemy because a large portion is just made up from having allies to do it for you.

I think is the core of our disagreement. You believe (if I'm not misunderstanding you, in which case please correct me if I am) that 14's Ninja job fantasy is about being a solo assassin that can take down a target from the shadows? I believe the 14's Ninja job fantasy is about hitting a target's weak spot, and following up with high burst damage.

I don't understand where your notion of 'going solo' is coming from. FF14 Ninja is notably heavily inspired by Naruto, and while I've never seen the show, my impression from years of osmosis is that they operate both in teams and solo sometimes. Even historical Ninjas often worked in teams. The Hollywood notion of a Ninja is definitely assassin-like, but my impression of Ninjas is japan is that they functioned more as spies -- support roles, if you would.


While the fantasy of a solo assassin is cool, I don't think it really fits a multiplayer game either, and I think the developers are aware of that -- which is why hitting a weak spot, doing a lot of burst, and letting your allies follow up is a bit more fitting to an MMO whilst still holding true to that Ninja job fantasy.

Something closer to a 'solo' job sounds more like a Samurai to me - a job that can consistently output high damage, and will generally win in both short-term and sustained fights. They have a ton of burst, too.

5.0 ninja was actually very weak. They got buffed heavily in 5.08 5.1 ninja was when it felt strong because Trick Attack overall rDPS got nerfed (10% to 5%) and the overall toolkit had been buffed to compensate. - Aka rebalancing Trick Attack to increase ninja's personal damage.

Ah, yes. You'll note I specifically said Ninja has been strong since 5.1, not 5.0, which lines up perfectly with what you're saying. I don't think we have any disagreements here?

And that's the thing. Because of how prominent Trick Attack was to raiding, Ninja ended up developing a trick attack identity. People hated ninja when ninja wasn't a trick attack identity.

Do you have a bit more supporting evidence for this? Trick Attack has been a part of the kit since Day 1. We haven't had a Ninja without Trick. The job is very literally designed around its existence.

However that's not the only identity that makes up a ninja. It's two core identities were always - support + fast paced high burst DPS via through melee or ranged (due to assassin job fantasy).

I think we're in agreement here!

If Trick Attack became too impactful, ninjas basically put in a ton of work on their core rotation for low DPS. That's why there were plenty of problems with balancing ninja to not just be a "trick attack" job for raiding and to make their own damage toolkit still impactful.

This is a problem that will always exist so long as any job has any buff. Currently, only two jobs provide meaningful buffing outside of the obligatory 2-minute button press. There's 17 whole other jobs which don't need to do that. I personally don't see the problem with letting those who enjoy buffing continue to buff, and those who enjoy playing selfish DPS to go and play jobs like Machinist, or Samurai, or Black Mage.

The thing that gets me about arguments about how much damage you're dealing overall is that... at least for me, personally, how much damage I deal doesn't impact how much I enjoy the class? I liked Ninja in Shadowbringers, I liked it in 6.0, I liked it in 6.05, and I liked it in 6.08, too. I was playing a class that had powerful burst that played well into raid buffs, and I was bringing along the king of all raid buffs to boot. I don't consider Ninja having high APM to be 'working harder' for 'less DPS'. Ninja hasn't been weak except in 6.0, and maybe 6.05.

The thing is, is that everyone definition of 'work hard' is different. For some people, jobs with high APM mean 'working hard'. I disagree. I'm just pressing the same buttons over and over, but faster. Ninja is not a hard job, despite what people who don't play Ninja will tell you. I think jobs with a flexible rotation that needs to adapt and change to maximise their DPS, such as Black Mage, is a good example of 'being rewarded for working hard'. You can play a very standard Black Mage, where you Blizzard 3 -> Blizzard 4 -> Thunder 4 -> Fire 4 x3 -> Paradox -> Fire 4 x3 -> Despair -> Repeat, but you can also do crazy stuff with different lines, making use of Transpose. Ninja just doesn't have that level of complexity. It would be amazing if it did, but currently it doesn't.

Ninja is an easy job. That's the way it is. I would say, in fact, Ninja is probably the easiest DPS to play at a high level. It has infinite disconnect options, an incredibly static rotation, and all the recovery tools you could possibly need. The only things that might be hard about it could be getting used to the pace you need to hit your mudras, because that is, admittedly, pretty janky. You're always going to dump the same abilities into Trick, the order in which you do so doesn't really matter, and all you need to do is hit your cooldowns on time, and don't overcap on Ninki.

And that's ignoring the fact that Ninja already deals shittons of damage. Your rDPS is your DPS. It's not worth less because you made your teammates stronger. If we balanced the game around every job having a 'satisfactory' amount of DPS that doesn't come from raid buffs, nobody would have raid buffs. Or, everyone would have the same raid buff, which is a reality we are getting scarily close to, what with 12/19 jobs have a 2-minute buff of some variety. The other 9 jobs? Don't have raid buffs.

I don't play ninja for trick attack only, I play it because I want that assassin job fantasy outside of raiding.

PVP is pretty much the only place in this game where an assassin job fantasy is going to make sense. I would say 'assassin' is the role of Ninjas, Samurais, and maybe Dragoons in PVP. It works, because you have a lot of high-value targets to kill, with a limited amount of HP.



I already went over why I don't think Ninja has or has even had an 'assassin' fantasy in PVE content, so I'll that there.

I might want to support my teammates sometimes, but I also want to feel impactful when I'm doing solo stuff because this is a job that is supposed to be able to annihilate an enemy instantly when they use their entire burst.

I mean, what aren't you killing in solo with Trick + your full burst? Ninja has some of, if not the single highest burst in the game. If you're not killing it with Ninja, it wasn't designed to be assassinated.

And honestly, sometimes it doesn't feel like that. Sometimes I use my entire burst and the enemy's still kicking, hale and hearty. It really puts ninja's job fantasy in a weird place for that reason because of how much Trick Attack makes up for ninja's damage. Raiding should not be the only thing that influences a job identity if the job fantasy doesn't align with the identity.

You keep saying that Trick 'makes up for' Ninja's damage, but Ninja once again, already has good damage. It has incredible burst, and once that burst is over, it has low sustained damage until you can burst again, which is about as close to an assassin as you can really get in a game with elongated PVE encounters.

The only way to fix the problem you're describing would be to increase Ninja's sustained damage, at which point it's not really a Ninja anymore, or to increase Ninja's burst -- which would be absolutely catastrophic for game balance. Ninja is, as it stands, is the single best job for feeding into two-minute raid buffs. It is absurdly broken. I cannot emphasize enough to you how gross Ninja's burst is. Making it burst even harder (presumably at the cost of sustained damage) would make it a must-pick on every single team because the value it brings during in raid buffs would be astronomical.

Once again -- Ninja already has the strongest burst in the game. If you can't burst something down with a Ninja, you can't burst it down period.

It's why I think PvP makes ninja exactly that good. You still get lots of support utility (Raiju stun, Doton heavy + Goka Mekkyaku synergy, Huton shield + movement speed buff, Meisui healing buff, damage up via mug) but your utility is all focused on enhancing yourself and becoming more impactful / flexible to adjust to the situation. It captures the essence of the job fantasy without losing any value as a support-based job. The problem is that this can't translate well into PvE due to how static and inflexible job design & encounter design has been.

Completely agree! PVP Ninja is super fun, and I love the versatility of your kit. I will say that none of your support options feel super impactful, but the fact is is that they're there! PVP Ninja is the closest to a true 'assassin' with their ult -- being able to finish off any low-HP is very assassin-like, in my opinion. Like you said, though, this is impossible to translate over to PVP.

Dancer and Bard are known for being a support ranged job that supports their allies' DPS in particular, which is why their personal DPS is generally much lower as a result. They have multiple skills designed to be support oriented for a team setting. However, ninja doesn't fall into this category of being a job that solely supports their team.

I don't see why you're making this distinction between Dancer, Bard and Ninja. Dancer and Bard press a few more buttons and buff a little harder, but Ninja still has to (or used, to) Suiton -> Trick to buff the team. It also does that every minute on the minute. Dancer and Bard do have sustained buffs, but they're unique to them. Ninja's team support makes completely for a Ninja. Hit a weak spot, open up a vulnerability for your team, and burst hard until your opponent recovers, then repeat when you next can hit a weak spot. Why does the number of abilities matter? Should not the impact or value these abilities bring be a bigger deciding factor?

Ninja is the only job that holds two unique identities that counteract each other. In the past, Ninjas focused on support - yes, but that support also aligned to their personal DPS. In the past, they had Slashing debuff and dripping blades. While some jobs can take advantage to their slashing debuff, their debuff solely exists to help them - with Fuma Shuriken being used often over Raiton for clipping as it benefitted from both slashing debuff and dripping blades. Their whole toolkit - from support to damage all amalgamated to give that quick and high burst DPS job fantasy, which is what made it fun to play in a party setting and in solo instances. No matter where, they always had a toolkit that fit their job fantasy.

Ninja definitely has two identities in a sense, but I disagree that they counteract. I think they complement each other, as I've detailed up above.

You could argue that Ninja used to support more with Slashing debuffs, but many, many jobs had a way to apply a debuff that supported the team. Not to mention, WAR could also apply Slashing, couldn't it? It's technically more ways to support your team, but this isn't exactly unique to Ninja. I do empathise mourning a job gone by, and I personally think these types of debuffs are interesting, but unfortunately SE has stated their intent to be rid of them entirely. I'd be very surprised to see them come back .

Outside of the Slashing debuff, what else did Ninja have that made them feel better in solo instances? If anything, Trick Attack was even more powerful than it was back, so wouldn't Ninja personal DPS have been lower? You said so yourself -- in 5.1 Ninja's personal damage was increased, and Trick's potency was lowered. So -- what, exactly made it better in solo content? To me it just sounds like the problem you're describing would have been even worse, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

If you asked me what changed from ARR to Shadowbringers, it's that ninja became more streamlined and removed a lot of personal support buffs to directly increase their overall DPS per skill. Trick Attack was the only support buff that still exist as a result. However, Shadowbringers still kept their core job fantasy of being a high damage assassin via Hyosho Ranryu.

Okay, what? You talk about how Ninja lost all its support skills, and then you say it managed to 'maintain' its high damage assassin fantasy via Hyosho? You just finished saying it used to be more supportive. It's not keeping anything, my guy. It's losing its support identity piece by piece.

Even then, it took some work to adjust ninja to feel powerful. On its initial release, ninja was actually undertuned again when mudras moved over to a GCD-centric gameplay and went through multiple patches and buffs to make it feel good again for leveling - without just trick attack padding.

I mean, 5.0 Ninja was just horrendously undertuned across the board. It did less rDPS than Bard.

From Shadowbringers to Endwalker, we just lost flexibility to account for the big DPS gains other jobs have (raiju being lost upon using another weaponskill and Phantom Kamaitachi being an underwhelming skill on release).

Hard disagree. Raijus are fine as they are -- it would be nice QOL if they didn't drop, but all other similar GCDs do (reaper's gallows/gibbet, for example), so I don't see the issue. Phantom has always been an amazing ability -- not having to spend a Raiton outside of Trick to handle disconnects means that even if it only had the potency of Spinning Edge, it would still be fantastic.

Ninja is more flexible than it's ever been, what with all of our disconnect options. The only place we've lost flexibility is with our burst windows. We have to press Mug on cooldown now, which means we can't stock up Bhavacakras for burst. Feels pretty awful, quite frankly.

It honestly felt like they were trying to balance Ninja's rDPS because of how much stronger Trick Attack was, but our overall DPS didn't change much. It was after multiple adjustments on these skills that we got ninja's overall DPS back to where it was again - which is also due to its dual identity as an high burst DPS assassin. On Dragon Song Reprise release though, Trick Attack's damage got moved to mug - which I believe is exactly because of the issue of how impactful their RDPS was in relation to its personal DPS.

I'm not really sure what argument you're making here? Ninja was weak and underperforming, so it got buffed. The skills that were buffed were Hyosho and our core GCDs. One ability we use in burst, and four we typically only use outside of burst.

It also wasn't on DSR release, it was with 6.1. DSR came out with 6.11. I know myself and other Ninja mains were hoping for more meaningful changes to fix its current gameplay, but nothing came.

I would be fine if there was a job that was more support oriented than personal DPS oriented, but that's not what ninja's job fantasy is.

According to who? You've said yourself multiple times that Ninja has had a 'dual identity' of being a support and a high-burst job. You've said yourself that Ninja used to have many more support options.

Forgive if I'm misunderstanding you, but to me it just sounds like you want Ninja to be something it's never been.

It would be great if it can have both, but it becomes an issue later down the line, I am more willing to move the trick attack's raidwide debuff and have another job be what ninja couldn't if it becomes too much of an issue with its job fantasy.

It can have both. It's historically had both, and been very successfully. It performed well all through SHB post 5.1, without being absurdly broken. It also performed well in 6.05 and 6.08 without being absurdly broken.

My final hard disagree is that -- actually, no. Ninja should be a support job. It should revolve around Trick and its mudras (which are pretty inseparable). We already have four other melee DPS with high personal damage. We don't need to force Ninja to fit into personal DPS mold, when it's never fit there before.

You can't have an assassin in content where the point is to kill a boss with a huge HP pool over the course of 6-10 minutes. Assassination is just incompatible with this sort of context. You can, however, have a high-burst job which deals good damage, and can hit a weak point to support their teammates -- which is what Ninja has always been, and what I would it to continue to be.

[butchersblock]

The thing is, is that everyone definition of 'work hard' is different. For some people, jobs with high APM mean 'working hard'. I disagree. I'm just pressing the same buttons over and over, but faster. Ninja is not a hard job, despite what people who don't play Ninja will tell you. I think jobs with a flexible rotation that needs to adapt and change to maximise their DPS, such as Black Mage, is a good example of 'being rewarded for working hard'. You can play a very standard Black Mage, where you Blizzard 3 -> Blizzard 4 -> Thunder 4 -> Fire 4 x3 -> Paradox -> Fire 4 x3 -> Despair -> Repeat, but you can also do crazy stuff with different lines, making use of Transpose. Ninja just doesn't have that level of complexity. It would be amazing if it did, but currently it doesn't.

Ninja is an easy job. That's the way it is. I would say, in fact, Ninja is probably the easiest DPS to play at a high level. It has infinite disconnect options, an incredibly static rotation, and all the recovery tools you could possibly need. The only things that might be hard about it could be getting used to the pace you need to hit your mudras, because that is, admittedly, pretty janky. You're always going to dump the same abilities into Trick, the order in which you do so doesn't really matter, and all you need to do is hit your cooldowns on time, and don't overcap on Ninki.

Having played a fair bit of every tank and most melees, I'll have to disagree here. Xenos often likes to say something to the effect of, "GNB isn't harder than WAR. it's just busier." Against a target dummy perhaps, but busy will always be far more difficult, having to press more than an oGCD or two while having to reposition boss, do the mechanic, keep uptime, etc.

I've stated before that I don't believe Ninja is anywhere near as difficult as people that don't play it much would have you believe. This probably comes from Ninja having more of a high skill floor and entry barrier than other jobs because of Mudras and very high APM during burst. Meanwhile jobs such as current Black Mage, ShB Samurai and Summoner had an insanely high skill ceiling tied to encounter design that I found much more difficult to fully optimise than Ninja. That being said, NIN still has enough going for it in terms of gameplay to not put me to slumber, unlike certain other Endwalker DPS jobs.

[aloneatsea]

Having played a fair bit of every tank and most melees, I'll have to disagree here. Xenos often likes to say something to the effect of, "GNB isn't harder than WAR. it's just busier." Against a target dummy perhaps, but busy will always be far more difficult, having to press more than an oGCD or two while having to reposition boss, do the mechanic, keep uptime, etc.

I've stated before that I don't believe Ninja is anywhere near as difficult as people that don't play it much would have you believe. This probably comes from Ninja having more of a high skill floor and entry barrier than other jobs because of Mudras and very high APM during burst. Meanwhile jobs such as current Black Mage, ShB Samurai and Summoner had an insanely high skill ceiling tied to encounter design that I found much more difficult to fully optimise than Ninja. That being said, NIN still has enough going for it in terms of gameplay to not put me to slumber, unlike certain other Endwalker DPS jobs.

I guess I'll have to agree to disagree with you on this!

For me, having played a fair bit of Ninja in EW, I don't need to put any thought into the buttons I'm pressing, because it's so rote, and pretty much every fight this tier is full melee uptime, unless you get a handful of specific mechanics (i.e. odd number tethers in p2s, dark tether in p4sp2 act 4) which force you to eat some downtime. Even then, Ninja has great tools to deal with this downtime.

I definitely think that something like moving a boss whilst bursting as GNB is genuinely difficult, because you're pulling a balancing act where you disconnect from the boss to position it, but get back within max melee to land your abilities. I wouldn't say Ninja has to do things like that, but I will concede that eating some downtime and properly squeezing in your oGCDs can be a little tough in certain circumstances. My personal stance is just that the huge numbers of tools you have as a Ninja to handle disconnects over other jobs more than makes up for this.

But, my experiences are of course not universal!

[AnotherPerson]

First off, thanks for taking the time to read my responses. I do feel like I can get very wordy at times, so I'll try my best to cut down on word count and summarize things. Please do let me know if I missed anything.

I think is the core of our disagreement. You believe (if I'm not misunderstanding you, in which case please correct me if I am) that 14's Ninja job fantasy is about being a solo assassin that can take down a target from the shadows? I believe the 14's Ninja job fantasy is about hitting a target's weak spot, and following up with high burst damage.

I don't understand where your notion of 'going solo' is coming from. FF14 Ninja is notably heavily inspired by Naruto, and while I've never seen the show, my impression from years of osmosis is that they operate both in teams and solo sometimes. Even historical Ninjas often worked in teams. The Hollywood notion of a Ninja is definitely assassin-like, but my impression of Ninjas is japan is that they functioned more as spies -- support roles, if you would.


While the fantasy of a solo assassin is cool, I don't think it really fits a multiplayer game either, and I think the developers are aware of that -- which is why hitting a weak spot, doing a lot of burst, and letting your allies follow up is a bit more fitting to an MMO whilst still holding true to that Ninja job fantasy.

Something closer to a 'solo' job sounds more like a Samurai to me - a job that can consistently output high damage, and will generally win in both short-term and sustained fights. They have a ton of burst, too.

Yeah, I think that's part of the core of our disagreement. I think a big part of the job flavor is tied to both its class gameplay and lore. People have been expecting ninja to be more of an assassin based on class to job storyline advancement (especially where we're always supposed to move in the Shadows / learning to kill our enemies silently / doing ambushes in job quests) and doubling as a magic-melee DPS. From the feel to the execution, the job is heavily designed to be using everything in their arsenal to kill your opponents quickly. I'd say this is probably also because I am running PotD, HoH, Eureka, and Bozja a lot too lately, which is where that feeling of solo play happens. The effect of Hide becomes much more pronounced in content where stealth matters / can be used more often, which directly influences solo play.

DPS is definitely not the biggest contribution to whether a job is fun, but it definitely does matter when your job fantasy revolves around throwing everything you have at the enemy to supposedly delete them, and you just can't do that because the big part of your damage is tied to relying on buffs instead to support other players. I'm not talking about boss-levels of HP in burst, but ... I guess the feeling of the amount of reliance to a party? I'm not completely sure how to describe it. Even if their DPS isn't as high as the other jobs, the impact of their initial burst should be high enough to offset that feeling.

I think this is probably the biggest misunderstanding. When I say "lacking any job fantasy outside of support" I mean the current effect of support seems to lock them in because it heavily favors supporting the party like a ranged support does. Whereas I love to play a support role at times, I don't think ninja is completely suited to being a support role by directly buffing others like a Bard or Dancer does. Don't get me wrong, I love Trick Attack and how it can strengthen others in the party to do more damage, but I feel that the main focus of ninja's support relies on enhancing themselves first and the secondary effect would be to support their allies as an extra condition when the party can take advantage of it. I think this has been always the core tenant of ninja is that the support utility will always be useful for them, and useful to their allies at a lesser effect. This applies to Trick Attack and ninja's old slashing debuff. However, it also synergies very well to their own toolkit (ex: Duality - an old self support buff which worked in synergy to their support to party, and now Bunshin). I think this is what made ninja's support utility feel good in a party setting without taking anything away from their solo gameplay. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the focus has always felt like ninja's support bolstered their "personal DPS" and gave a high burst gameplay, but their support just worked to align with everyone else, making them feel like a powerful support without taking much flexibility away outside a party setting.

We are both in agreement that ninja's job fantasy is about hitting a target's weak spot and following up with high burst damage, but I think the disagreement is how much of that burst damage should be attributed to personal - and how much should be attributed to party damage. I feel both support and personal DPS matter and exist in the ninja toolkit as this would be much more in-line with their job fantasy, but the problem is how the ninja's toolkit goes about doing that without compromising on too much on their solo play job fantasy.

I believe that's why the biggest problem with ninja is how much burst synergy it has with other jobs. This dual identity of being 'the highest burst damage' job and the strongest 'low cooldown buff synergy' makes ninja in a very weird place to be for balancing issues. I agree with you that it's great synergy, but it's also a problem because this synergy is so strong that the dual identity becomes a headache for balancing. For Shadowbringers, I'd say ninja felt great after a bit of patching. Trick Attack felt strong but ninja did not feel overwhelmingly reliant on party's damage as they had other tools for powerful burst (Hyosho Ranryu + Bunshin in this case). Endwalker ninja felt off as a result because we didn't feel like we got any powerful support utility for ourselves or any high damaging skill (Phantom feeling like it replaced Shadow Fang) while we lost some DPS abilities instead (Assassinate oGCD combo action from Dream within a Dream). Numerically, ninja is strong in Endwalker, but that's not what it feels like to me because I was referring to the job fantasy gameplay here. We got more flexibility, but it felt like Trick Attack became more powerful with more jobs aligning to the 60 second window and getting a lot of stronger skills. Then it felt like Mug and Trick attack was changed to weaken that burst synergy (with some debatable effect), but it overall returned Ninja's gameplay to "supporting themselves first" and then supporting the party second with both effects overlapping on the ninja (except our Ninki generation went out of the window). It felt like ninja was designed in a corner due to Trick Attack and balancing. If you say it can have both, then that would be great. But honestly, it felt like Trick Attack was the problem here while it was under a 60 second window, but I'll gladly eat my words if this wasn't the case.

I'd say the difference between the 4 other melees with ninja is not personal damage, but gameplay difference. Dragoon, Reaper, and Samurai are all sustained DPS jobs (consistently high DPS), but each has their own flavor. Monk, Reaper and Samurai are close combat sustained DPS jobs with various levels of burst. Dragoon and ninja are the two jobs with ranged DPS - Dragoon is more of a gapcloser job than ninja due to multiple jump attacks on a relatively low cooldown tied into their rotation (Dragonfire dive, Spineshatter dive, Stardriver) and ninja has mudras for ranged attacks. Dragoon, Monk, Reaper, and Ninja are DPS jobs with various support utility to the team. Ninja should be the job with a high burst and low sustained output in my opinion.

[butchersblock]

I guess I'll have to agree to disagree with you on this!

For me, having played a fair bit of Ninja in EW, I don't need to put any thought into the buttons I'm pressing, because it's so rote, and pretty much every fight this tier is full melee uptime, unless you get a handful of specific mechanics (i.e. odd number tethers in p2s, dark tether in p4sp2 act 4) which force you to eat some downtime. Even then, Ninja has great tools to deal with this downtime.

I definitely think that something like moving a boss whilst bursting as GNB is genuinely difficult, because you're pulling a balancing act where you disconnect from the boss to position it, but get back within max melee to land your abilities. I wouldn't say Ninja has to do things like that, but I will concede that eating some downtime and properly squeezing in your oGCDs can be a little tough in certain circumstances. My personal stance is just that the huge numbers of tools you have as a Ninja to handle disconnects over other jobs more than makes up for this.

But, my experiences are of course not universal!

I don't think we're in disagreement here, my stance is based on comparison of this job to the others I've played (Reaper, Monk, SMN, MCH, DNC, WAR). You're correct that, unfortunately this tier has had almost no downtime, and whatever downtime we had was purely based on RNG. This kinda devalues Ninja's tools for disengagement.
I generally prefer jobs to be a little bit more complex, and while I wish the same for Ninja I don't think the job needs complexity as much as some of the other jobs I've mentioned that feel incredibly dull with barely thought process behind them.

[aloneatsea]

First off, thanks for taking the time to read my responses. I do feel like I can get very wordy at times, so I'll try my best to cut down on word count and summarize things. Please do let me know if I missed anything.

No problem ! Thank you for reading my whole response. Even if we're not in agreement, so long as we're both arguing in good faith, I actually really enjoy debating the finer aspects of Ninja. Playing that job is pretty much my whole reason for playing this game.

People have been expecting ninja to be more of an assassin based on class to job storyline advancement (especially where we're always supposed to move in the Shadows / learning to kill our enemies silently / doing ambushes in job quests) and doubling as a magic-melee DPS.

Have they? I got that impression much more from the Rogue quests. The Ninja job quests, from memory, felt pretty goofy most of the time, and focused a lot on Ninja magic, the secret fourth mudra, etc etc. I do know there was disappointment expressed that Ninja didn't continue to follow Rogue's path, but there's always the potential for another scouting job which aligns a little more closely to that particular job fantasy. I think nowadays, most people have a good understanding of what Ninja is -- a heavily ranged, hybrid-damage dealing burst job with the best party buff in the game. Or, well, it used to be. :,,) rip

From the feel to the execution, the job is heavily designed to be using everything in their arsenal to kill your opponents quickly.

I mean, yeah? It still does that. Like I said, biggest burst job in the game. Especially after the 6.1 changes. No other job does it better!

I'd say this is probably also because I am running PotD, HoH, Eureka, and Bozja a lot too lately, which is where that feeling of solo play happens. The effect of Hide becomes much more pronounced in content where stealth matters / can be used more often, which directly influences solo play.

Yeah, there we go. I am pretty gutted that Hide was nerfed to remove Doton - that felt super unnecessary, and a bit of an unfair nerf to Ninja not doing raiding content, all for the sake making sure the Tank doesn't have to -- god forbid -- pull the boss south for a few seconds.

Side note, before the changes, Ninja was actually the 3rd strongest job for running PoTD solo, almost entirely because of its burst and Hide. Suiton (when Trick is up) is your strongest mudra by far, with an effective 1000 potency up front, and then whatever other bonus potency you can shove into Trick. Plus, given how much downtime there it, you can be almost constantly bursting by refreshing your mudras. Not sure if it's quite the same in HoH, I think Tanks are very strong there? Eureka/Bozja I tend not to consider too much, because they're effectively really messy Alliance raids, what with the sheer number of people in there. You can, in theory, do it solo (and those duels are a thing), but most people mob NMs or FATEs or CEs to get by.

DPS is definitely not the biggest contribution to whether a job is fun, but it definitely does matter when your job fantasy revolves around throwing everything you have at the enemy to supposedly delete them, and you just can't do that because the big part of your damage is tied to relying on buffs instead to support other players. I'm not talking about boss-levels of HP in burst, but ... I guess the feeling of the amount of reliance to a party? I'm not completely sure how to describe it. Even if their DPS isn't as high as the other jobs, the impact of their initial burst should be high enough to offset that feeling.

I actually run some numbers of this, because I just completely disagree that Ninja's burst feels lacking. I mentioned before that if it got any stronger, it would make the job absolutely broken, and most likely necessary in most parties.

Before the changes (obviously this varies based on your party comp/skill of the party), roughly ~8% of your rDPS was contributions from Trick. Pretty big number, all things considered, but still not that big. 92% of your damage is your own.

Then, in 6.1, with the Mug changes -- Mug contributes about ~6% of your rDPS. Which is still quite a lot, but not as much. That said, these numbers are only 2% apart.

To me, losing out on the immense value of Trick for gameplay variance, class synergy, and dare I say fun, is not comparable in value to dealing 2% more personal damage and 2% less party damage. Ninja still has a huge chunk of their damage come from raid buffs -- it's just a lot less interesting now.

With that in mind, the only real solution to the problem you describe would to remove party buffs from Ninja entirely. Or, nerf Mug over and over until it meets some arbitrary level of personal DPS vs party contribution DPS.

In my opinion, that's more than just one step too far. At that point, I don't know if the job is recognizeable. We both agree that Ninja has always been a support class.

I think this is probably the biggest misunderstanding. When I say "lacking any job fantasy outside of support" I mean the current effect of support seems to lock them in because it heavily favors supporting the party like a ranged support does. Whereas I love to play a support role at times, I don't think ninja is completely suited to being a support role by directly buffing others like a Bard or Dancer does. Don't get me wrong, I love Trick Attack and how it can strengthen others in the party to do more damage, but I feel that the main focus of ninja's support relies on enhancing themselves first and the secondary effect would be to support their allies as an extra condition when the party can take advantage of it. I think this has been always the core tenant of ninja is that the support utility will always be useful for them, and useful to their allies at a lesser effect. This applies to Trick Attack and ninja's old slashing debuff. However, it also synergies very well to their own toolkit (ex: Duality - an old self support buff which worked in synergy to their support to party, and now Bunshin). I think this is what made ninja's support utility feel good in a party setting without taking anything away from their solo gameplay. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the focus has always felt like ninja's support bolstered their "personal DPS" and gave a high burst gameplay, but their support just worked to align with everyone else, making them feel like a powerful support without taking much flexibility away outside a party setting.

Like, I can kinda see where you're coming from but I just disagree. Slashing debuffs do benefit the Ninja, but they also benefit the party -- just a smaller subset. I've spent a decent amount of time trawling through older videos and forum posts from Heavensward/Stormblood, and it seems like Ninja's value was because it would provide a Slashing debuff to the party -- every tank, as well as half of the melee DPS benefited from Slashing. At that point, Slashing is just a permanent buff you provide that only targets half the party. By the same token, Trick benefits the party, but it also benefits the Ninja. It's not like buffing the party stops the Ninja from benefiting from their own buff. You also say Duality worked in synergy to their party support, but all it did was double the base damage on your next weaponskill. Didn't include combo damage or effects applied. It only affected NIN. I'm not really seeing the synergy there, nor do I see how Bunshin synergises in particular with our party support. I mean, yeah, more damage into raid buffs is great, but there's nothing special about it relative to other abilities that deal damage.


With this in mind, aside from enmity management (which no longer exists, as enmity management has been greatly simplified), all of Ninja's "party utility" has been in the form of damage taken debuffs on the enemy, benefitting the party. Both the Slashing debuff and Trick work like this. Mug even still works like this. So, I just don't get why that's suddenly changed in 6.0. 6.0 release Ninja was Shadowbringers Ninja with extra steps (hi, Raijus) and some extra convenience (no more Asssasinate animation lock, free disconnect button in Phantom).

What we have now is a step further away from the support Ninja of old.

We are both in agreement that ninja's job fantasy is about hitting a target's weak spot and following up with high burst damage, but I think the disagreement is how much of that burst damage should be attributed to personal - and how much should be attributed to party damage. I feel both support and personal DPS matter and exist in the ninja toolkit as this would be much more in-line with their job fantasy, but the problem is how the ninja's toolkit goes about doing that without compromising on too much on their solo play job fantasy.

Mm, see, here I disagree again. Currently, there's no real endgame 'solo content'. It would be cool if that changed, but matter of fact is, currently there is no content that fits that description.



The closest we have to that would be solo POTD and HOH, and -- at least for POTD -- Ninja is already extremely good at that content. The only reason Red Mage and Machinist are better is because Red Mage can self-heal and Machinist can kite infinitely. Ninja is third in line, with excellent on-demand burst that you don't need to wait for cooldown for, excellent ranged options, and the ability to explode all of its burst inside of Trick.

Ninja already does extremely well in existing solo content. Extremely well! I just don't see why you think it needs to be any better?

Not to mention, even if they did make 'solo savage' somewhere down the line, it doesn't exist now, and it just seems foolish to balance around content that doesn't exist. What we have are Savage fights and Ultimate fights -- 8-man content that is intentionally tuned to be hard. We should be focussing on balancing around this type of content, because this is where it matters.

I believe that's why the biggest problem with ninja is how much burst synergy it has with other jobs. This dual identity of being 'the highest burst damage' job and the strongest 'low cooldown buff synergy' makes ninja in a very weird place to be for balancing issues. I agree with you that it's great synergy, but it's also a problem because this synergy is so strong that the dual identity becomes a headache for balancing.

I almost completely agree with you! The only thing I don't agree with is that this is a Ninja problem. I think this is an introduced problem created by the forced two-minute meta Square Enix is intent on bringing in. If we relaxed raid buffs back to their Shadowbringers timers, Ninja's burst being strong each minute would be much less of an issue. However, Square Enix continues to make questionable decisions for the sake of 'balancing'.

I don't think it's impossible to balance Ninja with a one-minute party buff in this two-minute world. 6.05 and 6.08 demonstrated that Ninja, before the changes, was perfectly viable. I cleared the tier on it, damn it!

It's not fair to Ninja players to completely ruin how their job works because they wanted to...make everything two minutes, despite Yoshi-P saying it would make everything boring if they did that (and he was right!). Square Enix should revert the changes, and tune the numbers appropriately. If that means Ninja gets potency changes every patch, so be it. At least it'll feel good to play again, and adhere to that job fantasy.

For Shadowbringers, I'd say ninja felt great after a bit of patching. Trick Attack felt strong but ninja did not feel overwhelmingly reliant on party's damage as they had other tools for powerful burst (Hyosho Ranryu + Bunshin in this case).

I completely agree! Shadowbringers Ninja was simply excellent.

Endwalker ninja felt off as a result because we didn't feel like we got any powerful support utility for ourselves or any high damaging skill (Phantom feeling like it replaced Shadow Fang) while we lost some DPS abilities instead (Assassinate oGCD combo action from Dream within a Dream).

I miss Shadowfang too, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it was anything other than raw damage, because it wasn't. Ninja didn't lose a lick of party support until 6.1. It was literally the exact same job, with Raijus, one less oGCD, no more Shadowfang, and a great disconnect ability instead. It was very much the same job, with slightly different damage buttons. That's all.

Numerically, ninja is strong in Endwalker, but that's not what it feels like to me because I was referring to the job fantasy gameplay here. We got more flexibility, but it felt like Trick Attack became more powerful with more jobs aligning to the 60 second window and getting a lot of stronger skills. Then it felt like Mug and Trick attack was changed to weaken that burst synergy (with some debatable effect), but it overall returned Ninja's gameplay to "supporting themselves first" and then supporting the party second with both effects overlapping on the ninja (except our Ninki generation went out of the window).

Trick Attack did get slightly more powerful because more jobs align to it, yes. That said, this just means more party synergy across the board -- and let me remind you that the stated reason for the Mug change was not balance, but to increase party synergy. Which is demonstratively untrue, so uh, lol? The thing is is that until Ninja's base GCDs (and Hyosho) were buffed, it was also just superbly weak.

Remember how I said before the 6.1 changes, Trick contributed ~8% of the Ninja's total damage? In Shadowbringers (specifically looking at Eden's promise), Trick contributed around ~9%. This means that despite moving to a two-minute meta, Trick was actually a smaller portion of Ninja's overall damage in 6.0, relative to Shadowbringers. I can't explain it, but numbers are numbers.

With that in mind, knowing Trick isn't any more powerful than it was in Shadowbringers, do you still feel that way?

(n.b. my numbers aren't official/confirmed to be legit, i just looked at a handful of ~90 ish percentile numbers from both 5.4 and 6.0 and did the math, and it seemed pretty consistent)


Also, as I mentioned before, even Ninja's Slashing debuff was party value first. You can decide on your own that it felt like that, but what I've seen seems to reflect the idea that Slashing/Piercing/Blunt debuffs were a party-buff thing, not a personal-buff-that-also-happens-to-benefit-the-party thing. Which means Ninja has always been a support.

It felt like ninja was designed in a corner due to Trick Attack and balancing. If you say it can have both, then that would be great. But honestly, it felt like Trick Attack was the problem here while it was under a 60 second window, but I'll gladly eat my words if this wasn't the case.

We can have both! Square Enix just doesn't want us to. Ninja was fine in 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.55, 6.05, and 6.08 with Trick as it was. The only time it wasn't fine was in 6.0, where it was undertuned and had Raiju issues, but this was hardly a Trick problem.

I'd say the difference between the 4 other melees with ninja is not personal damage, but gameplay difference. Dragoon, Reaper, and Samurai are all sustained DPS jobs (consistently high DPS), but each has their own flavor. Monk, Reaper and Samurai are close combat sustained DPS jobs with various levels of burst. Dragoon and ninja are the two jobs with ranged DPS - Dragoon is more of a gapcloser job than ninja due to multiple jump attacks on a relatively low cooldown tied into their rotation (Dragonfire dive, Spineshatter dive, Stardriver) and ninja has mudras for ranged attacks. Dragoon, Monk, Reaper, and Ninja are DPS jobs with various support utility to the team.

Yeah, I guess I agree. I was mainly speaking from the perspective that Ninja is the supportive melee, rather than trying to imply the other melee DPS don't bring anything at all - they just all happen to bring much higher personal damage, and weaker buffs. They do sometimes bring unique utility, like Monk's Mantra or Reaper's Arcane Crest, but I've found those two abilities to be a bit lacking. Even so, I'd love to see more of them. It'd be cool if Ninja could get, like, a single-target mitigation ability, where you can send a Shadow to soak 10% of your HP's worth of damage on something, or something. I dunno.

Ninja should be the job with a high burst and low sustained output in my opinion.

Big agree! And that's what 6.08 Ninja was.