NIN changes changed nothing, and that's why they shouldn't exist

[butchersblock]

I also like risk, but I don't quite see the risk inherent here. It's a pretty straightforward choice -- use nothing, and lose a ton of damage; use Throwing Dagger, and lose a lot of damage; use Raiton + Raiju, and lose a fair bit of damage, or use Phantom Kamaitachi, and lose a miniscule amount of damage.

No, not exactly. Having the ranged options disincentivizes proper greeding and creating unique uptime strategies. Diamond Frost and Vacuum Slice come in mind where you'd see the huge majority of Ninjas even in the top ends of logs forgoing uptime to Raiton out of trick or in Diamond Frost's case just using Suiton. It was possible with correct play for Ninja to keep full uptime much like tanks and the Samurai that was PLD covered for the speedruns to not even clip, let alone lose a GCD during Vacuum Slice. Stuff like this highly contributes to the replayability to the Savage tier, something I felt incredibly lacking after the initial prog of this tier.

[aloneatsea]

No, not exactly. Having the ranged options disincentivizes proper greeding and creating unique uptime strategies. Diamond Frost and Vacuum Slice come in mind where you'd see the huge majority of Ninjas even in the top ends of logs forgoing uptime to Raiton out of trick or in Diamond Frost's case just using Suiton. It was possible with correct play for Ninja to keep full uptime much like tanks and the Samurai that was PLD covered for the speedruns to not even clip, let alone lose a GCD during Vacuum Slice. Stuff like this highly contributes to the replayability to the Savage tier, something I felt incredibly lacking after the initial prog of this tier.

Mm, I kinda see your point, but I think that what contributes to replayability much more is the fight itself being fun, and 'keeping full uptime' to not be an impossible task. Curtain Call in p4sp2 is a great example of this. Breaking your tether requires you to be at the very edge of the arena, and through some combination of server ticks or whatever, you do need to be at the edge for roughly a GCD or so in order for the tether break to register. I've (embarassingly) tried to greed this, failed, wiped my party and have since concluded that unless you have some insane luck, you just have to suck it up and use Phantom, Raiton, or god forbid, Throwing Dagger at the edge such that the game recognises you've broken your tether. I don't believe the boss can be moved from the center during Curtain Call (and even if he could be, the RNG nature of the order you need to break your tethers would make tanks pulling for uptime a bit of a Herculean task). Of course, maybe your experience is different -- maybe I'm missing something, or I'm just bad. I'm playing on high ping, so maybe that's it too.


You can and should make the argument that this is due to the game itself being unresponsive and janky, which it is, but unfortunately I don't forsee SE going around fixing these issues anytime soon. Obviously, this is just one case, but it is one case where I've greatly appreciated having Phantom, because it allows me to make the choice to conserve it as opposed to spending it earlier in the fight so that I can maintain uptime. It's not particularly deep choice, but it's there.

I'm also just... not particularly attached to the idea of Ninja having to fight for uptime like any other melee. Part of the appeal, at least for me, is that Ninja does have all of these ranged options. It's a feature! You still gain a ton of damage by properly greeding; losing a Raiton + Raiju out of Trick is much more punishing than just losing a Raiton out of Trick like in Shadowbringers. If anything, you gain more damage now by properly greeding than you used to.

I think another issue is that this tier's fights, were, for 99% of their runtime, full uptime fights. There are so few situations where you're forced away from the boss, and in the few situations you are, it's a proper "you need to be at the edge of the arena, and the boss isn't moving". There's no better place to stand like there is in Act 2, where you can properly greed if you know the fight well. You just have to eat it. If there were more situations where downtime was an option as opposed to a necessity or nonexistent, maybe that would feel better?

Even then, I'm kind of okay with Ninja just having some ranged options. Bad Ninjas deal a little bit more damage, and good Ninjas still deal a lot more. It's not taking anything away from the ceiling, so I think I'm pretty okay with it. Using Raiton outside of Trick is always going to be a loss. Using Phantom outside of your odd Tricks is also always going to be a loss.