Greased Lightning and Huton

[Burningskull]

Since Greased Lightning got turned into an always active trait and did basically the same thing as Huton, do you think they should turn Huton into a similar trait and make way for a new Ninjutsu and/or remove/change Armor Crush?

[ItMe]

Depends on what the new jutsu is IMO.
I mean... you'll also be removing the timer element from the UI, so removing huton gives you a lot of creative space.

[AnotherPerson]

i personally prefer if Huton was kept. Having the alternative to armor crush vs. to always Aeolian Edge is a nice change of pace from just using the basic 1-2-3 rotation every 60 seconds.

I rather they upgraded Huton with a secondary skill, similar to how Black Mages get Enochian within their Astral Fire/ Umbral Ice Phase to make sure they don't drop it during combat while giving a charged resource for a big damage skill. That'll give us an extra charge in the UI to work with for future ninjutsu which wouldn't have to directly compete with Kassatsu since it already has a Single Target attack and an AoE attack. Even Hide can get another skill buff where using it will refresh the charges outside of combat.

Unless they plan on allowing us to use Assassination outside of Dream within a Dream, I think they can make room for another skill by chaining Dream within a Dream and Assassination into one skill slot instead of 2 slots since they can only be used one after the other.

[Kaedys]

Having the alternative to armor crush vs. to always Aeolian Edge is a nice change of pace from just using the basic 1-2-3 rotation every 60 seconds.

I know this post is from more than half a year ago, but I'd like to point out here that it's very easily possible to still vary the rotation into Armor Crush on the regular even without the buff extension aspect. The most common method of doing that is by attaching a DoT to it (ex. Chaos Thrust, Demolish, Goring Blade, etc). Since they're removed the DoT via Shadow Fang, they could easily attach a DoT to Armor Crush instead. Setting the DoT at 30s would cause Armor Crush to be used as often as it currently is. They could easily tune the damage so it's worth using in ST but not in AoE, or attach a non-stackable bleed to one of the AoE abilities (or a new ability, like an alternative combo off Blossom).

[Kolsykol]

I don't really see the point Huton is already so easy to keep up.
You basically have nothing else to juggle during the downtime either, getting rid of it would just make it 1 2 3 with nothing else to pay attention to.

[SamSmoot]

The current Huton is the worst thing about NIN in my opinion. Having to do a noisy 4-key sequence before every fight is a major pain. I'd accept a single key refresh, with no timeout while out of combat.

[wereotter]

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job, Huton isn't doing the same. They seem similar on the surface, but operated very differently when it came to upkeep. Ninjas just had to make sure to include armor crush every 30-ish seconds in their rotation, and the buff lasts 70 seconds giving the ninja a lot of time to disengage and do mechanics of a fight that requires it. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it, while the ninja would have to wait, at most, 20 seconds to reapply huton, while missing out on one damage dealing ninjutsu.

Also as evidence of this, while monk continued to get more and more skills over the past 6 years specifically aimed at trying to make it easier to maintain greased lightning, ninja only had to have armor crush added and the job has been able to evolve since that point. So no, I don't see any reason at this point to change huton into a passive trait the same as greased lightning.

[dezzmont]

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job, Huton isn't doing the same. They seem similar on the surface, but operated very differently when it came to upkeep. Ninjas just had to make sure to include armor crush every 30-ish seconds in their rotation, and the buff lasts 70 seconds giving the ninja a lot of time to disengage and do mechanics of a fight that requires it. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it, while the ninja would have to wait, at most, 20 seconds to reapply huton, while missing out on one damage dealing ninjutsu.

Also as evidence of this, while monk continued to get more and more skills over the past 6 years specifically aimed at trying to make it easier to maintain greased lightning, ninja only had to have armor crush added and the job has been able to evolve since that point. So no, I don't see any reason at this point to change huton into a passive trait the same as greased lightning.

Just to add to this, it helps also that Huton isn't on an especially busy class overall. Monk is basically a ceaseless barrage of mechanics that make the job utterly overwhelming without actually making it better, which is why the job has been in the gutter basically forever.

Monk had positionals, a rotation that got out of sync with itself (which made positionals 'harder'), an entire phase that alters your core rotation, an RPG proc system for Meditate stacks, team utility for defense AND offense, a buff to be maintained, a debuff to be maintained, a burst window buff, buffs that suddenly make positonals NOT matter, and 4 oGCDs you would regularly use in rotation, on top of greased lightning. And most of these mechanics have a lot of passive interplay that made messing one of them up make all the rest fall apart.

Ninja has a lot going on too, but comparatively less: Your positionals keep you in the back most of the time, you don't have random stuff popping up in rotation, your rotation is fairly fixed, and if you say... mess up your ninjutsu that isn't going to muck about with your Ninki that much. Its also easier to recover from mucking up on ninja. Its still a big DPS loss but getting back into the flow is pretty seamless. So there is still complexity in the job and a good ninja is going to do better than a bad one, but unlike monk messing up as a ninja doesn't feel like the game just punched you in the face: The mistake is visible but the role doesn't grind to a screeching halt as your muscle memory works against you and it takes you 3 full 1-2-3 rotations to get back where you were.

[Morzy]

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it

To be precise, it would take 7 GCDs to get three stacks of GL back if you form shifted into coeurl form and did demo followed by two sets of your rotation (6 GCDs).

GL didn't hold the job back as much as SE didn't know what to do with an otherwise decent level 50 job, and this idea was shown to be the case in 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0.