Objective comparison of Mnk and Nin difficulty to play ?

[Casper]

Hey there. I am interested in a discussion to gather some objective and argumented PoV onto the difficulty of playing Mnk or Nin. I am leaving Drg out of it as they are getting changed quite a bit very soon, and that Mnk and Nin are currently fighting for the spotlight.


Some people have argued that nin dmg needs to be nerfed because their damage is "too easily accessible". I do not have a mnk leveled up (disclaimer), but i do main ninja, and i did invest some time to understand the rotation of mnks well enough.

I am quite unconvinced by those claims, and while i don't think nin is harder to play than mnks, i do not think there is a huge difference in difficulty between the two, and certainly none that warrants a nerf when nin is already the one with lesser damage and utility (although very slightly on both accounts).

Mnks need to maintain a 30 sec Dot (like nin), a 18 sec dot (like nin), a 15 sec damage increase buff (like nin but nin can slack on that if a warrior do it for them, and it's actually 20 sec long), and dragon kick. GL will be kept up as long as you continue hitting the boss in a non-stupid way. On top of that, they need to hit positionnal attacks to get the most out of their attacks, although missing one here and there won't make or break their dps, since they get all the other benefits anyway.

Ninja, on top of the listed things, will need to use goad effectively (can't wait for someone to call for it as it is a waste, for best use you need to pretty much keep it on CD and organize with your party for who gets it when), and use jutsus in a correct way. Most people think this is simple, but there is quite a lot of thought involved in it: you do not want to make huton drop, and it last 70 seconds. There are 20 seconds of recast for justus, starting at the execution, and you need some time to input all mudras. Realistically you have at most 5 seconds of margin to split in your cycle of 3 jutsu (huton, suiton, raiton) if you want to prevent the drop of huton; if you have kassatsu, you have about zero margin and need to hit all your jutsu instantly. You need to input them without double tapping (or you can bunny, and you need to watch for any delay in the execution), and need to know beforehand which of the 3 you need to use. Trick attack is also better saved for the next jutsu if the boss will become untargettable in the next 10 seconds, so you can not just blindly go huton -> suiton -> raiton, sometimes you will switch to huton -> raiton -> suiton and back again. All this is quite an involved thought process and is far from trivial -- it is honestly harder to keep track of than simply "blue dot about to fall off, time to shadow fang", which you can do "on the fly": i hit the first part of the combo, and check for what i need to continue with during the off GCD. I can't do that with my jutsus -- if i do not check out some seconds before my jutsu is ready i will likely either delay it a bit too much or just use the wrong one.


When all is said and done, i feel like the jutsu complexity does make up for the positionals and then some, and that both jobs feel equally complex to play out. However, when reading stuff on the forum or reddit, it seems quite a large part of the playerbase feel like ninja is braindead and mnk is rocket science. What's the take of people here ? Care to elaborate on the subject a bit ?

[Camalott]

I don't NIN - at all. However, I do MNK from time to time.

That said, I think the "MNKs are rocket science" perception may come from the fact that if the MNK looses GL3, they go from the (arguably) front of the bus to the back in a heartbeat, and it takes a while to get it back up to speed if you don't have PB on tap. As such, it often requires a good deal of creativity and intimate knowledge of the fight and its mechanics to ensure this stays up and running. This includes when to go ahead and pop PB for your damage boost and when to hold it back a while longer because you're going to need it again to rebuild your stacks.

As far as I am aware, and please correct me if I'm wrong - failing a Jutsu is in no way as damaging to your DPS as loosing GL. Even though you're probably greatly more likely to screw up a Jutsu than you are to lose GL.

That, and for some reason, people seem to have the hardest time in the universe remembering positional attacks. No idea why. It's only one of two positions and it's not like they ever change.

I will not say one is inherently harder than the other because I have no working knowledge of NIN - and I don't necessarily like to jump to too many sweeping conclusions based on theory alone. However, on paper, NIN looks harder to work than MNK due to a lot of snap decisions on the Mudra side that need to be made.

[Casper]

Discussion

Admittedly, no, you can't lose as much as GL, since GL is a loss of both damage % and skill speed. However, should you fail a huton (either doing a bunny due to double tapping, getting a lag without noticing, or using a raiton thinking huton was only next, for example), your GCD goes from 2.15 sec to 2.5 sec, and this for a whole 20 seconds. At this point it is probably at least half as damaging as a mnk losing GL3 without PB up, and probably higher than this. Also, if you take too much time before hitting your jutsu, you will need to skip the raiton in the rotation -- a loss of a 360 potency off GCD attack, so about 15 dps lost for the whole minute. Lastly, if you use trick attack just before a phase switch / jump / mechanics where all people have their dps fall somehow, you wasted quite a bit of potential dps too, and you would have been better off using raiton and saving trick attack for 20 seconds later ; this require intimate knowledge of the fight too.

Not saying nin risk anything as bad as losing GL3 though, and that's why i think it is fair for mnk to be slightly above ninjas. But nin gameplay is made of pitfalls too and some of them can really cripple you if you don't pay attention. During progression on FCOB fight, it was frequent for me to hit 500 dps during the first phases of the boss that i knew in and out, and to drop to 400 at the end of the fight, meaning the last phase i was at 350 max, down from 500, just because i had to focus much more on mechanics of the fight and my rotation got sloppy as hell.

[Levis]

Snip

NIN is pretty simple, considering we have no positional requirements other than Dancing Edge. As for Mudra it can dramatically lower our DPS if we mess up. We need to keep up Huton 100% as this is a huge portion of our damage. For example if we mess up Huton you either have to wait the 20 second CD for Mudras to return or you could cast Kassatsu to get it back up, but then your still hurting your burst damage instead of using it for Raiton. Just as the OP says managing the Jutsu correctly can make up for not having positional requirements.


http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...II-Q-A-Updates
In this letter Bayhone explains their reasoning for nerfing NIN.
Q3: Ninja is able to silence, stun, and I feel like their DPS output is a bit too high. Do you have any plans to make adjustments to they are balanced with other jobs?

A3: With the mudra combinations, ninja is a job where it’s tricky to deal damage, and we’ve set their DPS to be somewhat higher than other jobs. However, players have really been pushing ninja to the limit, and while it’s only by a slight percentage, DPS is being output a bit higher than anticipated. Due to this, in order to make their DPS output similar to other jobs, we will be making adjustments to DPS and the TP costs of certain actions, while ensuring that the current rotation is not destroyed.

I think the "braindead" vs "rocket science" argument could be more focused on which job is easier to pick up and learn. My opinion is that both jobs are pretty easy to understand and play with monk maybe just taking more practice to get the muscle memory down for positional requirements

[OmniKLD]

I used to main monk but the main reason in my eyes for nin nerf in comparison to monk is. Nin has kisses which already give 20% increase. They arent really position strict i.E boss does some huge aoe you can go right back to dpsn at max instead of taking 3 combo rotations to get pack at max dmg

[Casper]

Snip

The thing i don't understand in this QA is that they say that they planned for nin to be top dps, but they did not expect it to be on this level. Point is, currently, nin is NOT top dps, mnk is -- i think that beyond all arguments, everyone pretty much agrees on that, even if it is only slightly. So i am pretty confused by the whole justification. If it was up to me, i would keep things as they are -- i think both jobs are similarly complex and close to be as rewarding as each others, and i would just wish drg was on par so we could have real choices to make regarding optimal setup. I fear that with the nerfs we will just switch from one obvious optimal setup to another, and miss an opportunity for non-obvious choices.

[OmniKLD]

Monk is top dps in situational fights not straight out top DD. You put a equal geared mnk n nin in a t8 fght mnk would definitely out dd nin but lets say a dungeon or levi or most content nin would out dd simply because its impossible to keep gl3 up

[MrCookTM]

Monk is top dps in situational fights not straight out top DD. You put a equal geared mnk n nin in a t8 fght mnk would definitely out dd nin but lets say a dungeon or levi or most content nin would out dd simply because its impossible to keep gl3 up

This is correct, but classes should be balanced after the current top tier content, because a) it is the only content with dps checks that 10% more or less dps would make any difference and b) with the next content update and new gear, level cap, skills, etc., the balance will change completely anyway. That being said, the current top tier content - final coil - is high uptime fights all the way, so an equally geared and skilled monk should out-dps a nin in every encounter that does not have any deaths.

[Levis]

Snip

I agree I should have stated that I do no agree with their justification of the nerf. I do not mind so much the TP increase (depending on how severe it turns out to be) but the lowering of the damage is what concerns me a little bit. Obviously we can only speculate at this point until it happens and we can go test it and see the difference ourselves.

However I agree MNK still pulls ahead in the long fights, but NIN is not to far behind. I think the better option would have been to leave NIN as is and continue with the DRG buff they have planned.

[PROBOUND]

As a player who has a MNK/NIN i support the nerfs. It's way too easy to deal top damage as a NIN on the same fight where a MNK is working his hardest to push his own numbers. NIN achieves almost the same DPS as a MNK however its effortless (no positionals, no loosing GL, no tp issues).

A Badly played NIN can stay on the Heals of the Best MNKs. Thats the part i have a problem with.

An important thing to remember is that these nerfs will surely be minor which i think is fair. Whats not fair is that MNKs have to work so hard to stay at the top of the charts when NINs just coasts their way to the #2 spot without even trying.