NIN is undertuned.

[ValStormbreaker]

There's a great analysis video on Youtube by Core-A Gaming about the consequences of reducing the skill gap I highly recommend watching. While it most directly pertains to fighting games, the general principles apply to all kinds of games, including this one.

Ultimately, when you take away portions of a job's kit, you lower a skill ceiling, so even skilled players can only go so high until they hit that ceiling as their options are going to be far more limited as a consequence, and there's only so much they can do with what they have to work with. MNK mains are feeling this right now, big time. Henceforth, the idea of it being an "equal gear but coming down to player skill" sort of thing is getting skewed by removing options for skilled players to use, and shackling them down.

There are players who hate double-weaving, and there are players like me who live for it. I have played MNK at a skill speed north of 2300 and it's still too slow for me. I want it to be faster and more complex. That's not for everybody. Then again, a job with demanding positionals and timing isn't for everyone, either. I wouldn't want those to be removed just to cater to people who aren't into it. At a certain point you have to say to these people, "maybe the job just isn't for you," and call it a day. But when you try to make said job more accessible... that comes with a price, and that price is often too big for any individual job in this game to bear, if it wasn't designed as one of the entry-level jobs to begin with.

[Hydrium]

There's a great analysis video on Youtube by Core-A Gaming about the consequences of reducing the skill gap I highly recommend watching. While it most directly pertains to fighting games, the general principles apply to all kinds of games, including this one.

Ultimately, when you take away portions of a job's kit, you lower a skill ceiling, so even skilled players can only go so high until they hit that ceiling as their options are going to be far more limited as a consequence, and there's only so much they can do with what they have to work with. MNK mains are feeling this right now, big time. Henceforth, the idea of it being an "equal gear but coming down to player skill" sort of thing is getting skewed by removing options for skilled players to use, and shackling them down.

There are players who hate double-weaving, and there are players like me who live for it. I have played MNK at a skill speed north of 2300 and it's still too slow for me. I want it to be faster and more complex. That's not for everybody. Then again, a job with demanding positionals and timing isn't for everyone, either. I wouldn't want those to be removed just to cater to people who aren't into it. At a certain point you have to say to these people, "maybe the job just isn't for you," and call it a day. But when you try to make said job more accessible... that comes with a price, and that price is often too big for any individual job in this game to bear, if it wasn't designed as one of the entry-level jobs to begin with.

I know the video you're talking about and I agree with that video a lot however I don't agree with its usage here, fighting games are competitive we fight against each other to achieve our goal of winning, when you lower the skill ceiling in a competitive game it dilutes the pool and allows lower skill players to compete with higher skill players, that's counter productive in a competitive game because the sole reason you're fighting is to find out who is better.

FFXIV is a collaborative game, we all work together to achieve our goal of winning, having a class that has a lower skill ceiling is actually a good thing because it allows more players into the game, if the mechanical cost of entry is too high then sure, you'll be left with nothing but the best players but the community will suffer for it. Having a low skill class allows those lower skill players (or just anyone in general, I swapped to DNC because I like proc based classes) to tag along to help with accomplishing the main goal, winning.

There should be classes with skill ceilings for all play types and skill levels, the tuning needs to reward the higher skill classes with "more" of whatever it's bringing but not enough that the community shuns all others for them, maybe around 3%.

[ForteNightshade]

Testing out NIN more now and... to my surprise, I may advocating for a buff. Unless it's a gear syncing issue, my i400 NIN couldn't out-dps a DRK in Bartem's Mettle (they were synced down with lvl77-79 gear). Now this may just be due to NIN lacking many of its new tricks but frankly, it's absurd to think synced below 70 you're essentially useless. Even at 71, the job still feels rather weak. I'm beginning to think the dev team vastly overestimated Meisui and didn't nearly compensate enough for the loss of Dripping Blades.

I'll need to get both DRG and NIN to 80 for some direct comparisons at their highest potential but it's more than a little concerning for NIN right now.

[cwild]

Just wanted to chime in here. Ninja is absolutely my favorite class, and it's extremely weak right now. They 100% did not compensate for the lack of dripping blades, it's very apparent.

Few things that I think would make it a bit better and put it in a more competitive spot.
1) Change the new shuriken to work off of Fuma Shuriken so we don't have to clip (this would be a big dps gain)
2) Increase the damage from bunshin (while also allowing it to work off DwAD/Assissinate, basically any skill we have)
3) Flat potency increases across the board
4) Remove Trick attack working for the group and make it 20% DPS for NINJA only (have it give the group crit or something). Trick attack is Ninja's greatest enemy but also it's best ally. We may forever be desired because of this skill, but i truly think our DPS is so low, Trick attack will not be worth it. Just put a dragoon in my place and have them alternate BL and you will kill the boss faster.

Ninja is by far my favorite class, and while i enjoy the complexity behind what they tried to accomplish (I actually enjoy how hard it is to play right now) the juice is just not worth the squeeze. I have all of my 450 assessories and my 450 weapon (i'm missing hands and boots for 440 gear) and I'm completely melded with +60 materia on those slots and I'm BARELY competetive to any other class besides Bard and Dancer wearing 430 gear. For people saying "but you have trick attack, RDPS is where it's at"....I say to you no no no my friends. The class is so much harder than any of the other melee's in it's current state, and you are rewarded for stellar play with mediocre results. I really do hope we see some changes, because Ninja surely needs it.

I consider myself a pretty good Ninja player...I still love it, I'm still having fun with it, but it's in a really rough spot (hopefully gear scaling will make it better and we just don't know it yet, but it doesn't seem that will be the case)

Killed Titania about 15 times last night, capped out at like 8.7k dps. Here are a list of the classes that I beat in those 15 runs.
1) Bard (sometimes)
2) Dancer
3) ONE REALLLLY BAD SAM

Everything else beat me in 20 Ilvl worse gear. Not cool dude

[Laur1x]

snip

I agree whole-heartidly and would be so happy if they made even half of the changes you suggested, primarily to TA. I'm so sick of TA holding us back, we're the classic Assassin archetype, in what world do Assassin's "support" and do the lowest damage in the game? Literally never seen such thing until FFXIV. If they want us to STILL play the utility role, fine, but we lost goad ages ago, lost our enmity skills recently, and as you said with dripping blades removed without fair compensation it's a real struggle.

I can only beat DNC or players that have died. I lost to a DRG who didn't know you could get the 430 set in all whites, I lost to a RDM who still had on full i400 gear at 80. And the cherry on top is the only other melee job I enjoy (Samurai) is doing rather poor atm as well. Best expansion for MSQ, worst expansion for balance so far, IMO. ShB is very bittersweet to me atm.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

So here's the thing about Trick attack. Damage potencies are absurdly high right now. You're going to get a lot more value out of your utility with attacks now.
So while personal dps may be really low, it's safe to say the utility will make up for it.

I mean just as a quick example, WHM has a 900 potency nuke. 10% damage taken on that is a LOT.

[Mavrias]

i'm sorry maybe i'm misunderstanding here but a lot of these comments read a lot like complaints about NIN not auto-locking a slot in meta comps...

[RowanLauron]

It's not just about locking in a meta slot, it's about becoming irrelevant/completely uncessary. People aren't understanding the point some people are making. If the ninja has very low personal dps, then it's possible another job can make up the damage loss even with trick attack. So you're basically removing the need for ninja if the raid damage from trick attack can be compensated by brining a different job entirely. It's all ninja has, as far as group utility. Remove that niche, and you kill the job.

[Gun-Cat]

It is a combination of the NIN rotation being a frail house of cards, the encounters in the daily 80 content being really melee unfriendly, low damage, being latency reliant and missing support skills that makes the job less fun, despite some awesome new stuff like Shukuchi now having charges and more mudra play.

I am still going to play it, its my favourite by far, but at some point the effort - reward cycle isn't really there. If my whole existence in a group revolves around pressing TA every 60 seconds then even as support class this feels bad.

That being said the AoE damage on big pulls feels really good, we have an ungodly amount of AE burst in a very short window.

[Alahra]

I'm only up to 75 so far, but Ninja feels rough to play right now, as someone who's mained it since its 2.4 release. With changes to Ninki meaning faster overall gain, two Ninki generators, far more frequent use of Ten Chi Jin (which still feels awful to actually execute), and having to use Kassatsu twice as often, keeping up with everything feels really hectic and generally not fun. It's always been the technical melee, requiring a certain level of execution to play well, but with the job's DPS continually hamstrung by Trick Attack, the actual benefit of managing its myriad, disparate elements feels minimal in situations outside of raid content (where Trick Attack's value is greatly diminished). While NIN's personal DPS has been on a lower tier for a long time, the job's complexity feels like it's been significantly ramped up with no real payoff (and that's before adding even further increased Ninki gain, essentially adding another Ninjutsu to remember for burst phases, and yet one more cooldown that Ninja gets post-75).

Without significant changes, I imagine I'll be leaving Ninja behind for Shadowbringers, personally, as it simply doesn't feel worth all of its extra hassle.