A Modest Ninja Proposal

[Theodoric]

Well, recently, I've been reading a lot of commentaries about Ninja and how the class is one of the most difficult to play properly, with 2 off-gcd skills being thrown in-between gcd skills all the time and whatnot, only to end up with sub-par damage being dealt, while even accounting for Trick Attack. Now, I can understand how this job could be hard to balance, since they don't want to have Ninja be considered essential in every single raiding party again because Trick Attack is necessary to reach OPTIMAL DPS!!!, even when Trick Attack's potency depends on the damage output of the rest of the party. I haven't read any patch notes for 5.05 yet, or 5.1, so I have no idea how SE planned to rebalance Ninja. Maybe they plan to do nothing at all, and simply wait for ilvl to be so high that the Trick Attack bonus will be enough to compensate for Ninja's sub-par personal dps. Who knows. But what I know is that as long as we have Trick Attack, this will simply be a headache that SE will have to deal with again and again, every single time they try to re-balance the jobs.

So here is my proposal: remove Trick Attack entirely. Since this is the only utility Ninja has left, it's just a bother. Make it that Ninja is a job solely focused on its own damage output, like Samurai. But to compensate for Trick Attack's loss, they should buff Hide. Make it so that the first attack when coming out of hiding is an automatic critical, and perhaps also a direct hit. Honestly, I don't know why that isn't already the case. That's what happens in most other RPGs that have come out in the past two decades. And change Suiton so that instead of allowing you to use Trick Attack once during the 20s duration of its effect, it instead allows you to use Hide. This would allow the Ninja to have one guaranteed critical, and it would reset the ninjutsu. (But don't have it reset Hide cooldown, else the rotation will keep spamming Suiton endlessly.)

So this was my proposal to rid SE of the headache that is balancing Ninja because of Trick Attack. Just get rid of it, and give a slight buff to a few other weaponskills to compensate, and we're done, problem solved. Thoughts?

[Remonade]

I actually like bringing a little bit of utility when I'm playing Ninja. I'd prefer if they just did a % nerf on TA and buffed his personal potencies to compensate.