The Ninja Superthread

[Dante_V]

I haven't had an issue like that with armor crush personally. It's added a lot of freedom in regards to dungeons and dealing with situation for me.

Also after playing with the aggro moves more the first move is a straight aggro reduction on a party member. Meaning it takes there aggro and dumps it immediately.

The second and more interesting aggro moves allows you to put the hate your ninjas accumulate on another target. This means if you pop it on tank, pull a mob ahead of the tank by attacking, there will aggro straight to the tank instead of you. This would be a good move for instance if you wanted to maximize uptime on dps on a golem in t9 as soon as you see them without waiting on the tank to take aggro or have the tank move to position x and you attack the enemy making them aggro on the tank and move to him.

[Arkenne]

What I can tell about the skills up to lvl 54 is:

Smoke Bomb: its quite underwhelming at first glance, but its surprisingly handy.
The skill itself is a Queling Strikes on a party member, not yourself.
It does NOT affect your party member's current aggro pool, but it reduces conciderably the aggro generated by said party member in the duration of the skill.

If your party member had 100 aggro points on an oponent, and did a 1000 aggro points worth of skills under its 20 seconds of effect, the skill should have at least halved that to 500 and they would end up with 600 points. The original 100 are not affected.

This skill proves its worth in duns when there are waves of enemies which are often in reach of the ranged players or catch sight of the healer much faster than the tank. Allowing the Tank to stabilize aggro in an easier manner and not waste sources on aggro generating skills alone.


Armor Crush: tho at first I believed this skill would have been better suited after Shadow Fang, having it branch after Gust Slash made it for a subtle and gentle change in the rotation rather than a complete GCD addition. Which would have on the long (or short) term ended up making the fall of Shadow Fang, Mutilate or Dancing Edge more often than one would desire to.

Armor Crush adds but another layer of priorities in the already priority ridden class of NIN. Should be used instead of Aeolian Edge at a chance that occurs once in the rotation every 18 seconds.
As in, if the rotation was MU > SF > DE > AE. At a point it would become MU > SF > DE > AC.
Keeping an eye on the Huton timer and dividing it in multiples of 18 should ease this up. You will need a minimal of 6 seconds for its use, but 'tis needless to say that if you excecute it at any moment that was not originally designed for AE, will bring about the fall of either of the buffs or debuffs.

There is also no need to use it before the 40 seconds timer, and actually, doing the rotation cycle as AE, AE, AE, AC,(AE, AC, AC, AE, AE, AC) does work just fine.


I have some theories about the other skills, but for now I will leave it here (or it will become an excesively long post)

[Aiurily]

put shadewalker on the MT before a pull and he can pull easily with eye/path combo, gore blade, souleater/delirium etc

[Allyrion]

Unless you hit Armor Crush when Fuuton is 40s and over, you shouldn't realistically lose any dps.
Don't hit it over 30 because I can't see the precise seconds after it goes over a minute.

That's the difference between an extending and a refresh skill, you can 'bank' extra buff time as a buffer with no dps loss unless you go over the duration cap.
Then you can spend that extra time without refreshing according to the needs of the fight.
If you don't know the fight, the extra time functions as a safety net (like when waiting for an add spawn or phase change without using Mudra to refresh).

It's reasonably flexible to adapt to how your timers are, but the timing takes practice.
I do it around 20-25 at the start so it's comfortable to refresh the dots and debuffs without worrying that Fuuton may also fall off.
But yea, I let it dip lower than that quite a bit when I have extra things to fit in but then I extend back to a comfortable level.

[Krissey]

Does anyone know if the original poster still plays or will be updating this at all?

[Leonus]

Does anyone know if the original poster still plays or will be updating this at all?

If not, the next thread should be called "The Ninja Guiden"

[AnMex]

What are everyone's thoughts on this:
New Possible Opener:

Blood for Blood >Spinning Edge+Internal Release >Gust Slash+Pot > Dancing Edge > Suiton > Spinning Edge > Kassatsu+Trick > Shadow Fang + Fuma/Raiton > Mutilate+Mug+Jug> Spinning Edge + Dream Within a Dream> Gust Slash + Duality > Aeolian Edge

My only gripe with this rotation is (Mutilate+Mug+Jug), because if you have bad latency it'll cut into the next GCD and your AE wont fall in the TA window. I'm only at lvl59 right now so I cant test since I dont have DWOD but just wanted to get thoughts on this.

Also, when would be the best time to use armor crush? at 17-18 sec before huton runs out just like how we reset it before? or when there are 8sec left in Huton?

[Arkenne]

Blood for Blood >Spinning Edge+Internal Release >Gust Slash+Pot > Dancing Edge > Suiton > Spinning Edge > Kassatsu+Trick > Shadow Fang + Fuma/Raiton > Mutilate+Mug+Jug> Spinning Edge + Dream Within a Dream> Gust Slash + Duality > Aeolian Edge

I've only got as far as lvl 56 so Im also in the dark about Dream.
But supposing it doesnt have an animation lock that wont let you do anything else...

As I see it, neither of your buffs will reach Aeolian Edge. 'Tis true that Mug and Jug doesn't have much of an animation lock so they can go pretty quickly, but they are 140 and 80 potency respectively, even if you add them up they wont get as much of a bonus as an unbuffed Aeolian Edge...
I think we should give the priority order of Ninjutsu > Dream > Mug > Jugulate and Duality always before Aeolian.

[Allyrion]

I've only got as far as lvl 56 so Im also in the dark about Dream.
But supposing it doesnt have an animation lock that wont let you do anything else...

As I see it, neither of your buffs will reach Aeolian Edge. 'Tis true that Mug and Jug doesn't have much of an animation lock so they can go pretty quickly, but they are 140 and 80 potency respectively, even if you add them up they wont get as much of a bonus as an unbuffed Aeolian Edge...
I think we should give the priority order of Ninjutsu > Dream > Mug > Jugulate and Duality always before Aeolian.

I agree DwD should be higher priority than Mug and Jugulate.
Also, I think BfB should start after Spinning Edge, and IR after Gust Slash so they'll up for the full opener, but not delayed further than that.

Duality always on Aeolian sounds great in theory, but if you're keeping up Dancing Edge yourself then you delay it too much in my opinion.
There have been a good few times it's just off cooldown but I need to do a full Dancing Edge combo and refresh the dots before I can do AE (which is at the end of its own combo).

If you can sync Duality with AE reasonably, that's great but if if you're gonna have to hold the cooldown for 10s+, I doubt it's a dps increase."
Maybe when pandabearcat finishes that simulator it'll be clearer what the most optimized will be though.