The Ninja Superthread

[Alahra]

Shadewalker gives the enmity you generate to the person you target, yes.

Smoke Screen, on the other hand, lowers the target's enmity (in an all at once drop like Shroud of Saints, as far as I can tell).

[NovaLevossida]

Great, thanks. That tooltip made me think it did something entirely else.

[Alahra]

So I'm 59, and I'll probably be level 60 tomorrow. Overall I'm relatively disappointed in the new skills we got as a whole. Of the four I've played with, here are my thoughts:

• Smoke Screen: This would be a nicer ability if we could target ourselves with it. As is, it does little to adjust our playstyle and the enmity drop itself doesn't seem to be all that high. It's capped at some number, as there have been times I've not been able to get aggro from a healer after using it on them. All in all, especially with the addition of Shadewalker, this just feels like very marginal utility.
• Armor Crush: Being able to extend Huton really increases our flexibility, and as should be expected, this is the best of our new additions. I don't really have anything negative to say about this, though I wish they had added it to the end of Shadow Fang instead of Gust Slash. At times it feels a little awkward needing to juggle three combos on Gust Slash. This is our only exciting ability, easily.
• Shadewalker: This has proven fairly useful in Duty Finder so far, since you never know how your gear will compare to your tank's. However, in more controlled settings (with friends and/or an Alexander static), I don't see this being very useful in the long term unless they do some weird things with fight mechanics.
• Duality: While dropping 2k+ damage with one Aeolian Edge is fairly nice, the cooldown on this feels rather long. It feels as though this could use an extra something.

I've not used Dream Within a Dream yet, though as another oGCD damage filler, it's not really anything to write home about. We got one too many abilities to manipulate enmity, and if one of those had been swapped for a new Weaponskill or perhaps something defensive even, I feel like there would be more to be excited about.

That being said, I'm still having a blast. The addition of positionals is taking some time to get used to, but in general we can still largely sit on the rear as we used to, since we'll only need to hit Armor Crush on longer fights (I don't tend to hit it until I have less than 15 seconds on Huton if I can help it, otherwise trying to get Aeolian Edges in). Damage still feels high at least from relative experiences in Duty Finder, so we should still be desirable in that regard.

[Krolja]

Armor Crush on longer fights (I don't tend to hit it until I have less than 15 seconds on Huton if I can help it, otherwise trying to get Aeolian Edges in).

The biggest issue I'm running into when waiting to refresh Huton at such a low duration is that I tend to hit a point where Shadow Fang is falling off, with Mutilate a GCD falling off after, and Dancing Edge right after that AND my Mudras have just come up. And if we're prioritizing Huton (but using Crush over just straight casting it) we'll end up doing 3 GCDs for Crush, 5 for Shadow Fang, 6 to get Mutilate back up, and then a total of 9 to get Dancing Edge back up (If we did Crush > Shadow Fang Combo+Mutilate > Dancing Edge combo). That loses ~2 ticks of Shadow Fang and 3 of Mutilate plus all the GCDs without our Slashing debuff up.

Are you encountering any events like that when refreshing at such a low duration?

[Alahra]

Are you encountering any events like that when refreshing at such a low duration?

I do occasionally if I'm not keeping careful track of things, yeah. I'm still trying to figure out if it's best to wait and try to cram everything in at the end or to use Armor Crush earlier, and keep Huton's timer around the 1 minute mark as much as possible.

[Houston009]

Smoke Screen is a 20s buff on target. (seems to be Quelling Strikes)

[Alahra]

Smoke Screen is a 20s buff on target. (seems to be Quelling Strikes)

Just double checked the tooltip and you're right. That's odd, it hasn't *felt* like it works that way when I've used it. Normally I see someone's enmity drop visibly as soon as I use it. But good to know!

[Zamii]

i had a ninja use smoke screen on me and i can guarentee you it works like quelling strikes, though looking at the enmity bars its maybe stronger than quelling as for how much it reduces it by, if i had to guess i'de say like 75% reduction.

[Zamii]

also, i think your all forgetting that every tank is more than a 1-2-3 tank now, you can easily drop your enmity onto the tank so they can do more dps at a given point in time without having to worry much about loosing enmity

[Viridiana]

Leveling with a friend, I've found several uses for Shadewalker. Most of them have been situational and wouldn't easily apply in Alexander, but that's not to say there won't be uses for it there, too. The situation I've used it in most likely to be in Alexander (I think) is helping a tank pick up simultaneous adds if you want to single-tank and the adds spawn apart from each other but at the same time. Like, if you wanted to single-tank the adds at the beginning of Bismark Hard, for example. Other than that, it's been either just helping the tank solidify hate because they're having issues with it for whatever reason, or helping make sure all the adds are going to the tank if there's lots of AOE happening, and such. One use I've found while leveling that my friend has been positively thrilled with is using it to toss one of a pair of mobs his way so I don't nearly die to 2x mobs pounding my face in. >_>