Thread: suggestions to improve the state of ninja in 5.0

personal note

these are my personal thoughts about shadowbringers ninja from a ninja main since 3.0, when i first started playing ffxiv. i have loved ninja from day 1 despite having punishing high ping. i want nothing more than to continue playing ninja but feel like i'm now a detriment to groups due to changes in the job that make it both less rewarding overall and more punishing for players of average to high ping. although i have seen many ninjas saying some of the same things i am going to address, i don't speak for the ninja community but would rather want to encourage other ninja mains speak up and add their own thoughts, so the developers and community have a good understanding of our job as it currently stands.

intro

for me, ninja has simultaneously never felt better and worse than it does right now. aesthetically and from a simple play style perspective, ninja has never felt more like a ninja should. the animations, skills, and rotation look and feel amazing for the most part. ninja has been lucky to get some of the best changes to any job in the game with their 2 new ninjutsu, bunshin, and the quality-of-life adjustments with kassatsu charges, suiton duration, meisui, ten chi jin cooldown, shukuchi charges, shade shift, and 2-step shadow fang. i've never felt more like a ninja than when executing my combinations and cooldowns optimally. unfortunately, the payoff for flawless execution is incredibly lacklustre when you consider how active our new rotation is and the higher difficulty of its execution, especially at higher ping.

this goes beyond low dps, which a simple potency adjustment could somewhat fix, but there are a few other small changes that could make ninja rewarding to play again. i talk about ping a lot because it's something i have to deal with. obviously, i personally will not be able to compete at quite the same level with top players, and i don't try to. but i want to be able to play to the best of my ability and have fun with the job i love and not be told to play something else. ninja needs to be fun and rewarding for everyone regardless of their ping or group setting.

a few new problems

ninjutsu

although the new ninjutsu and the frequency at which we can use them are both great additions to the ninja kit, the new rotation now essentially always requires 2-step mudras (or more), and this means mandatory clipping of your gcd no matter what your ping is, and the clips are only made worse at higher pings. this "requirement" is due to the incredible potency buffs to raiton and the new ninjutsu and the nerf to fuma's potency with the loss of ninja's dripping blades trait and slashing debuff.

double weaving

the new rotation now also requires double weaving because of how many cooldowns that must be executed in a narrow window. this window is narrow in part due to the urgency of trick attack, which if not used optimally for your group leaves the question of why bring ninja at all. double weaving is difficult for ninjas even with no ping due to our fast gcd but again is only made worse at higher ping.

bunshin

this is a great animation and idea for a skill, but it is missing a lot of value. the fact it does a flat potency no matter what gcd is used is remarkably unrewarding. i could do nothing but spam throwing daggers and get the same value from bunshin as i could when doing my rotation properly. also, not as big a deal but still feels bad, at a 15-second duration, ninjas should be able to get 8 hits inside this window but are generally limited to 7 due to some of the clipping that happens with all the increased ninjutsu and other cooldown weaving during the optimal window.

shukiho and ninki

tying ninki to weaponskills is a great idea but due to the problems with animation delays and double weaving, it actually further widens the gap between low ping and high ping players who may now be 1 or more gcds behind optimal uses of ninki skills, per minute. additionally, generating 8 ninki per weaponskill instead of 6 but keeping the ninki cap at 100 and the cost of ninki spenders at 80 means ninjas have at best 2 gcds to use a ninki spender without overcapping.

assassinate

this is not quite as troubling as the other issues addressed, but it needs to be said that it feels lacklustre and just adds to mandatory ninja cooldown spam without a rewarding payoff.

trick attack

no discussion of ninja can happen without mentioning its core utility skill. for better or worse, trick attack still exists. the problem is that outside of the top performing groups, most raids fail to utilise trick attack to its full potential leaving ninja's raid dps contribution too low to add enough value. due to high potency adjustments and changes to other classes, it may even be at a point where it's no longer worth it even for optimal groups. there are a lot of assumptions around trick attack but the problem is the same. trick attack has been an unrivalled raid utility since its introduction.

some possible fixes to bring ninja back to a rewarding level

please note that i don't have a great technical understanding of how the game works, so i'm aware i may be making impossible suggestions. i have tried to keep these ideas reasonable, but if there are obvious reasons these suggestions wouldn't work, feel free to point them out and help come up with an alternate solution.

reduce animation delays for ninja skills

animation delay means the amount of time you are forced to wait to execute your next skill (weaponskill or cooldown) due to the animation lock from the previous skill you used. for most classes, the delay is around .7 seconds which allows for comfortable double weaves between slow gcds even with higher pings. ninjas have a faster gcd than most other classes, so it stands to reason we need to have less animation delay on our skills than other clases to allow for a similar level of comfort during double weaves. a delay of .5s would be manageable even for ninjas with higher ping.

some change to the mudra recast timer

similar to the issue above, the .5s mudra recast timer has had an interesting history. from what i've heard about when ninjas were first introduced to the game, the delays between mudra were almost unplayably bad, resulting in many, many rabbits. i don't have a full understanding of what changed, but it has not been too bad since heavensward, although it's worth mentioning high ping players still experience occasional issues with mudra and ninjutsu execution. even though the animation delay on mudras is .5s to match its recast timer, this ends up being slightly longer for high ping players. if possible, reducing this timer to .3s would help tremendously. if that's not possible, are there other options to fix mudra and ninjutsu execution so there isn't a discrepancy between high ping and low ping players? adding some value back to fuma shuriken could be a decent workaround, but it wouldn't solve the overall problem especially for the new ninjutsu used with kassatsu.

bunshin potency and timer adjustment

let bunshin's potency equal half of the actual weaponskills used and let it work with shadow fang. this punishes bad play and rewards optimal combo use during this window. increase the timer to 16s to give us a safer cushion to execute 8 weaponskills inside the window. 8 is a much more natural and optimal use for this skill without adding too much headache to an already busy rotation. i don't want to go into great detail about this 8-skill point here but can explain more in a separate post in this thread if it causes any confusion.

change to ninki generation and cost

keep ninki generation to 6 per weaponskill and use the shukiho ii trait to reduce ninki spenders' cost to 60. to go along with this, reduce mug and meisui's ninki generation to 30. this gives ninjas much more flexibility in using their ninki spenders without the fear of overcapping. this also could allow top players to eek out more use and potency from meisui without causing trouble for higher ping players who might want to avoid overuse of this skill.

assassinate dot

it would be nice to add some kind of reward to assassinate beyond executing it as a free cooldown after dream within a dream. perhaps adding a bleeding dot to successful execution of assassinate when shadow fang is ticking could add reward to ninjas who keep their dots ticking. this is more an afterthought and nowhere near as big a deal as the other problems above, but it could still add value to good play instead of just being a flashy but otherwise boring free cooldown.

trick attack

i'm not quite sure how to address this issue as removing it entirely just means ninja would need to become a greedy dps, a spot which is already filled by several other classes. maybe nerfing trick attack to 5% vulnerability and giving ninjas a personal 10% damage up buff during this window could help to keep this skill rewarding to ninja without being a game-breaking meta for everyone else.

potency adjustments

these are basically boring and can be done at any time during any random patch to fine tune ninja's place in the dps charts. ninja is not just undertuned. i'm sure we'll have some potency changes in 5.05, but the problems with ninja right now go beyond what flat potency adjustments will really fix and i hope this post highlights that. ninja is in some ways easy to play with its fluid rotation and easy-mode ninjutsu that comes with the quality of life changes from 5.0. but in other ways the job is now more difficult than ever in a way that potency adjustments won't adequately reward. higher potencies will only widen the gap between low-ping top-tier raiders and the average ninja who just wants to do their best.

thank you for reading!

this was my first forum post coming from a place of genuine frustration with a job that i have loved for years. i'd love to hear what the rest of you guys think. i hear complaining here maybe has more traction than complaining elsewhere, so hopefully we can start a discussion that will raise awareness about ninja's current place in the raiding community.